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Hi! This question is really important to me personally and I would love to hear from children-learning-experts as well as anybody who made a relevant experience in this area. Some background first: My ex-wife (italian) moved from Germany back to Italy with our two kids, when they were 5 (Connor) and 2 (Lizzy) years old. I visited them from that time on 2-3 times per year for about a week each time. From the beginning on they were both reluctant to talk on the phone with me (reason for that is another case for a psychologist, I guess) but were always truly overjoyed when I came to see them in Venice.

Until today they accept and respect me as their father and listen to me when I tell them what they should/could do and what they'd better try to do differently (in contrast to my ex-wife I never shout at them). I speak just enough Italian (never learned it, just picked it up along the way) to have a basic conversation with the two (I speak English with my ex-wife) - but both kids never learned another language (despite having had English and German in school, which unfortunately proved to be totally useless).

Today Connor is 17 and Lizzy is 14. Although it is very common in Italy to speak only Italian, even today, I am sad to say that my kids never picked up at least English - for their own good as well as, of course, for our ability to have a real conversation.

Now my question: My ex-wife claims (from the beginning on until today), that both kids would speak at least good or even very good English and/or German, IF I only had talked with them in one of these languages on the phone from the start. (As I said, they never liked talking to me on the phone, which - according to my ex-wife - is also due to my "reluctance" to talk with them in English and/or German. I prefered talking to them in my rudimentary Italian because in that way they understood and answered my at least a bit). So, what I would truly like to know is:

Can a child learn a second language, if he/she talks (or listens to) another language on the phone - and if it is a question of the number and length of phone-calls, what would have been a sufficient number and length of calls?

Thank you very much for your answer, I really appreciate it.

Dandy Serendipity
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about the language acquisition, not about the properties of the languages itself. You may try asking it at Language Learning.SE instead. – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Mar 05 '17 at 05:26
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    The telephone is a very lo-fi sound reproduction system. Maybe some people might be able to learn something that way. Very talented people. A child needs more than an occasional conversation to learn a language; language learning is intensive. And they need the visual and tactile correlates, as well -- seeing and feeling help correlate the words and the feelings in conjunction with sound. – jlawler Mar 05 '17 at 14:37
  • Children need visual or at least tactile (for blind children) to information to connect a stimulus with a word. There's no chance one could learn language as there's no chance you could learn Greek just by looking at the Rosseta Stone. – Probably Mar 05 '17 at 19:04
  • My wife and I are native Korean speakers who moved from Korea to US 5 years ago when our kids were 4/6 years old. They were monolingual Korean speakers. We almost always talk to our kids in Korean, and even insist that they read Korean books, which they sometimes do. Yet they are practically native English speakers now, their Korean skill is at least several grade levels below Korean kids, and I can here distinct "English accent" in their Korean pronunciation. Based on my experience, I think the answer to your question is "Not a chance," unless your kids are language geniuses. – jick Mar 06 '17 at 01:03

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