Boy, did I misread the thread title. I thought it was Raising Children Mutilatingly: How?
Uh-huh. She said if she was going to be an American, she would speak American, and her children would be raised as Americans. She said if she was going to reap the benefits of being an American, she owed it to her adopted country, and if she had wanted a bunch of guineas, she’d have raised 'em in Sicily. <shrug>
I often hear variations of this from Americans who insist that if you’re going to live in America, you ought to speak the language. (I have also noted that this only seems to apply when Spanish is the native tongue in question.) While I think the ability to speak English fluently can only be an asset if one is going to live in the States, AND I think ESL programs do more harm than good, I also think we owe it to our kids to expose them to as much diverse (i.e. non-white bread “americana”) culture as we can.
When flodjunior was just new, we got a lot of “helpful” advice about how to raise a bilingual child. Two opinions in particular came up again and again. The first was that it was vitally important for each parent to speak her/his own language to the child, and never vary, because otherwise the child would get confused. The second was that it was vitally important to speak only one language at home because otherwise the child would be emotionally scarred.
Needless to say we never figured out how to combine these two.
Instead, we speak our respective mother tongues when we’re alone with the kids. When we’re all together, we try to finish a conversation in the same language as we started… though sometimes this isn’t as simple as it sounds! When we’re together with monolingual relatives and friends, we’ll stick to their language. But above all, we go with what feels natural at the moment. In spite of all the dire warnings, this is working great.
It’s been my experience, talking with other bilingual families, that multilingualism works best when it’s natural. That is to say, when the parents speak different mother tongues, or speak (natively) a different language than that of the society around them. Artificially introducing a language for the sake of raising a bilingual child can definitely work, but it takes a lot of dedication. Introducing as many languages as possible simply for the sake of it is not, IMO, a good idea.
Incidentally, I would heartily recommend Grosjean’s Life with Two Languages, and yet I have a completely different take on it from Green Bean. For one thing, I didn’t find it particularly academic - it’s one of the better popularized books on the subject.
I have a student whose parents are both Mexican immigrants. They both aquired English after coming to the United States. They decided to raise their two older children English only in the beleif that the children would be hampered by hearing Spanish at home and English elsewhere. By the time number 3 came along, they had learned from other immigrant families that children can do fine with the Spanish at home, English elsewhere, and tried to do so with this child. However, the older two were uncomfortable with this Spanish at home idea, and the parents started speaking English to them. When she got old enough, the youngest rebelled against Spanish and insisted on English only and would not respond to Spanish at all, so the parents abandoned the idea. So, despite their intentions, they ended up with English only children, but this doesn’t bother them at all. Their attitude is that they are Mexican, so they should know Spanish, but their children are American, so it’s ok if they only speak English. When mom tells the story about how the youngest decided it was English only, it is with the flavor of a favorite family story, without any regret at all.
flodnak: What was your take on the book? I’d be interested to hear. I suppose that I meant it was “academic” in that it wasn’t meant for a “popular” audience. In any case, I was rather impressed with the book, especially as it didn’t obsessively focus on Latinos-in-the-U.S. bilingualism.
–Gruene Boehne (or something like that)
My wife is a Swede, and speaks excellent English, while my Swedish is, at best, shockingly bad.
I am trying to pick up as much Swedish as possible before we have kids, in order to get a headstart on the little beggar.
I also speak Japanese, though, and have been wondering about how to go and teach our children how to speak it. Without the benefit of any experience in the area, and going by what has been said here, it seems to me that it will have to be taught, rather than intuitively learned. Its not something I use around the house, and so a child is not going to pick it up by listening to me.
When I was growing up more than half our neighborhood had bilingual children. Italians, Germans, Belgians, Swedes, etc.
With lots of people escaping Fascist regimes, and later the Displaced Persons, plus the large extended families, it was the natural state of affairs.
i took a language acquisition class last spring, and a really interesting thing the prof. mentioned was that by the time a baby is 6months or so, you can tell what language baby will speak by the babblings. babies will babble the phonetic sounds predominant in the language(s) that surround them and start filtering out sounds of other languages. that’s why sometimes it’s hard for adults learning another language to pronounce some sounds -they have trouble hearing the differences that are clear to native speakers. so it seems a good start in raising a multilingual child is to make sure the infant is exposed to the languages and just hears the languages a lot. then as baby starts growing more and begins talking, the interaction with other speakers of the different languages will be part of the acquisition process.
as for being forced to learn another language by parents…
i had to go to chinese school every week and never really picked it up and stopped after a while. now that i’m older and can’t speak much beyond beginner levels, i wish i was more fluent. i heard chinese all the time growing up, but it was never spoken to me. i think it might be easier for me to pick up now because i know the sounds, but the interaction is really important to learn a language at any age i think. it’s strange because sometimes people speak chinese in my dreams (and i can’t understand it then either!) so maybe after growing up hearing it all the time, i have it somewhere in my subconscious.
One of my good friends is raising his kids with American Sign Language as a second language (both he and his wife are interpreters). They did this by speaking both infront of the kids from the cradle. Seems to be working pretty well.
i’ve got the same situation as cougarfang(then again, we go to the same school).
if parents want their kids to be bilingual, then they have to be bilingual too. My parents speak english and mandarin, but I speak better english than they do. it’s all basicaly a matter of enviroment in the public, at schools, and and home.
I’ve heard (only anecdotally) that raising children mulitlingually can slow thier acquisition of language as compared to children learning one language. Ultimately, they catch up, but are slow at the beginning.
My wife started my step-son with both American Sign Language and English. She kept this up to the point that he babbled both English and sign. Unfortunately she stopped doing this (I’m not sure why). We have wondering if this is not partially responsible for his slow acquisition of English when he began to really speak.
-G
The “normal” range for children learning how to speak is pretty huge. My daughter at 15 months barely babbles a few words. However, she understands quite a lot of Shanghaiese, Mandarin and English.
Ask me in a few years.
Sunspace, if you get in touch with me, I’ll put you in contact with some people I know: a pair of Esperantists (a Quebecois and a Croatian) who raised their kids in Esperanto, Croatian, and French. They are now quadrilingual, having learned English at school0. Damn, I wish that had been me.
I feel it’s very sad when immigrant parents decide not to raise their children with their own language as a first language. Certainly it’s important to speak the language of the country where you live, but the language of your country of origin is an important link to your heritage. The belief that learning another language as a first language will hamper you from also learning English as a first language at the same time is unfounded, but sadly it persists. I know a guy from El Salvador who moved to Canada when he was fairly young, and has since lost most of his Spanish. 
I have a friend who is from Wales, her son’s father is French, and her daughter’s father is Mexican. Both fathers are only in the picture a few weeks a year. She now lives in California and is raising them both trilingually. The son goes to a french school in Berkeley, the daughter goes to a spanish immersion pre-school, and she switches off languages in the home. Whenever she teaches them something one language, she then does the other two, and makes sure to point out the differences. Sometimes they’ll make a game of it and see how far they can get into a Saturday only speaking French or Spanish. The kids aren’t confused at all. She never switches from one language to another mid-conversation, so they seem to have picked up that if someone else starts talking to them in English, they will continue with it. I’ve never seen them slip into french with me, unless I ask them a direct question about it.
My Franch teacher was born in Montreal and French was her native language. She learned English as a second language at home. In school she learned Spanish, Italian, Russian and German. Her husband speaks only English, as does her son. Her daughter is fluent in English (first language) French (mother taught her at home) and Spanish (learned in school).
A good friend of mine is the Israeli-born daughter of two Americans. As kids, she and her siblings were required to speak English in the home. Outside the house, Hebrew was allowed, but they recieved scoldings if they slipped into Hebrew at home. The result is that though she speaks both languages fluently, she does have a slight accent in both - Israelis often ask her how she learned such perfect Hebrew.
A professor of mine in Israel, who was an American, told me that she and her husband had done research on how to raise their little sons bilingually, and and found that if you don’t speak a language fluently, don’t try to teach it to your kids - they’ll just learn a poorer version of the language. They elected to speak only English at home; she didn’t want her sons to imitate her bad Hebrew.
FTR, I have three cousins who are Mexican/American dual citizens, and they grew up in a confusing muddle of Spanish and English (mom’s first language is English but speaks excellent if accented Spanish, dad grew up speaking both but prefers Spanish, went to English-speaking schools in Mexico) and they speak both languages fluently. I don’t think my aunt and uncle consciously tried to make sure they learned each from the right person, but it doesn’t seemed to have harmed them any. One went to a Mexican university, one to an American university (the third is thirteen, you’ll probably see him in a telenovela any day now); the inconsistancy of their language training didn’t ruin their chances of learning one or the other fluently.
I’m from a Chinese family too. Which means that I have firsthand knowledge of how INCREDIBLY IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN this language is…ahem. Bad high school memories coming back.
So you want to raise multilingual children? Here’s my advice:
- Not Chinese. Not any dialect of Chinese. Never. Ever. It’s the most unlearnable, impenetrable language I’ve ever run across. The reason, of course, is that it was invented in China, a nation which had absolutely no concept of practicality for about 4,000 years, give or take a millennium. And lord help you if you want to learn the writing. In my experience, “beautiful” or “calligraphic” is shorthand for “grossly overcomplicated and impractical for all things”.
You think I’m exaggerating, right? I wish.
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If you’re raising the child in America (like I was), it’s absoutely imperative that he/she gets English down cold first (like I did). Period. Don’t even consider anything else. When my mother decided that I had to learn English first, her reasoning was that this was the language that’d be used in the country I’d be living my entire life in. Makes sense to me, and I have a much easier time getting by than any number of other children whose sadistic parents insisted on teaching Chinese first. (Yes, there are nutjobs who actually do this. Sometimes I worry for my race…) It’s better to be left out of a few parties than to not be able to function in society.
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If the child’s learning it, you have to learn it too. This is only fair, and it’ll help a lot in speeding up the learning process.
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Choose a practical language, choose a practical language, choose a practical language! And don’t just look at “population”; choose a population the child is going to actually deal with. Japanese is a good choice because they’re a major world power, they export many kinds of goods, they’re a strong presence on the Web, and in general they’re in touch with the world. (In Hawaii, if you know fluent Japanese, you can almost always get a job no matter what.) Spanish is a great all-purpose choice, especially in places like the southwest. French is good for someone planning on a lot of travelling, as it’s a fairly widespread langauge. My point is, it should be something that’s going to be useful, not just something that “runs in the family”. There’s much, much more to the world than just family.
Sorry if I sound a bit harsh here, but I’ve seen too many botched, half-baked attempts at teaching multilingualism. Remember, learning an entire language isn’t like riding a bike. It takes many, many years of concentrated effort, and unless the child will be getting something out of it, there are better ways to spend that effort.
Anyway, that’s my piece, make of it what you will, and good luck.
One parent - one language seems pretty silly when everybody on the street you meet is speaking something else.
A good friend, whose mother was Polish and father was Indian, was born in India but moved to Switzerland. Mom spoke Polish, German and English, Dad spoke Urdu and English, the neighbors spoke French, occasionally Italian.
In his 20’s, he picked up Icelandic and Arabic. Maybe he was just a polyglot, maybe being confused as a child (what do you mean, it’s not all the same language?) helped.
Uh, obviously we would agree to disagree on this one. Maybe for this thread it would be helpful if you or others that have been the victim of language abuse, share your stories on how NOT to raise children. Trust me, I can guess your High School Chinese horror story.
Dr. Pinky, just IMHO, one parent one language seems to work pretty well individually. Then in a group environment, you speak the group language. This does not seem to cause any problems.
Interesting discussion! I agree with a number of posters that choosing a practical language is important, although family politics may override that.
I suspect that for a North American, the top three languages to learn are English, Spanish and French. I’m not sure what the fourth would be; possibly Portuguese, although Mandarin also comes to mind.
matt_mcl, thanks for your offer to conect me with the Croatian/Québecoise/Esperantist family. I may take you up on it someday. 
In the meantime, I’ve decided to try to rouse my high-school French from its twenty-year slumber: yes, I’m going to take French lessons starting in the new year! Bonjour. Bien. Comment ça va? Merci. In the little informational interview at the French school, I found that I could understand much of the simple French the interviewer used, even if I couldn’t remember what to speak. It’s gonna be a long process, but hopefully next time I go to Montréal, I won’t be so terrified of opening my mouth…