French with a toddler
Between 18 months and 3, your child is in the vocabulary explosion, adding words faster than at any other point in their life. Your job isn't to teach. It's to narrate, and to be unbothered by the silence that comes back.
Narrate, don't question
Questions demand production, and production lags months behind comprehension. Name what's happening, the sock, the spoon, the red truck, and expect nothing back. The words are going in.
Name the object in their hand
Whatever they're holding is whatever they're attending to. That's the word to say. One noun, clearly, then wait.
Silence is not failure
A toddler may listen to months of French before producing a single word of it. Comprehension runs far ahead of speech at this age, the quiet phase is the normal phase.
The 200-words-a-month explosion
Right now your toddler adds roughly two hundred words a month, the fastest vocabulary growth of their whole life. Every French word you offer lands in the middle of that boom. Point, name, repeat: une fleur, regarde une fleur, une jolie fleur.
Motion verbs in real moments
Verbs stick best when the body is doing them. Say tu sautes as they jump, le chien saute pointing at the dog, on saute as you do it together. Meaning arrives through movement, no translation needed.
Start with bedtime
It's the ritual that survives a bad day, and the fixed sequence means the same ten sentences work every night.
One sense is good, three are better
A toddler lives in the here and now, and their attention is short by design. They learn from things they can see, hold, hear, smell and taste, so the word lands hardest when it arrives attached to the real object. Hand them the cold apple as you say une pomme. Let them squeeze the wet sponge as you say l'eau. Every sense you add lays down another path back to the word.
Offer a choice, not a question
Toddlers will trade almost anything for a bit of control, so use it. Instead of asking what they want, hold up two real things and name them: le t-shirt rouge ou le t-shirt bleu? La pomme ou la banane? They answer by pointing, which costs them no words and teaches them both. Opposites work the same way, chaud ou froid, and they land fast because the difference is in their hands.
Say more back than they said to you
When your toddler offers one word, hand back a slightly longer version of it. Max says milk, with that hopeful rising note. You say, tu veux du lait? Je vais chercher ton lait. Then, if the moment is still open, you stretch it: on cherche le lait, je verse le lait, voilà ton lait. You have affirmed him, shown him how the sentence is built, and given him three more words, all without correcting anything.
The words a toddler day actually needs
These are the words that come up before breakfast and keep coming up all day. Not a vocabulary list to study, just the ones worth having ready, because you will need them today.
- À bras Up, when they want picking up ah BRAH
- Maman, papa Mummy, daddy ma-MON, pa-PAH
- On joue ! Le joujou, une poupée Let's play. The toy, a doll on ZHOO, luh zhoo-ZHOO, oon poo-PAY
- Guili guili Tickle tickle gee-LEE gee-LEE
- Le pipi, le caca Wee, poo luh pee-PEE, luh ka-KA
- Le biberon, le lait The bottle, the milk luh beeb-RON, luh LAY
- La couche The nappy la KOOSH
- La chaise haute, le bavoir The high chair, the bib la shez OAT, luh ba-VWAR
- La tétine The dummy la tay-TEEN
- Le berceau The cot luh bair-SO
- Attention ! Careful! ah-ton-SYON
See the full stage-by-stage guide, from the womb to school age →