Q. My husband and I are bilingual, and we want our baby to be, too. Will we confuse her if we speak anything other than English to her?

A. Nope. Babies have a natural capacity for learning language  -- they're actually much better at it than we are.

Now's the perfect time to begin your daughter's multilingual education, since she can easily master all the subtle phonetic differences in pronunciation that will allow her to speak foreign tongues with little or no accent, says William O'Grady, author of How Children Learn Language. By the time she's 1 or so, that ability starts to diminish.

To help her absorb her second language, make sure she's immersed in it  -- occasional chatter isn't enough. Singing songs and reading books in both tongues can be fun, too. But while bilingual toys, books, DVDs, and CDs may help your child's ear grow familiar with your language, nothing will lead her to become fluent like the sound of your voices.

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