How to Teach Kids Spanish at Home, Even If You Don't Speak It
From the Super Trivia Kids team ·
How do you help a kid learn Spanish when your own Spanish is two years of
high school and a lot of guessing? You don't need to speak Spanish to start.
This guide covers simple steps you can try this week, common pitfalls, and the little
bit of research behind them. If you want the bigger questions first (is earlier better,
does it make kids smarter), those are in
Spanish for kids: what the
research actually says. This one is the how-to.
The short version
Small and daily beats big and rare. A few Spanish words woven into routines you already have is something a non-speaking parent can keep up.
Real people matter most. In a well-known study, babies learned new speech sounds from a live speaker but not from a recording. Find someone your kid can actually talk with.
Flash cards, games and apps are good for practice between conversations, especially spaced out over days. They won't teach a kid to speak Spanish on their own, ours included.
How do you teach kids Spanish at home if you don't speak it?
Here's the honest answer: you mostly don't teach it. You make room for it.
You learn a few words alongside your kid, you find people who really speak it, and you
give them short, regular practice in between. Being a beginner yourself is less of a
problem than it sounds.
Here's what that looks like, roughly in the order to try it.
Pick a few daily routines and do them in Spanish.
Label the house.
Borrow picture books and songs from the library.
Find real people to talk with.
Practice with flash cards, a little at a time, spread out.
Start with small daily routines
A weekly "Spanish hour" is hard to keep up. Smaller is easier: a handful of phrases
tied to things you already do every day, so nobody has to remember to "do Spanish."
Breakfast:agua, leche, pan. "¿Quieres
leche?" ("Do you want milk?") is a whole sentence a kindergartner can answer.
The car: counting red cars in Spanish, uno, dos, tres.
Bedtime: "Buenas noches." It costs nothing.
Keep a list on your phone of the words you're working on, and look up the
pronunciation before you use a new one. If you're not sure how to say something, say so.
"I don't know, let's find out" is a fine thing for a kid to hear.
Label the house
This is the easiest thing on the list and a good place to start. Sticky notes or
index cards with the Spanish word, taped to the thing: la puerta on the door,
la ventana on the window, la mesa on the table, la silla on a
chair, la cama on a bed.
Common pitfalls:
Include el or la. Spanish nouns are masculine or
feminine, and it's much easier to learn the word with its article than to fix it
later.
Don't do the whole house at once. A good rule of thumb is about ten
labels at a time. Add a few and retire a few every week or two.
Turn them into a game. "Touch la puerta." "Where's
la silla?" Kids get to run around the kitchen, and nobody has to sit still.
Labels are reading, though, and reading a word isn't the same as hearing it. Say
them out loud every time.
Picture books and songs in Spanish, from the library
You don't need to buy anything here. Ask a children's librarian whether your library
has Spanish or bilingual picture books. Bilingual books, with English and Spanish on the
same page, are the easiest place to start, because you can follow along.
Two places to look for titles to request:
The Pura Belpré
Award, from the American Library Association's children's division, goes each year
to a Latino writer and illustrator for a children's book that celebrates the Latino
cultural experience. Books in Spanish, English or bilingual formats are all eligible, so
check the format before you request one.
Día (El día de los
niños/El día de los libros, Children's Day/Book Day) is the same association's
celebration of children, families and reading in every language and culture. It
culminates each year on April 30, which makes a good excuse to ask your library what
it has in Spanish.
When you read, stop and ask questions. "¿Qué es esto?" ("What's this?"), pointing at
a picture. That habit has some research behind it, though not for this exact thing: when
parents paused a video to ask their 3-year-olds questions, the children learned more
vocabulary than when parents just watched or commented
(Strouse, O'Doherty & Troseth, 2013).
That was preschoolers and video, not grade schoolers and books, so this is an
extrapolation. It also just makes reading more of a conversation.
Songs are where your pronunciation matters least, because someone else is singing.
Ask your librarian for children's music in Spanish, or for a bilingual story time if
your library has one. A simple counting or body-parts song works well in the car.
Find real people to talk with
This is the hardest part to arrange. It's also the part the research is clearest
on.
In a well-known study, 9-month-old American babies heard Mandarin from a
native speaker in short play sessions. Babies who heard it from a live person learned to
tell Mandarin speech sounds apart. Babies who got the same speakers on video or audio
didn't (Kuhl, Tsao & Liu,
2003). Those were babies, not grade schoolers, and the
research article goes
into the limits of that study. But the lesson is worth keeping: language is something
you do with people.
Places to look, depending on where you live:
A relative, neighbor or family friend who speaks Spanish and wouldn't mind ten
minutes of "how do you say…?"
A Spanish class or immersion program at school, or an after-school club.
Bilingual story time or conversation groups at the library.
A bilingual babysitter.
Ordering in Spanish at a restaurant where the staff speak it, if they're up for
it. Practice "Quiero tacos, por favor" ("I'd like tacos, please") on the way.
None of these takes a lot of time. One real conversation gives the rest of the week's
practice a reason. A kid learns gracias on a flash card, then uses it
on a person, and that person smiles.
Spaced quizzing with flash cards
Paper flash cards still work. (How flash cards turned into this game is on our
About page.) Two ideas from learning research make them work
better:
Guess before you flip. Trying to remember a word helps it stick
more than looking at it again. That's been shown in kids around 10 years old, though
with word lists in a small study, not Spanish
(Karpicke, Blunt & Smith,
2016). Saying camisa out loud before turning the card over is the
point.
Spread it out. Fifth graders who learned vocabulary in two
sessions a week apart remembered more five weeks later than kids who learned it all at
once (Sobel, Cepeda & Kapler,
2011). That was 39 kids, so it's small, but it's a good reason to spread practice
out.
One simple system to try uses three envelopes:
New: words you just added. Go through these most days, for a
couple of minutes.
Getting it: words your kid has gotten right a couple of times. These come
out every few days.
Got it: words your kid knows. These come out about once a week, mixed in
with the rest, so they don't quietly disappear.
A word that's missed goes back to "New," with no fuss. The whole thing takes about
five minutes, and breakfast is an easy time for it. For more on why quizzing helps and
where the research is thinner, see
Does quizzing kids actually help them
learn?
What an app can't do (ours included)
We make an app with Spanish in it, so here's the straight version.
It can't talk back. Our game asks questions. It doesn't hold a
conversation the way a person does, and the research above says that's where the heavy
lifting happens.
It can't hear your kid. Our game reads every word out loud, so kids
hear it said properly. It has no idea how your kid says it back.
It's mostly words. Vocabulary is where quizzing fits best. Putting
words into sentences, and understanding someone who talks fast, comes from people.
Tapping an answer is easier than producing one. Picking the right
word from a list helps memory less than coming up with it yourself
(Rowland, 2014). Our game uses multiple
choice because young kids can't type fast. If you play along, ask "how do you say
it?" before your kid looks at the choices.
What an app can do is make the practice part something a kid asks for, show the right
answer every time, and say the word out loud for a parent whose accent isn't great. That's
useful. It's a supplement to real Spanish, not a replacement for it.
A one-week plan
Here's one option. Pick the pieces that fit:
A few Spanish phrases at breakfast and bedtime, every day.
Five minutes of flash cards most mornings.
One or two Spanish or bilingual library books at bedtime.
A level or two of Spanish in the game, with siblings or friends taking turns on
the couch and saying the words to each other.
One real conversation with someone who speaks Spanish, when you can manage it.
Some weeks all of it gets dropped. That's fine; pick it back up. Every family is
different, so take whatever piece of this fits and leave the rest.
Common questions
How do I teach my kids Spanish at home if I don't speak Spanish?
Learn alongside them rather than teaching. Use a few Spanish words in daily routines, label things around the house, borrow bilingual picture books from the library, and practice with flash cards a few minutes at a time. Most important, find real Spanish speakers to talk with, since research suggests live people teach language far better than recordings.
How much time a day should kids spend learning Spanish?
There's no established number for young kids. Short and frequent tends to beat long and rare: in one classroom study, fifth graders who learned vocabulary in two sessions a week apart remembered more than kids taught it all at once. A few minutes most days, plus regular conversation, is a realistic place to start.
Can kids learn to speak Spanish from an app?
Not on their own. An app can't hold a conversation or hear how your child pronounces a word, and a well-known study found babies learned speech sounds from a live speaker but not from video. Apps are useful for vocabulary practice between real conversations, especially ones that read words out loud.
Where can I find Spanish picture books for kids for free?
Start at your public library and ask a children's librarian for Spanish and bilingual picture books. For titles to request, look at the American Library Association's Pura Belpré Award winners, which celebrate Latino culture and include books in Spanish, English or bilingual formats. Check the format before you request one.
About this article. Written by the Super Trivia Kids team from the
published sources listed below. We're not researchers, teachers or doctors, and we're
not Spanish linguists. Every source links to the original so you can check our reading
of it. Where a study was small, or done with a different age group, we've said so.
Sources
Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in
infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(15), 9096–9101.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1532872100
Strouse, G. A., O'Doherty, K., & Troseth, G. L. (2013). Effective coviewing:
Preschoolers' learning from video after a dialogic questioning intervention.
Developmental Psychology, 49(12), 2368–2382.
doi.org/10.1037/a0032463
Karpicke, J. D., Blunt, J. R., & Smith, M. A. (2016). Retrieval-based learning:
Positive effects of retrieval practice in elementary school children. Frontiers in
Psychology, 7, 350.
doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00350
Sobel, H. S., Cepeda, N. J., & Kapler, I. V. (2011). Spacing effects in
real-world classroom vocabulary learning. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(5),
763–767. doi.org/10.1002/acp.1747
Rowland, C. A. (2014). The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A
meta-analytic review of the testing effect. Psychological Bulletin, 140(6),
1432–1463. doi.org/10.1037/a0037559
Association for Library Service to Children, American Library Association. El día
de los niños/El día de los libros (Children's Day/Book Day).
ala.org/alsc/initiatives/dia