Teaching different languages to kids

That's the way to do it.

Keep English as Mother tongue (you), Dutch as school language, and French with your partner. Always. Reinforce the French later with something like Scouts or some other regular activity.

Junior will be totally trilingual by end of secondary school.

Don't take my word for it - read a book or 2 on bilingualism in children.

Hi
I think you have the right idea, just a couple of comments. If you want the French to be strong enough, your husband would have to speak French all the time, ie to you not just to the child. Having a child in a Flemish speaking school is not easy. After the first year of kleuter klass they expect parent meetings etc to be in Flemish. And the homework will be in Flemish. Someone has to be able to help the child to read etc. I have always spoken English to my child, and my husband, and my husband French. We put him in a Flemish crèche and then a Flemish school. He managed fine, speaks all three languages. But after 2 years at the Flemish pre- school we moved him to a French speaking school. I speak Flemish, but I still found it difficult coping with Flemish at school meetings, etc My French is much better. We also thought French is a much harder language to learn to write and it would be better if he had a good grounding in that. When we take him where there are Flemish children he communicates with them, and he will start learning Flemish at school next year. He himself is much happier speaking like daddy - French

What about the option of choosing NL immersion class in a French school? As mentioned above the parent teacher/school interaction is also important as well as parents ability to help with homework etc. If your child goes to Flemish school you need to have sufficient level in that language too (though learning it could be a nice challenge for you too :-)

A good reference book for multilingual families is Una Cunningham's Growing up with two languages. In addition to child's learning curve the decision to raise kids multilingual (or monolingual) has lot of other aspects too. For example how are you going to communicate as family, what happens if (when) not all the children learn the languages as easily, what about relations with grandparents and rest of the larger family etc.

Hi Mercy sounds like you're doing the best thing. If you always speak one language at home and your partner a different one your child will just soak it up. Gets more complex once reading and writing begin. I have friends who speak Flemish as second or third language whose children thrived in Flemish schools and graduated with good results and were able to go to university in the UK even though no Flemish was spoken in the home. All the best

I agree with the others, it sounds like a good idea. There might be two downsides, though:

- If he goes to school in Dutch and is not an avid reader, he might end up having some trouble with French spelling. I have seen this with some people. However, the level of French classes in Dutch-language schools is generally good (and clearly superior to the level of Dutch classes in French-language schools), which helps in that regard.

- If your husband is not entirely comfortable with Dutch, as you seem to indicate, he might have some trouble helping out with homework, parent meetings, school letters, etc.

That said, this pales in comparison to the tremendous advantages that come from being trilingual on the Belgian job market (particularly the Brussels area). I would go as far as to say that it is almost as valuable as a degree, particularly when you have little experience otherwise. I have known twenty-somethings at my company to get hired almost purely on the basis of being perfectly bilingual (French-Dutch).

So you should go for it, but keep the different contexts clear, consistent and strictly separated so the child does not get confused or frustrated: always English with you, always French with the father, always Dutch in an educational context.