We are just at the start of things, kiddo is 2 months. we are alse doing pt and en, and live somewhere that speaks en, funilly enough

I think your plan is not enough, they should be able to anderstand pt, but idk abt talking and reading. We speak only pt with the kid, we also listen to pt music, and plan on íetting access to pt TV/movies later

I’m bilingual.

They just sent me to an English daycare and spoke French with me at home.

Then I could do the rest on my own.

I was born and raised in the US. My parents spoke Spanish only. They maybe knew 5 words in English. I grew up learning Spanish fluently at home. Everything else (i.e. school, tv, friends) was in English, so I learned that naturally.

Downside: I feel like it created 2 personalities. I feel emotions, relate to family and romance, and cook in Spanish. I think logically, conduct business, and have friends in English.

My friend is French, his wife Portuguese, they live in England with their two children. When all together, they all speak English with each other. When the kids are with one parent, the speak that language. In the park with father, French. Baking with mother, Portuguese. Bedtime stories are in the language of the parent reading. Kids switch between languages easily and understand what to speak with whom. Effortless trilingual.

Another friend moved country with her husband and had three kids. Home language was always mother tongue, both my friends had fairly bad English. Everything outside parents is in English for the kids - media, school, anyone outside the household. Again, the switch for the kids is really easy, they are fluent and have no accent in both languages.

Former child in a bilingual household. The time that your child spends outside of your home has by far the biggest influence on language fluency. You can have your child speak a language at home, and they would be able to understand it and speak it, but it would be limited - likely conversationally fluent, but not natively fluent.

If you can find a community for that language and culture that you visit every once a week, it will help reinforce that language. There might be language schools run by people from that culture - it’ll be an easy way to get in touch with other people from that same culture

I was raised bilingual, and speaking from my own experiences I’d say that it’s a good idea to consider the following questions if you want to maximize the child’s ability in either language:

1. Is there a parent who the child sees more or less often than the other? What will one do in case one parent dies, or in case the child has a language disorder, or there is otherwise some sort of unexpected problem that could impact the child’s language development?
2. What are the language dynamics at play in the family and in the local area? What will the child associate with each of the two languages? Can the child have all its needs met in the non-dominant language? Does the child have access to a broader community of speakers, and in what way?

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to share my own story because it gets pretty melodramatic at points, but yeah, language skills need to be built and maintained over the course of one’s entire life, so you need to be able to adapt to changing circumstances. But as a whole I think that what you’re planning for your own kid sounds like it will work well, or at least decently well — the only way to know for sure is to get a time machine and go forwards 20 years, and until then I think it’s best to have faith in your competence as a parent. There’s no-one who knows a family better than itself.

And beyond that, one should also ask oneself… Well, what types of language skills does one want to see in one’s child, and what happens if the child ultimately does not reach the goals one has set? I’d say that I have sort of a nuanced or over-complicated relationship to so-called “bad grammar” because of my position.

We speak Irish to the kids as much as possible, essentially all the time. Them learning English is a given, a force like gravity.

We try to get them to read Irish books, watch Irish cartoons, but that can be a struggle with the temptation of English-language ones. Children have their own strong preferences about those things.

Kids are like sponges, especially when it comes to languages.

We lived in Romania until a few years ago, when we moved to Germany. We speak Romanian at home, and they have a decent grasp. The oldest is fluent, with no accent, the youngest lacks vocabulary, applies German grammar rules and has a bit of German accent. All of them speak German fluently, and they use it when they talk to each other, with friends and at school. They are also fluent in English, and that is because of the media. I only use English when it comes to devices OS/interface, streaming services etc, and they are used to it. They consume YouTube, Netflix etc in English only.

They sometimes mix the languages, especially when talking to us, since their exposure to Romanian is limited.

You need to take advantage of code switching, similar to how you’ll use curse words in some contexts, but not in others. Or retail language vs casual.

They should have some intuitive idea of when to speak Portuguese and when to speak English. If you’re mixing within the same context, that will be difficult.

the hardest part was finding a doctor willing to cut my newborn children’s tongues in half

Not a parent, but I was raised bilingually in English and German, while growing up in Germany.

My Dad (almost) always speaks English with me, and my Mom (almost) always speaks German with me, even to this day at age 31. This approach worked well for us and I’m fluent in both languages, but I can imagine an approach where both parents speak both languages could work as well.

What also really helped me was to consume a lot of media in English, so maybe you could encourage your child to do that as well.

French and English in school, Mandarin course on Saturday. Cantonese with parents,

At least that was my upbringing

My parents don’t speak English, but I learned it as a kid by watching a lot of Cartoon Network. All the cartoons were in English, no subtitles or dub or anything. Somehow I assimilated the language without any external aid, and then learned the rest when we first got the internet and I started communicating with others via games.

So, if I had to teach a kid English, I’d just expose them to as much English as possible with plenty of context and encourage them to express themselves in English when they can. This is also a popular method how adults can learn languages, called tprs

So we have 3 languages in the family, native languages for me and wife + English as common language. It’s a huge mess and at almost 4yo she’s mixing up languages and a little bit slow on learning to speak in general, but we’ve been told that’s just how it goes

When I was the kid, the house rule was French at home, English everywhere else. Kind of like your plan but stricter. Now that I’m the parent, the kids are in French Immersion school, so at home we do 50/50.