How To Help Your Child Learn A Second Language

A reader recently wrote to me with a question that I suspect many parents have been wondering about:

“Your blog has been very inspirational to me as an adult language learner. However, one subject which is not discussed is how can I best help my child with language learning? How do the recommendations evolve if the target is a kid?”

I'm actually an expert in teaching languages to young learners – it's what I used to do in my previous role at the British Council, and it's part of my Master's degree.

More people wonder about this than they do about their own language learning. We all care about languages, but we care about kids more. So here's how to help your child learn a second language.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the video version of this post at the top of this page. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this article:

Why Is Teaching Children Languages Different To Adults?

The reason I haven't written much about how to help your child learn a second language is because it's such a big subject. And as this reader rightly pointed out above, the standard advice doesn't apply for kids.

Language learning for children, as pedagogy, is very different from adults – for all the reasons you might think.

As adults, we are self-directed learners. We create our own motivation and hold ourselves accountable (or at least we try to). Children can do none of those things, so it's a fundamentally different process.

The big advantage that children have – and therefore the biggest strategy for parents – is time.

Do Children Really Learn Languages Like A Sponge?

Anyone who has kids will know that children don't learn languages quickly. Far from it. Even their first language – from the time of their birth to the point where they have a really solid command of the language – it takes about eight to ten years.

I have friends who have brought up kids bilingually, and the children speak those two languages perfectly. But they've also put them in a third language class twice a week at school, and the kid hardly speaks that language at all.

The old mantra of “kids are like a sponge” is simply not true. If you put children aged five or six into language classes for 45 minutes, two or three times a week, they won't learn to speak the language.

I guarantee you they won't. Not from a class a few times a week. It just doesn't happen like that.

Why Formal Language Classes Don't Work For Young Children

This is partially why the most up-to-date, informed advice for government policy is that teaching children languages at primary or elementary school is not worth it.

Studies show that children who begin a new second language at secondary or high school (around age 11) outperform or do just as well as kids who start younger.

The reason? Study skills don't really kick in until the age of 10 or 11 or higher.

So the idea of formal language lessons for younger children up to the age of around 10 is a non-starter. I'm not going to say it's harmful, because obviously it's not, but you cannot rely on that alone. Language for children is not a school subject, and you can't treat it as such.

You also can't make children learn against their will. It's essential to find something that is fun, that engages them, that makes a language a living, breathing part of their life.

What Are The Best Resources For Teaching Children Languages?

Your best resources are books and people. TV can help, but as a very famous study by Patricia Kuhl demonstrated, kids do not learn as well from passive, watching-TV-type interaction as when they are interacting with a real person.

It is through two-way communication that kids learn languages. So sitting them in front of their favourite cartoons in Japanese will not teach them Japanese.

Obviously, if they watch two hours of Japanese cartoons a night, they'll probably learn some stuff – but that's not a very ethical way of doing it. It's not good for the kid, and it's not the best way to learn the language.

What's The Best Way To Help Your Child Learn A Second Language?

You have two basic options.

Bring In A Native Speaker

Probably the best thing to do, if you have the time and resources, is to bring in an au pair or childminder who can speak to the kids in the target language.

The reason is fairly obvious: if they're interacting with that person in the language, they will learn – especially if that person is really good with kids and knows how to encourage them, draw language out of them and help them repeat words.

If you can have an au pair or childminder who is with the kids for the long term, that's the best way to teach a child a language (short of taking them to another country or putting them in a school where that language is the language of instruction).

This isn't practical for most people, so a childminder or au pair is your best option. The longer the better.

Use Books And Create Language Time

If that's not an option, the next best thing is books.

What I'd recommend is setting aside dedicated language time. Let's say you want to teach one of your children Spanish. Every evening, you would have “Spanish time.”

If you don't speak the language your children want to learn, that makes things much harder because who's going to help them? So I'm going to assume you do speak the language you want to teach your children.

Here's what you do:

Go to your local international bookshop (if you have one) and order a whole variety of simple books in Spanish. Then every evening, instead of stories in English, read stories in Spanish.

Do the same things you would do when reading stories to your kids when they were very young: take important phrases that are easy to understand and repeat them lots of times.

Ask little questions in the language. Get them to try to interact in the language. Be very, very patient – and keep it up.

If you can read to them in Spanish for 30 minutes a night, every night, I guarantee you within a few days they're going to start to know the important vocabulary related to those books. They're going to start identifying certain things – most likely animals – in the target language.

If you're looking for recommendations for French, here's a list of the 13 best French children's books that you and your child will enjoy.

Bringing Language Learning Into Real Life

Once you've been doing story time for a while, you can start to bring the language into real life.

A simple way of checking understanding in Spanish is to ask “¿Sí o no?”—yes or no? Is that correct or not? Kids will very quickly learn sí for yes and no for no.

What you can then do is ask these questions outside the context of the story. When you're walking down the street, you can ask “Is that a red car?” in Spanish, then ask “¿Sí o no?”

The kid will say no, and you start to coax the language out of them this way – blurring the boundaries between stories and real life.

The Multilingual Family Advantage

It's much easier if you're part of a multilingual family. If your partner speaks another language, you would have them speak to the children in their language.

There's a concept called “one person, one language.” Children are better able to conceptualise a language if they can identify it with a particular face.

For bilingual parents, it's much easier: one parent speaks Spanish, the other speaks English, and the child learns to separate the two.

If you don't have that situation, you've just got to have defined language time every day. On top of that, you can add music, cartoons or other media in the language – but the more interaction you can have, the better.

How To Help Your Child Learn A Second Language FAQ

The Key Takeaway On Teaching Kids Languages

This is a very brief summary of what is a huge topic – something I'd like to write a book about one day because it's extremely important and something I'm really passionate about.

The essential points to remember are: formal classes alone won't work for young children, two-way interaction is crucial, consistency over time matters far more than intensity, and making the language a natural part of daily life is the goal.

If you have kids, please start teaching them another language. You will never regret it. Language learning is worth it, no matter your age.

Want even to read even more on this topic? Check out the languages billionaires learn and teach their children.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.