Did your parents speak YOUR "native" language?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was watching a show late one night about childhood development (PBS at 3 am. oy!) and one of the kids they were talking about was a Vietnamese-American kid, about 8 years old I’d say.

The kid was apparently good at school and his parents were proud of him. They showed Dad helping Kid with his homework. Then they interviewed Mom and Dad - neither spoke English.

I thought it was interesting that the kid was able to get homework help - on his written-in-English homework - from his dad. Of course, 2nd grade schoolwork probably involves a lot of pictures and beginning reading, and math is universal so it’s not that strange. But different to me, nonetheless.

Do any Dopers have stories about growing up in a household where one or both parents didn’t speak the language used in your school/hometown? What was it like? I find the topic intriguing.

2

This doesn’t directly answer your question, but it addresses the general topic. I’ve heard expressed that children whos parents sit down with them for the duration of their homework more likely to “do better” - have greater grasp of the material, than those children whos parents are not at home during homework, or otherwise do not sit with them. Even if the parent is just reading a book or doing the crossword, their presence is beneficial, apparently.

3

Oh yeah there’s no doubt that the act of this kid’s dad taking interest in his homework (and possibly assisting him with it) is a boon to him, no matter what language they’re using.

I’m just interested to hear stories of people who grew up in a multi-lingual environment, especially those who basically acted as a translator for their parents. Sounds neat.

4

I knew of quite a few kids in this scenario growing up, who were children of immigrant parents with little or no ability to communicate in English (of varying “native” languages – Spanish, two or three dialects of Chinese, and Serbo-Croatian). I also grew up in NYC speaking a non-English language at home (Mandarin Chinese), but my parents both held “white-collar” jobs speaking English, so I don’t count in this category.

The cases where the parents didn’t speak English didn’t seem odd to me at all… What struck me as inexplicable was that in more than one of the cases, the kids basically didn’t speak the parents’ native language.

For example, I made friends with this one kid during a summer program, and found when I visited his house discovered that while I could speak to his parents perfectly fine in Mandarin Chinese (which wasn’t their “home province” dialect, but they spoke it), my friend basically didn’t talk to them at all except with gestures and some very broken English on the part of the parents.

The reason was that the parents were often so busy working (the father as a cook in a Chinese restaurant, the mother as a seamstress) that after a certain age, their son just basically went to school, watched TV, read books, ate leftovers, etc. all on his own.

It felt very strange (and sad) to serve as a translator between parents and their own child.

Sometimes you’ll find immigrant, non-English-speaking parents who feel that speaking a non-English language at home would impede the kids learning English well (for a while this was actually part of the “melting pot” naturalization philosophy promoted by the US Government), and despite having limited skills in English would suppress the use of their original languages at home to not “hold back” their children.

While I strongly disagree with this angle, I have to admit that there may be a kernel of truth therein. In my personal observation, many of the kids enrolled in “bilingual” Spanish/English programs in NYC public schools were for the most part in reality relegated to a “special ed” learning environment, and ultimately ghettoized into speaking both bad Spanish and bad English. On the other hand, the Hispanic kids who were mainstreamed, yet still spoke Spanish at home to their families (as I spoke Mandarin with mine), ended up not only with native-speaking English skills but better academic skills overall, with no noticeable lack of skill in Spanish.

That’s probably more an indictment of the implementation than the approach – but in the end, for those kids it still represents a colossal failure of The System.

5

My father was raised in a working class neighborhood in Louisiana in the 40s and 50s. He took French classes every year in school, and there was a great deal of French spoken on the streets, in the stores, in church, and even on the radio. It was only natural that he should pick up the language. Except for the fact that every time his parents caught him speaking French he was beaten. Because in their minds, speaking French was a sign that you were common, or even worse, some kind of Cajun (which translated to halfbreed as far as they were concerned).

By the time I started taking French in high school, my grandmother (never one to let the truth get in the way of her reminiscing) had decided that the French language was a cultural treasure and it was so tragic that it had become so scarce in Louisiana. She sent me tapes of songs and chitchat in French, recorded off of a local zydeco radio station, and told me how she tried to instill in my father a love for this beautiful language, but that he just never took to it.

6

It is terribly sad how scarce French has become in Louisiana, even amongst the Creole/Cajun communities. A boy I dated several years ago was Cajun, and he and his twin brother were two of the only Cajuns of my age bracket I’ve ever met who could speak French, and they didn’t speak it fluently. My mother had lots of Cajun friends when she was my age, and she said back then (1970s) usually the grandparents spoke nothing but French, the parents spoke French and English, and the Cajuns of her generation spoke English and some broken French.

7

My mother didn’t learn any English until after her arrival in England at the age of 19, which means she was still perfecting it in her mid-20s when I was little. She transmitted some of her mistakes to me: like stressing the third syllable of interEsting, and - part of family lore - reading the story of Cinderella and saying: “the ugly sisters flew into a rage” pronounced the French way. (Mum’s mother tongue is Spanish but she was educated in French). When an English-speaking cousin read the same book to me, I corrected her, saying: “not rage - RAJ”.

My English is pretty good considering it’s not my mother’s mother tongue, and that much of my growing up years were spent outside the English-speaking world. I’m one of those English speakers who ended up sounding more English than the English. FTR Mum’s English is 99.5% fluent now. She still cocks up some idioms (often with amusing consequences) and gets her prepositions in a twist, but on the whole her English is excellent.

Now my six-year old son is growing up in a Spanish-speaking country and has one parent who speaks no English. So far he is pretty much perfectly bilingual, if anything, his English has the edge. What I wonder about is how it must feel for my husband to be unable to understand what his own son is saying. ::sigh:: I still have vague hopes that it might motivate him to learn.

8

I grew up bilingual (Spanish and English). Mom’s native language is Spanish, but her English is probably similar to Martha’s mom’s. Very fluent with occasional wrong inflections and/or idioms. She started learning English as a kid in school and had lots of classes in English through junior high, so she spoke quite a bit of English when she came to the States. My Spanish isn’t as fluent as my English, but it’s good enough to communicate with family and friends and be able to understand pretty much anything I want to. (Mom’s best move was making sure that Bro and I learned to read Spanish.) Can’t remember getting help from her doing homework, but she wouldn’t have had any problems helping until I got into high school English or so.

Best friend is American, married to a German. Her kids are bilingual, and are in German schools. It’s expected that parents help kids with homework. Only place she gets stuck sometimes is with German (they’re in grades 7 and 9 or so) composition. And math, but more because she’s not that good at math and the kids’ textbooks are markedly unhelpful. I’ve helped out with homework when I’m there and the kids have had to explain the approach to me before I could help them. There’s no actual explanation in their books.

I think it’s a shame that bilingual programs haven’t been more successful. There are a couple of immersion schools here in Columbus and it seems like the kids who go there are generally more successful in academics than average. Don’t know why bilingual programs couldn’t be just as successful.

GT

9

I also grew up in working class where neither of my parents spoke English. More accurately, my mother’s vocabulary was limited to “hello”, “goodbye” and “thank you”. My father was functional in English but spoke it with a very, very thick accent and like most educated Vietnamese people of his generation, was brought up learning French as a second language so his grammar, while solid, was a often a mongrel of French, English and Vietnamese. However, my father seldom spoke English at home simply because my mother wouldn’t understand. I guess it just seemed natural for my parents, both very culturally proud, to raise their children in their native language. Vietnamese is still the only language I use to converse with my parents.

My sister started kindergarten several months after coming to Australia and I two years later. Neither of us knew a word of English when we started. Being young is fantastic though! After awhile I started getting English; by grade 1/2 I was on par with most of the other children. My parents did the best they could. They made sure we did our homework, taught us things (often maths) we didn’t know but never did our homework for us, got us interested in learning by spending more money than we had on books. Mostly, it was about setting boundaries, taking an interest and instilling in us the virtues of education.

I am familiar with both of the situations robardin mentioned and sadly they’re not uncommon. Some Vietnamese parents try sending their kids to weekend classes but they’re generally not very successful as kids tend to stop going quite early on. I don’t blame them though. My mother used to threaten me and my sister with “I’ll send you to Vietnamese school” whenever we whined about having to learn Vietnamese at home. The idea was horrifying. So much so that we put up with my mother’s sporadic attempts at teaching us to read and write at home. But we were very good whiners and she gave up eventually too.

I also do the translating thing for my parents. It’s not neat at all. If you think corporate speak is hard to understand try it when you’re 10. It was very frustrating when I was younger as I wasn’t as fluent in Vietnamese as I am now and some ideas simply don’t translate well into Vietnamese. That and my mother is a super fastidious woman who must know what everything means. She’s never happy with just the gist of a letter but must know what every sentence means and when I’m talking to someone on her behalf it’s always “What did he say? What are you saying? Why aren’t you telling me anything?”

Kind of amusing translating story. When I was 10 or so I was at home with my mother and an Optus (telco) salesman came to our place. He tried to get us to switch from our existing company to his. While my mother was interested, she wanted to discuss it with my father first. Our intrepid salesman wasn’t taking no for an answer and pulled a fast one on me. He told me that if my mother signed this fancy piece of paper here it just means someone’s spoken to her and she’s interested in the plan. If we don’t call to confirm in x many days then everything stays the same :smack: . I was not a meticulous contract reader then as I am now. I didn’t even know fine print existed! Not long after that our original telco had some special offers and my parents, thinking we were still with the old company, made a lengthy long-distance call. When the bill came the total was $150 for the international calls alone. A whole lot of money for us and five times what would’ve been charged from the other company. I thought it was all my fault and was extremely upset. My mother was furious with the salesman and having none of that. She called up the phone company and demanded to speak with a Vietnamese person and, er, “aired her grievances”. Phone company said she signed contract, end of story. Angry at being ripped off, disgusted at being deceived, my mother was a force to be reckoned with. She called every day asking for anyone who spoke Vietnamese. After the fifth time or so they pursued the issue with the salesman and soon after that apologised profusely, crediting our account with twice the amount: $300. Now that was a HELL lot of money; it was like we won the lotto! We used all the credit and switched back to our old company. To this day, I will not sign a contract without reading every single word over several times.

Moral of the story: Having 10 year olds read contracts suck. However, if shit hits the fan, your mother has back even if she is illiterate. I’m sure if there were no Vietnamese speakers my mother would’ve gone to the company and interpretive danced her grievances.

10

I find it depressing that my SO doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. Neither brother does, actually, and so it’s lost to this generation.

When I first came over, I was speaking Hindi, and my mom spoke excellent English but my dad’s was awful. They encouraged me to learn English, to the point of neglecting Hindi. So my dad and I had a horrid time comunicating for a few years.

When I reached seven or eight, though, I clearly remember them switching tactics and embarking on a program to re-teach me Hindi again. And now I’m pretty fairly bilingual, although my command of English is far greater, having learned it in school of course.

So there was a few years when I fit the OP’s description, at least with my dad. My SO’s parents speak English well but he had all his grandparents until recently and couldn’t communicate with them. I lost all my grandparents but one before I ever met them, and him not being able to talk to his seemed heartbreaking to me.

11

Immersion programs are usually successful. The problem with the specific bilingual program I was referring to, though, is that it was created to “gradually introduce” Hispanic immigrant children to the NYC school system, so that they start first grade being taught pretty much only in Spanish, then get increasingly introduced to English in a formal context, and so on, with the program ending in 6th grade or so.

It sounds reasonable in principle, but what really happens in my observation is that the kids suffer from a “special ed” type of environment, so that by 4th or 5th grade they may be reading material a grade level behind, due to re-reading everything in two languages and the teachers having to deal with fresh injections of kids every year (regardless of grade level) who have no English skills. Also, since the teachers are hired almost completely on the basis of language skills, and so much of the classroom time is devoted to language issues, the math/science materials are skimmed over, which is very hard to “make up” later. On average, by the time these kids are pushed into mainstream coursework in Junior HS, they’re noticeably behind in just about every subject.

This program started up when I was a kid back in the 70s, so maybe it has been improved or turned around since then. I don’t think so, though: my sister-in-law currently works as a third grade teacher at a NYC public school, and she says she sees the same problems going on with the bilingual program to this day. And her school (which has a lot of Hispanic kids enrolled) automatically places the kids in bilingual programs if the initial form the parents fill out when registering for school indicates that “a language other than English is spoken at home”, and often the parents tick that off as a justifiable point of personal pride. In that case, the parents have to separately contact the principal if they want their child put in a mainstream class, while not necessarily appreciating the hole they may be putting their kid in if they don’t.

She’s concerned enough about the issue that she now personally warns the parents about this checkbox during registration, and tries to make clear that this is the default enrollment result of that checkbox.

This is becoming a Pit-like hijack so I’ll stop now.