How to teach your kids perfect English, effortlessly and for free

For our children to speak perfect English, we don't have to pay for native-speaker lessons or schools abroad. We don't even have to speak English at home. It is enough to turn on the TV only in English from an early age, writes Charles University professor and father of four Tomas Havranek.

Every year I meet up with a Portuguese colleague who works in Spain. His wife comes from the Basque Country. They met when both were working in Germany, and their three children were born there. At daycare the children spoke German. My colleague and his wife speak English to each other at home, so the children picked up English too. Each parent spoke to them in their own native language, so from early childhood they also learned Portuguese and Basque. And now, in Spain, they go to school in Spanish.

"And how many languages do your children speak?" my colleague asks me over dinner in the Gion district of Kyoto. He knows full well that my wife is Slovak by origin, so he may think we must speak English at home too. I explain that Czech and Slovak are very close, something like London English and Appalachian English. I see his disappointed look: Pity, so at least the children speak Czech and Slovak? No, I shake my head, the two blur together for them; they speak Czech, they just prefer some words in Slovak.

Still, in the end I can at least say that the children speak English well. No, we really don't speak it at home. I tried once, when my daughter was a year old, and she started crying. But now, at twelve, she speaks English better than I do, with a perfect American accent, and the three younger children are getting close. There is a single reason: when we turn on the TV at home, it is only ever in English. Czech fairy tales are a rare treat for the kids, something for Christmas at Grandma's.

Learning and resting at the same time

Classes with a native speaker are great, and sending children to study abroad is better still. But both are expensive, and not always possible even when money is no object. YouTube, by contrast, is free, and English-language cartoon channels can be watched for next to nothing. We started when our daughter was a year old and could sit still in front of a tablet. Half an hour a day, which also gave us a chance to rest a little.

I have to admit that the half hour gradually became an hour, and we still keep up the habit: the children demand their cartoons in English from six to seven in the evening. From YouTube shows for toddlers we moved on to The Penguins of Madagascar, My Little Pony, SpongeBob and The Simpsons. Sure, an hour of television is not the healthiest thing in the world. But parents deserve some rest, and on top of that they can justify it by the fact that the children are learning a language.

I like telling friends about this system and describing the scientific research behind it. My wife frowns at me ("Oh, stop fibbing," she tells me, silently and sometimes out loud), because she knows full well that we weren't thinking about any research at the time. From her own childhood she remembered a classmate who spoke perfect English because his parents put Cartoon Network on at home. Correlation is not causation, but it seemed to us like a good idea.

Dubbing can stay

None of this means the state should restrict Czech dubbing, which is excellent. I myself prefer some series dubbed (Red Dwarf, for example), and most Czechs will go on preferring dubbing, even at the cinema, for a long time to come. But I see no reason not to show children cartoons and films in the original version from an early age. It costs nothing and the benefits are clear. You have to keep one clear rule: if you want TV, it's in English.

Beyond English, the same approach can be applied to general knowledge of the world. Let's get the children a radio and, from an early age, play Český rozhlas [Czech public radio] in the background. They'll get used to it and it will feel natural to them, just as it feels natural to me. At eight I got a radio, my parents tuned it to Radiožurnál [its news station], and since then I have never stopped looking forward to Zápisník zahraničních zpravodajů [the foreign correspondents' program]. I imagined all those faraway places and how one day I, too, might travel...

To sum up: the digital age brings pitfalls, but also unprecedented opportunities for educating children. We can easily make use of them at home by sticking to a simple rule: at most an hour of TV a day for the kids, but only in English. Once we turn on the TV in Czech, it's over, because they won't want to go back. For Czech, let's tune in to the excellent Český rozhlas.