Getting my five-year-old interested in French
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2020 4:02 pm
Hello.
I am a long-time poster on here, still struggling with the French language (improving, but rather slowly).
When my son was born, my wife and I always had the intention of ensuring that he learnt French.
By way of background, my wife's late mother was French, so we thought it would be rather nice for our son to be able to do the same.
Unfortunately, my mother-in-law died well over ten years ago, so we missed out on the opportunity to have my son learn from here (and indeed me).
My wife was born in England and has an English dad and, unfortunately, fell into the trap of only speaking English - she has a GCSE in French but nothing beyond that.
Fast-forward five years and we have suddenly realised that we need to get our son learning French as soon as possible, before his brain starts reaching that age where it shall become more of a struggle.
We have tried to get him to watch French "stuff" on his tablet - Peppa Pig, Youtube videos teaching vocabulary etc. but he either complains that he doesn't want to watch something he cannot understand or just ends up looking out the window and ignoring it altogether.
We have also tried putting Netflix programs on, in French, but again he tends just to ignore them as he cannot understand them.
Our approach clearly isn't working and any advice would be much appreciated.
We don't want to make him miserable, and potentially put him off French for life, but we know that he will thank us, later, for any French he does now learn.
I am a long-time poster on here, still struggling with the French language (improving, but rather slowly).
When my son was born, my wife and I always had the intention of ensuring that he learnt French.
By way of background, my wife's late mother was French, so we thought it would be rather nice for our son to be able to do the same.
Unfortunately, my mother-in-law died well over ten years ago, so we missed out on the opportunity to have my son learn from here (and indeed me).
My wife was born in England and has an English dad and, unfortunately, fell into the trap of only speaking English - she has a GCSE in French but nothing beyond that.
Fast-forward five years and we have suddenly realised that we need to get our son learning French as soon as possible, before his brain starts reaching that age where it shall become more of a struggle.
We have tried to get him to watch French "stuff" on his tablet - Peppa Pig, Youtube videos teaching vocabulary etc. but he either complains that he doesn't want to watch something he cannot understand or just ends up looking out the window and ignoring it altogether.
We have also tried putting Netflix programs on, in French, but again he tends just to ignore them as he cannot understand them.
Our approach clearly isn't working and any advice would be much appreciated.
We don't want to make him miserable, and potentially put him off French for life, but we know that he will thank us, later, for any French he does now learn.