Raising a mutli-lingual child

Factual Questions
21

I can give my experience. China Bambina was a bit slow learning to talk. About 18 months. But by 24 months she was speaking complex sentences.

We live in Shanghai. Mom is Shanghaiese native speaker, but speaks a lot of Mandarin because of me. Most of the people around us are native Shanghaiese speakers. Nanny’s and maid usually come from other areas of China and speak Mandarin as a second language. I’m American and speak Mandarin as a second language and only a little Shanghaiese. Grandparents and other relatives speak Shanghaiese as a rule but can also speak mandarin.

China bambina learned real early: younger Chinese you speak Mandarin, older (grandparent age) speak Shanghaiese, cacausians speak English. She naturally switched between all three based on age and race long before she understood there was such a thing as language.

Around 3 years old, she figured out there were distinct languages and got a kick out of saying something to me in Shanghaiese, then asking in Mandarin if “daddy understood?”

She still will mix up nouns if the listener understands. So she will speak english and throw in Chinese words because she knows I understand. She does not do this on trips to the US.

Also, she is most fluent in Mandarin since that is the language of most people around her and pre school. English is second best thanks to Daddy and annual visits to the US. Shanghaiese is third, and she understands a lot but speaks little. Interestingly enough, she has plenty of Shanghaiese classmates that can barely understand Mandarin after several years of pre school.

China bambina speaks English fluently although some pronunciations are off and her vocabulary is not as rich. For example, she might say in English “please give me that thing” using “thing” if she doesn’t know the English word (but she will know the Chinese word). Most of her bad English pronunciation came from some american neighbor kids with 2 american parents and the kids spoke english baby talk and pronunciation. I’ve never used baby talk like ducky instead of duck. Christ, kid’s got enough challenges learning duck, yazi, and the shanghaiese pronunciation to also have to learn english baby talk. I’ve taught enough ESL to know I really hate common ESL problems like “dat” instead of 'that" and from the very beginning instilled in China bambina proper pronunciation.

The advice I got back in the beginning of parenthood was that the secret is one parent speaks one language 1:1. In a group context, switching languages to what the group speaks is not confusing. Otherwise, make a serious effort to speak only one language. The kids can’t differentiate why Daddy speaks English now and 5 minutes later Mandarin. In my experience that is really critical. In the early days it would have been much easier for me to speak Chinese, but then china bambina probably would not speak very good english.

22

Russian.

23

Related question for parents of multi-lingual children in languages with different phenomes:

Do your children differentiate between phenome cognates* in each language like natives? That is, do the Mandarin/English speakers differentiate between “l” and “r” in English, but not Mandarin, and “dd” and “tt” in Mandarin, but not English?
*I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase - sounds that are accepted as the same in a language, even though they really aren’t

24

I think kids learn this so effortlessly that it has no developmental effect whatsoever, except that they are comfortable in more situations than the rest of us. My ex-roommate was divorced from her Mexican husband. The kid would spend the weekend with his dad (where only Spanish was spoken) and the rest of the week with his mom (where only English was spoken). Five years old and that kid could turn off one language and turn on the other effortlessly. I loved to watch him do it. It was as natural as breathing.

25

I have first hand experience of this too so I’ll chime in. I speak English and my wife speaks Mandarin as her native tongue and English (very well actually) as a second language. We had decided that our children would learn both English and Chinese (Mandarin) written and spoken at home. After our first daughter was born we spoke to the pediatrician about her language development possibly being affected by our home being bilingual. He said that it might take a bit longer than “normal” for her to sort out the different words and languages in her head before being able to understand the differences and similiarities, but that kids can and do readily learn whatever languages they are taught at home very easily, much easier than trying to learn as an adult. My oldest daughter was talking by 9 months and has understood both English and Mandarin seemingly from the get go, she never really had any problems differentiating the two languages. She started 1st grade yesterday and she is fluent in both English and Mandarin now, and she also reads and writes English very well, and my wife is starting to teach her to read and write Chinese at home. My youngest daughter is not quite four but she has had some problems with learning the two languages along with a slight speech impediment. For example last night we were eating watermelon and she always refered to it in Mandarin but understood the English word watermelon. She still mixes English and Mandarin words together in a sentence where my oldest daughter rarely does. We have brought that up to our pediatrician and he says that she seems to be perfectly normal and that unless it is still a problem by the time she starts school, not to worry about it. We are spending more time with my youngest daughter lately to help her with learn both languages and teaching her to pronunciate her words better. She is definately improving and I think she will be fine a a year or two when she starts school. If you want to ask me anything else my email is in my profile.

26

We have several sets of friends with Spanish-speaking mothers and English-speaking fathers. The kids (one is 4 and the the other is 2) both speak each language well for their respective ages and I’ve never really noticed any developmental lag in them. As othe people have mentioned, the 4 year old is amazing how effortlessly she can go back and forth between the languages and never lose a beat.

They also have that uncanny ability to know which language to speak to a particular person (even the 2 year old). Being a typical white American guy, I am assigned the “English” category. Though I always like the looks on their faces when I speak Spanish to them. They look a bit thoughful and confused… like “how do you know my private language with my mother?”

27

My wife’s first language is English. She speaks Albanian (slightly rusty) and learned modern Hebrew as a child in Israel, but has forgotten much of that. She has an innate gift with languages but is “blocked” educationally, ie she shuts down in a classroom context but immersed in a culture will learn its language within a few weeks at most.

I have never been immersed in a culture that way. However I spoke and read very quickly, and if I have a particular talent, it’s in language.

We wanted to send my daughter to a gaelic school because she began speaking very early. However because my wife’s so easily stressed out by the idea of studying, we decided to go with an English-speaking school for the sake of her peace of mind.

What would you say we could do to best enhance my daughter’s language gift? She’s now three and a half. Should my wife try to speak with her in ordinary Albanian, and just see where it goes? Should we all have a go at learning modern Hebrew? Should I just drop the kid off in France and see what she’s learned by the time she finds her way back home? Lots of local schools now do Spanish lessons from an early age, but we figured the gaelic school’d be better since it was entirely taught in gaelic. Like, every subject. Should we just shove her into Spanish lessons instead? Would it be better for her to learn a language that at least one parent speaks fairly fluently? Could I have asked any more questions in a single paragraph?

(I have no idea how to teach her to read and write, and we’re pretty easily stressed so we were going to leave that side of things to the schools. What would that mean for our chances of teaching her a language at home ourselves?)

28

You are lucky that you had a pediatrician who either knew something about the subject, or was sympathetic to bilingual families.

Many are not, and they have NO LINGUISTIC TRAINING.

Please, please do not ask medical staff for advice about bringing your kids up in a multilingual environment - I have more than a few friends who were advised by their doctors not to do it. In particular, my Swedish friend, whose girls now say proudly “I can count to ten in Swedish!” Big deal - you could have been thinking and dreaming in Swedish by now…

That example is from an English doctor - here’s one from a Japanese doctor.

My friend was working when it was her daughter’s day for her 3 year old check up, so her Japanese MIL offered to take the kid instead. The kid has a totally Japanese name. So they get in to see the doctor, who instantly says that the girl’s light brown hair colour might be indicative of a deficiency in something (reasonable, so far) so the the MIL laughs, and says no, she’s got an English mother. The doctor instantly switched to excreble English for the interview part of the exam. The little girl just looked at him, utterly nonplussed by the nonsense the man was spouting.

The doctor looks up at his staff and says, “Yes, well, this often happens, that children brought up by foreign mothers are mentally deficient.”

What is great, in this land where doctors are revered, the MIl got really angry, and said, “No, it’s just that she doesn’t understand your totally shitty English” and swept out of the room!

But it does illustrate the attitudes that bilingual families have occasionally.

When my son went to elementary school for the first time, I had the standard interview at his school, with the exception that both the head and the deputy head came for a goggle at the spectacle. Once they had bent over backwards to tell me that Japanese support classes would be an impossibility, and were reassured that my son could actually speak Japanese, they relaxed somewhat.

Then I dropped the bombshell that once a year or so, he would be missing ten days of school so as to go to England to visit relatives and learn something of his other culture. The deputy head asked me if I was teaching him English seriously (this, in the land of cram schools and no free time for kids!!) I said I was doing a bit of reading and writing with him a few minutes a day. He looked at the kid, and said “The poor boy - forced to learn English and being torn from school every year without fail.”

What. A. Prat.

We “tore” my son from that school about 6 weeks later, as soon as we’d set up a place at a village school a couple of miles away - where he is respected and admired for speaking English and maintaining his cultural heritage.

Sorry, this is turning into a rant. I’ll stop. But you’d be amazed how many people will think you are somehow abusing or neglecting your kid for allowing them access to another world. Grr!

29

OK, I had wondered about that, and I think that’s one reason why my friends failed to get their children to speak English. Since they normally speak Japanese to their wives, then they just continued with their kids, and didn’t make as consistant of an effort. Good advice.

30

This works well, but also if both parents speak the “weak” language, then that works out OK, too.

In our case, our family language is English - we even have the silly situation where my husband and boys will speak English together out and about in public. It doesn’t seem to bother any of them.

Our rough rule is English inside, Japanese outside. But if we are by ourselves as a family shopping, then we speak English. If inlaws are there I tend to speak English to the boys and Japanese to the parents. I speak Japanese to my husband in public but he answers in English!

The least successful combinations are where the father speaks the weak language to the kids but the wife’s native language to her (maybe this is what is happening with some of your friends.)

31

yes. speak mandarin, shanghaiese and english with native proununciation. english is california and cartoon network influenced. china bambina has trouble with ‘th’ sounds. pronouncing with as wif - but she’s really improving on this.

as said earlier, i really reinforce proper pronunciation, grammar, vocab, etc. i’ve met many kids in the US who could only be understood by their mother whilst china bambina did much better.

like hokkaidobrit says, i think it’s important to have a consistent & logical language speaking practice, whatever it may be. one parent one langusge; english at home and other language outside; etc

32

First, I take it you mean phoneme rather than phenome. That out of the way, the word you’re looking for is allophone, which might be glossed as the form of a phoneme used in a specific context.

In the case of Cantonese, local phonologists have responded to the substitution of ‘n’ with ‘l’ at the beginning of Cantonese words by proposing that the letters are allophones of a single sound, which might be called ‘n/l’. This description reflects the fact that the variation between the sounds is not linguistically distinctive, that no change of meaning is involved. One might say that there is allophonic variation between initial ‘n’ and initial ‘l’. In English, of course, ‘n’ and ‘l’ are separate ‘sounds’, not allophones.

33

It sounds like your husband speaks better English than many of my friends’ wives.

It gets worse. The father speaks the weak language inconsistantly to the kids and the wife’s native languge to her. Since there is no “rule” established that the kids have to speak English back to the father then they take the path of least resistance and speak Japanese.

Back to your earlier post concerning using Japanese words in English sentences, we did that extensively as Mormon missionaries. We would substitute Japanese or “missionary Japanese” for many “new” things we encountered as missionaries, even though we know the English for it. This would be such things as “shimai” for “sister missionary” “dod”, short for “douryou” instead of “companion”, “fud” for “fudo” (“bathroom”), “eki” instead of “train station”, etc. It wsn’t bad while we were talking to each other, but I found it extremely hard to tell my experiences to non-Japanese speakers when I went back. The next time I came to Japan I made an effort to not continue this practice.

Obviously, some things are expressed much easier in Japanese, and we’ll use “obaachan” instead of “older woman” since to connotations are much different.

34

Ha!

It’s just that when we met and became friends, I spoke absolutely NO Japanese, and he had the standard school education in English. By the time we started dating, the English habit had formed. Now, he says he simply can’t speak to me in Japanese because it would be like putting his shoes on the wrong feet.

His English is fluently awful! He can say anything he needs to, even really complicated stuff, but his grammar stinks. But that’s OK, I speak Japanese in a similar fashion…

35

We picked him because he attended and interned at John’s Hopkins University (a very good school and hospital) and he has been in practice since the year my wife was born. He is fantastic with the kids and very knowledgable. Even though we have moved to Pennsylvania from Maryland where he practices and we used to live, we still drive them down there for regular visits and check ups. He speaks Hebrew as well as English so bilingualality (is that even a word?) isn’t out of his realm of experience. ;j

36

That is great, so he can advise people on the basis of his own bilinguality (is that a word??) aside from his being a medical doctor. It is when you come up against some of the monolingual ones that you hit trouble…