Linguist here, and I focused on acquisition for a split-second before my adviser scared me straight. I agree that bilingualism doesn’t hurt anything, but I can see why some people might think it does. Age tends to be a remarkably poor predictor of linguistic ability in general, but a few studies have noticed that children who start in multilingual environments will often start talking later than kids in monolingual households, but once they start, they quickly hit most of the benchmarks and catch up with monolingual peers.
The importance of a regular routine has already been mentioned, and I don’t think it can be overstated enough: every language needs to have a clear time and place in which it is spoken, which is why OPOL tends to work fairly well: “I speak X to mom and Y to dad” is a pretty easy rule to learn and follow.
You guys seem like great parents, so you’ve probably already considered this, but I’d like to mention that your kid will probably have a tough first and (possibly) second year of school: Japanese schools freaking love conformity, and so until he gets his Japanese down, there’s a chance that he’ll have to deal with some crap from his peers for being “the foreigner”. Once he gets his Japanese down it’ll be much easier, and if you can find some way to get him involved with Japanese kids before his schooling starts (playgroups, socializing with children of your friends, or whatever), it might be easier.
I know absolutely nothing about educating kids, so you should take my advice with a grain of salt, but I have had a number of friends who grew up in Japan and made the mistake of being noticeably foreign, which usually led to their having an absolutely terrible time until highschool ended.
They can come and notice it in my household, where he is reading English at a ten year old level, can’t be shut up in either language and will argue the hind leg off a donkey in both tongues. The funny part - and I doubt he’s even aware of it; we’ve never explained to him that Mummy speaks Japanese and Daddy speaks English - is that when my wife is around, he plays in Japanese, but when I’m around, he plays in English.
I can’t stress the culture enough, actually: if both languages are to come naturally to your daughter, she’ll need a context to put them in. Expose her to stories, books, movies, games - and peers, ideally - in each language, and she’ll develop having a natural reason to use each. Make it fun and just the way you do things rather than an education regimen, and the rest just follows. They’re malleable little buggers, kids.
OPOL - but you have to ork at it diligently as a parent. it’s o for you & pouse to peak apanese together.
unfortunately your wife probably has to choose mandarin or Taiwanese. otherwise not OPOL.
hordes of shanghaiese kids now only speak broken shanghaises at best.
china bambina speaks mandarin best, english well but not nearly the vocab nor grammar and shanghaiese a very distant third. we’re putting her at 3rd grade into a truly bi-lingual school to improve her english
English speaker, with Spanish speaking wife. We do the OPOL thing for our three sprogs and it seams to work pretty well. Whenever I accidentally speak in Spanish to my daughter(6) she helpfully reminds me that I cannot speak Spanish and she refuses to understand me.
Outside the house they are almost exclusively exposed to Spanish so the younger ones are not so good with the English, hence my wife and I communicate with each other in English and we try to make sure any TV or films they watch are in English to increase their exposure. The school is bilingual (Spanish in the AM English in the PM)
If/when we move to an English speaking culture we will probably swap to Spanish in the house for TV/films and communication between my wife and I. Given it would be unlikely that the school will be bilingual english/spanish we would probably switch to exclusively spanish at home for our oldest, and depending how the language skills of the youngest are stick to OPOL.
Can anyone tell me what the options are for someone who wants to raise a bilingual child without bilingual parents? We are planning our first baby this year, and it’s one of the great regrets of my life that I never reached fluency in any other language. I speak some Spanish and Italian, but both are very mediocre. I grew up in a heavily migrant Mexican community and picked up much from surroundings, but though I would beg as a kid to be taught, there wasn’t anyone to do it. My parents couldn’t afford a tutor or anything, the school didn’t offer classes, and who was going to sit down and teach me a language? I remember being probably six or eight, and the school janitor would teach me silly kid songs in Spanish, which I would repeat to myself over and over, memorizing the words and grammar of them.
My Italian-speaking family spoke a Sicilian dialect, and when they were all still alive lived too far away to spend much of any time together. I guess my parents didn’t think non-English languages were terribly useful tools to have at your disposal. I took Florentine Italian in college and can hobble my way through it, but I don’t know that I’ll ever be truly fluent.
Anyway, in the absence of immersion schools, what can I do to help my young children get familiar with languages we don’t speak in the home? I doubt we can afford a nanny or au pair. Do language tapes and videos work at all? I know tapes and videos require adult interaction to be useful as learning tools, but could it be something like a game we could “play with” and learn together? Or does it always require the presence of a native speaker?
NajaNivea, Dora the explorer seems to be quite popular. I recently saw a similar cartoon (looked like was from Nickelodeon too) with a boy. Get the kid into a language program at school as soon as possible. See if you can find a playgroup with bilingual kids. And talk with the kid. So your grammar isn’t perfect, so what? It’s been over 20 years since the last time I had to drill someone on verbs and if you ask me what’s the third person singular of the simple past subjunctive of amar, I won’t be able to tell you without looking it up - but you bet I can use the simple past subjunctive, I just don’t remember what it’s called. Mom’s side’s Catalan isn’t school-book perfect, they learned it before there was any such thing as an Academy or Catalan-language textbooks, so what? It’s still Catalan and it’s real and I learned my more-edumacated Catalan from them, TV and six months of lessons.
The father of one of my Basque-as-first-language coworkers (funnily enough the one who learned Spanish latest and whose Spanish grammar sometimes goes on vacation up the Basque mountains) spoke pretty broken Basque when the kid was born; having a kid who’d tell him “in Basque, Daddy!” whenever he slipped into Spanish (they were raising her in Basque) helped him with his Basque. Or so his daughter claims
All Mom can say in English is “my tailor is rich and my father in the kitchen” (don’t ask), but I ended up quite trilingual.
PS: might be “amara o amase”… or is that the present? Now I have to go look it up!
I doubt it’ll be a problem TokyoPlayer, but if by some chance you need English or Mandarin children’s books, let me know before the end of August and I’ll bring some over.
I have two bilingual children (Dutch/English), one of whom has a language disorder. The alternative to OPOL is to speak the non-dominant language at home, which we did for some time and worked as well as OPOL. I know some people who speak three languages and they appear to switch languages based on the subject matter and who is in the room, which is interesting to say the least. I honestly think that as long as your kids have some clear signal for code switching – knowing which language to use – it doesn’t matter which signal it is. For OPOL it is the speaker of course. For non-dominant language at home it is location. For my peculiar friends it is the subject.
I could not agree more with the notion of cultural context, being able to speak a language without being provided with its additional kid-baggage leaves one speaking one’s mother tongue as a foreigner. This has for us entailed a great deal of travelling. You do have to decide to what extent you want your kids to consider each nation/culture their own and act accordingly. This includes large things and small and you have to decide what to keep and what to discard – we do have Santa for instance but not Thanksgiving.
We started with Dutch at home when we were living in the US because my husband had a brutal work schedule and there was a very high risk that they would otherwise speak no Dutch. There was also the downside of OPOL which is, what language do you speak to each other and what language do you speak to other people, since kids do not only learn language from being spoken to.
It was a lot of work for me as my Dutch was then not very strong. But we found a local Dutch expats/immigrants club and signed up and my MIL was a great help in providing DVDs and books and toys and so on. Webcams are great but my own experience was that they were not terribly interested in them for many years. They were nice for Oma, less so for the kids. The little guys want to see you close up and both my kids were bothered by the failure of the sound to come from the person.
At this moment I confess we speak a truly slovenly mixture of Dutch and English and we have been known to switch languages mid sentence (my kids are 6 and 8). There was also a stage when I simply repeated myself in nearly everything I said, first in one language and then in the other. They seem to keep up. It is constantly evolving, there will be phases when they refuse to speak one language or refuse to hear one language or must have every little thing repeated in the other language. Mine are required to communicate respectfully (more or less, did I mention that Eldest is 8? grrr) in a way the person to whom they are speaking can understand them and beyond that I no longer try to control them too much.
We had a small issue with Eldest learning to read, probably related to the language disorder, and I stopped readign with him in English for a time because he was having trouble with the vowels – vowel sounds in Dutch are uniform and in English er, really not and he was having trouble sounding out in Dutch. Which his teacher was not prepared to deal with. It lasted more than half a year and less than a year and now has cleared iself up. He does not seem to have lost any ground in reading in English because of it. In a language which does not use the same alphabet to indicate different sounds I would not anticipate a problem.
My boss told me there was a period of time where his daughter seemed to have not fully sorted out that the languages were separate. She only had one word for anything, and her chose word could be from any languages. It was just when she was putting basic sentences together, and the sentences would sometimes contain all three languages. It sorted out on it’s own and now (age 3) she’s got them all separate. But he and his wife were a little freaked they’d done something wrong.
From what I read, that seems to be perfectly natural. Children take a while to sort it out, but it seems like they get there.
I should say that from my studies, there isn’t long term issues. Many people say that it took their children longer to learn to speak in a mulilingual environment.
Marienee, thanks for your story. It sounds like what I thought, it takes work.
How long did it take for them to get interested in web cameras? The daughter I read about was five, and it didn’t say when they started.
We’re talking now about how much of each culture to keep. I had thought about including that in the thread, and perhaps should have specifically included it.
We’ll plan on going back to each of our respective countries for trips, and have the grandmothers come over to tell stories, but we’re still sorting this out.
My wife has a Chinese Malaysian friend who is married to a Chinese man, and they have a five-year-old boy. He told her once that Daddy is Chinese, Mommy is Malaysian, but he is Japanese! His half Nigerian, half Turkish friend of the same age also agreed.
I forgot to add this last time. If you plan on spending a significant portion of your child’s developmental years in Japan/another country neither you nor your wife “belong” to (which it sounds like you are ?), I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It’ll help you understand/forestall any identity-discomfort your kid might face down the road.
Actually, I could probably benefit from some Mandarin kid’s books. Trying to learn the language in a 63 week learn-or-burn full-time course. Got any recommendations for books I could look for?
A question for those who know: 大陆的中文和台湾的中文有什么不同？
I had been under the impression that they were largely the same language, with some minor dialectal differences.
That was my fear with the sprout, but she seemed only a little behind her peers in Spanish (the local language). She started going to daycare well before her 2nd birthday and that did the trick.
That seems to be common. I suppose since they do not understand the concept of language, as we know it, all they know is “how daddy says it, and how mommy says it” if you are doing OPOL. In fact, if I want my daughter to say something in Danish I would ask “how does daddy say…?”.
My daughter at 20 months, after she farted: ¡Ay dios mío, a little prut! She still mixes language to a lesser degree.
I’m going to guess you are asking the wrong question. The question as asked is what’s the difference between Mandarin spoken by (mainland) China and Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, but I guess you meant what is the difference between Chinese and Taiwanese. This would be 大陆的中文和台湾话有什麽不同
Unless, of course, you did intend on asking the original question.
According to my wife, the difference between Mandarin spoken between mainland China and Taiwan would be similar to the difference between British English and American English, but the difference between Mandarin and Taiwanese is the difference between English and French.
The mandarin spoken in taiwan & spoken in China is very close. especially the south china mandarin. ‘broadcast’ mandarin n both sides of the Strait are virtually indistiguishable (eg, dissimular to BBC & American news speech) however, most chinese speakers can peg Taiwanese mandarin at 50 paces.
written chinese on the mainland is simplified characters versus t raditional form ud in taiwan & HK. (Japanese uses a mix, take te haracte for country.)
Taiwanese versus mandarin is a different kettle of fish. it is no where close to being rlted in the sense romance lnguages are. Taiwanese is a close relative of meinanhua r fukien. fujian province was one of the most remote provinces. the language is very different from mandarin, and may linguists believe it has different roots. it does seem elated to chiu chou dialect.
it will be a huge challenge for your aghter to grow up speaking both mandarin & Taiwanese. given the OPOL model (if you lived in Taiwan it might be a different story.) most kids in shanghai with a non native shanghaiese speaking parent (usually a native chinese speaker & not a foreigner like me) usually do not speak more than rudimentary shanghaiese. this includes my kids despite daily exsure to grandparents who pretty much only speak mandarin when speaking directly to me.
We’re still working on this. My wife doesn’t speak Taiwanese as well as she does Mandarin, but it’s a matter of national pride. Her family roots go back 300 years in Taiwan, and were not happy with the mainlanders that much.
I think she’s be fine as like as the little one learns a bit of it.
My aunts (francophones) married anglophones - moms speak french to the kids, dads speak english (though dads did learn french with the kids and french ended up the household language, most of the time). The resulting 6 kids are completely bilingual.
I was raised with two languages at the same time, and picked up English in school. Most people are actually surprised to find out I’m not a native speaker
No children here. But I have one friend whose Thai is so good, he never speaks English with his two daughters by his Thai wife. I’m not sure how much English they do speak, as they’re shy little things.
Conversely, I knew a British man who spoke not a word of Thai, and HIS two daughters spoke not a word of English. His Thai wife, who spoke English, seemed to have no desire to have the daughters learn English, so this man had no way of speaking to his children. I suspected the wife of some sort of ulterior motives.
