preschoolers and language

Just some rambling thoughts - advice would be welcome.

Scott and I really feel that raising kids to be fluent in two languages is important. Americans seem to be just about the only monolingual nationality out there, and it's a bit embarrassing! And even people with an aptitude for languages, like me, are probably never going to achieve "native-speaker"-like fluency if they don't start study until adulthood, or even junior high.

We've thought about this and talked about it ad nauseam to anyone who will listen. But there remains the question: how on EARTH do two people who are not bilingual (I don't count my formerly passable German as fluency, because it wasn't and it isn't even passable anymore) going to raise kids that are? I'm sorry, but one or two hours a week in a language class, even an immersion class, is not going to turn out fluent speakers. And studying a language (usually Spanish) in school for even an hour a day, and listening to/watching other-language TV programs and CDs will turn out kids who can say some phrases and sing some cute songs, but not kids who can truly converse in that language.

So how do people do it?

I suppose we could hire a nanny or au pair and instruct her to only speak in her native language to our children. (Note: yes, I see the gender bias in my word choice above, and I acknowledge that there are male nannies and au pairs out there. But not many, and for people who are sticklers for using both gender pronouns or a neuter gender alternative, I say, "Get over it!" But I digress...) If my kids were with someone like that for six or eight or ten hours a day, they'd probably get fluent, given a few years. But besides the affordability issue (nannies), and the issue of not wanting a stranger living in my home (as au pairs typically do), there's the whole thing that I want to be the one raising my kids. Me. (And Scott, of course, but I don't know if he wants to be included in this rant.) And this is not to be critical of those who choose to use nannies while both parents go back to work full-time - but that's definitely not what I want for my family, and as most of you know, my own average annual earnings wouldn't cover a nanny anyway. Being with my kids is WAY more important than fluency in a second language.

We could enroll them in a couple hours per week of language classes, and supplement with books, CDs, tapes, etc, and try to learn the language ourselves so we could speak some at home. I still don't think you're going to hit fluency there, though perhaps if the kids continue into high school and college, they'd have a pretty reasonable facility. I don't know if children who "study" a foreign language from the preschool years actually end up speaking any better than someone who picks it up in middle or high school and gets through a few semesters of it in college; my guess would be that it tends to equalize. There are probably some studies out there. Probably funded by some preschool language center, in which case I'd probably ignore them anyway.

We could move to another country. Pretty major decision, but also a sure-fire way to insure our kids learning another language, at least if we stayed there for five years or so. I doubt a year overseas would help much.

And then there are full- and dual-immersion schools. These sound pretty spiffy: send your child to preschool for the morning session, which is entirely taught in the target language (Spanish, Mandarin, German, and Japanese are the languages I've found available so far). They're hearing only that language and no English for four hours a day, five days a week. By about age six, they're almost as fluent as a six-year-old native speaker (and age six is considered pretty much fluent from what I understand from my linguistics classes, though obviously not having an adult's vocabulary yet). And we could still continue with the fun reading and math work we've been doing in the afternoons a bit.

The obvious downside, of course, is the cost; these immersion schools are typically (though not always) private and range from eek-not-cheap to wow-more-than-double-my-current-college-tuition. Other downsides could be the transit time - driving my child to and from the Loop or Oak Park twice a day would get incredibly old. And there's the sacrifice (don't think I'm crazy) of not getting to spend these hours with my children. Yes, often an hour or three without my kids can be a blessing. But giving up ALL of my son's (and next year, my daughter's) morning (aka awake and in a good mood) hours every week? I'm not going to get those hours back. And there's the whole preschool-in-general thing; I won't start a rant, but there's not much my kids can learn, either academically or socially, in a preschool that they can't learn at home or elsewhere. Some days I would consider preschool-as-daycare: give Miles something fun to do while I give Eleanor some of the one-on-one attention Miles got as a toddler and she didn't. We'll see how this year pans out.

So any advice? For those who are bilingual, how did you achieve this? How important is it, really, to speak a second language? Is it worth sacrificing so much, in both time and money; giving up other hobbies, vacations, all the other ways our money could be put to use, to basically re-orient our lives toward language learning? What if, by the time my kids grow up, the language they've learnt has already begun to go out of vogue, and no one bothers to speak it anymore? After all, they'll be native English speakers regardless, and it looks like, at least in much of the world, that's the language they'll need most for business, travel, etc...