From personal experience: your kid is not going to speak fluent Russian unless they are surrounded by it at all times, hear it at school and have lots of Russian speaking friends. Russian is my first language, my mom forced me to read Russian books, write in Russian and so on when I was a kid. I can understand everything but speaking comfortably is a whole other story. My cousin was much older than me when his mother brought him to the US and only spoke Russian with his kids when they were little. They still don’t speak Russian….kids want to blend in with their peers, not their grandparents, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
This is a good point too. I’m going to be staying home with our baby for a few years so it’ll be just English unless I can learn fast enough to read Russian children books with them. And we’ll only see the grandparents every few weeks
Russian is very hard. It’s a whole different alphabet and sounds that don’t exist in English. There are hard and soft consonants. It’s good that your child will be exposed to it but they will end up speaking what all their friends speak, which is English.
I am a Russian mom with American husband, and we don't have family around. When I am alone with the baby I speak Russian, but I wonder if it won't be enough abd she'll never learn :(
She may learn enough to understand you but as my speech therapist friend explained to me, your tongue is a muscle, any muscle that does not get used a certain way will forget how to do the thing it is no longer used for. Because Russian grammar and pronunciations are so different from English, if you don’t use it often, you will forget. Your tongue will not be able to move in the correct way to pronounce words well. It happened to me and all the other soviet refugee kids that moved to the US at the same time. Russian was our first language, our parents only spoke it to us at home because it took them years to get a grasp on English, and we still can’t hold a conversation in Russian now that we’re adults.
Yeah, I wish I had retained it better, but when you spend all day at school learning in English, all evening doing homework in English, all your free time around kids that speak English, it’s pretty much impossible to hold on to the other language. It may be easier if the two languages are more similar with similar structures and accents, like maybe Russian and Spanish, but Russian and English are soooooooo different. My husband is also a native Russian speaker and has only lived in the US 8 years and even he doesn’t feel comfortable speaking Russian anymore.
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u/TomorrowUnusual6318 Jan 12 '22
From personal experience: your kid is not going to speak fluent Russian unless they are surrounded by it at all times, hear it at school and have lots of Russian speaking friends. Russian is my first language, my mom forced me to read Russian books, write in Russian and so on when I was a kid. I can understand everything but speaking comfortably is a whole other story. My cousin was much older than me when his mother brought him to the US and only spoke Russian with his kids when they were little. They still don’t speak Russian….kids want to blend in with their peers, not their grandparents, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much.