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Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

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Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#41

Post by KMag »

zwieback wrote: post #15

This is great, hopefully OP can keep it up. I spoke only my native German to our first daughter and it went great but when the second one came around she wanted to have nothing to do with it. "Stop speaking Spanish!" was her reply (all foreign languages were spanish in her estimation) so I slacked off. Even with my older one I stopped the German when she was a bit older because I didn't want to be the only one having…

Based on my family's history, my guess is that success rates are generally higher for the first kids.

My mom's side of the family is from East Friesland. My maternal grandfather was born in the US, but didn't speak any English when he started school. Grandpa was certainly fluent in English by the time I came along, and I presume he was reasonably fluent in English by the end of grade school. My maternal grandparents were bilingual, but decided to speak "Pig German" at home and let their kids learn English in school. My mom's oldest brother learned English the same way Grandpa did. Mom's older siblings spoke English enough that Mom never really learned to speak German. Grandma and Grandpa would speak to Mom in German, and she'd reply in English.

Though, plenty of German vocabulary made it into Mom's lexicon. I think I was in late middle school or early high school when I realized wunderbar wasn't an English word.

My oldest son is more fluent in Thai than English, where my wife does a good job of speaking almost 100% Thai to the kids. We'll see how the twins do once they start speaking and when the oldest starts going to preschool. My guess is that the oldest will speak primarily English to the twins, making it harder for them to pick up Thai.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#42

Post by irrational »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #14
irrational wrote: post #5

I have some friends where the Mom is Taiwanese and the Father is Peruvian. They have a one and a half year old daughter. The father only speaks Spanish to her and the mother only speaks Chinese to her. But neither parent speaks the other’s language, so they talk to each other in English and all their friends and neighbors only speak English. So far the kid seems to prefer Chinese.

Purely guessing here, but the closest connection a one and a half year old usually has is its mother. Fathers only become more "relevant" to them at 2+ years and people outside the family even later. So it would be normal for the kid to pick up the mother's tongue. But it would be interesting to see how this preference evolves in the coming years.

I'm not sure that is it. The mother is an engineer who works a typical 9-5 job in an office and often travels for work. The father works remote and is home all day.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#43

Post by eszed »

matteoraso wrote: post #33
prmoustache wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unlikely to be the cause. A kid can learn as much as 5 languages at a time as long as it is context related (like one language with one parent, another with other parent, another at school, another with a grand parent, another in another context). Sure they may be times when the kid will mix'n'match because a specific word comes in his head in a language but he will still be fluent in all those languages after…

>Problem arise when there is no boundary in how which languages need to be used. Yeah, that's probably it. Knowing my parents, they probably both used English and Italian to speak to me. In general, my family tends to use both languages randomly when talking to each other (e.g. start the sentence in Italian, switch to English halfway through, and then switch back to Italian to end it).

That's a very common pattern amongst people who a) fluently speak more than one language, and b) share a great deal of (assumed / sub-conscious) social context.

Out of curiosity: are you never / sometimes / always conscious, as you are doing it, that you are mixing languages? From my knowledge - and observations - some people (at least situationally) are and some people aren't, although I've never seen an explanation of what determines that. Do you have any ideas?

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#44

Post by Moru »

inasio wrote: post #10

Wow, just learned from the post about OPOL [0], didn't know it was a thing, but at least in our case it worked for 3 languages. My wife and I speak different languages (French and Spanish), we each speak exclusively with that one to our kids. They didn't know English when they started preschool, but it took them a couple of months. Right now they are close to native on all 3. Kids are amazing [0] https://smartparenti…

We did the same but with German/Swedish/English. Kid learns american english from youtube and movies and the main language in Swedish schools is English anyway... The Swedish teachers are complaining quitely that the youth talk more English than Swedish the last 10 years.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#45

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

It seems very cruel to the child to force bilingualism for the sake of being bilingual. I was raised speaking 5(!) languages, and over time that has attritioned into speaking only 3, but each language had its purpose: mainly in speaking to a different group of people in my home country, for official documents, or was the language on all the interesting TV shows.

The hard part about a new language, if you intuitively understand the grammar, is vocabulary. The author himself admits that his own vocabulary is not expansive enough, foisting than upon a child can't possibly help. The inability to have deep conversations is deeply harmful: there are many Chinese couples in my home country that raised their children only on English, much to the detriment of their Chinese/Hokkien/Cantonese, and the parent and child are now unable to hold deep conversations about important topics, which led to big disconnects in familial relationships.

I don't think that this will cause long-term harm, but I do think it's a massive waste of time.

There is this obsession with language learning that I've never quite understood in the US. The supposed cognitive benefits have, to the best of my knowledge, mostly failed to replicate, so it only lives on as a popular myth.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#46

Post by macNchz »

zwieback wrote: post #15

This is great, hopefully OP can keep it up. I spoke only my native German to our first daughter and it went great but when the second one came around she wanted to have nothing to do with it. "Stop speaking Spanish!" was her reply (all foreign languages were spanish in her estimation) so I slacked off. Even with my older one I stopped the German when she was a bit older because I didn't want to be the only one having…

Growing up, my dad didn't speak his native French with me. I did, however, pick up enough from hearing him on the phone every day and visiting Switzerland for a few weeks each year that I could loosely understand it. When I got to high school and started taking French classes it came to me extremely easily. In college I spent a semester in France and after a few weeks felt comfortably fluent, and was told I didn't have a discernible American accent. So ultimately if your kids want to pick it back up they may find it fairly easy in the future.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#47

Post by sho_hn »

m00x wrote: post #25
alexfoo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brit here, mid 40s. Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it. I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventua…

You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours, and a bit more to go to Germany/Spain. Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.

I call this the "I don't understand why Europeans don't go for lunch in Paris" puzzlement. I've had variations of this conversation with many American friends over the years ... :)

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#48

Post by user_7832 »

themaninthedark wrote: post #18

It all depends on the situation and the kid. I speak to my kids in Japanese mostly as well as my wife but we also speak to them in English. Both of our kids are considered behind their age group in English. One of my friends spoke their son in Arabic, his wife spoke to their son in Japanese and they spoke to each other in English. They had to change that because their son wasn't speaking by age 3. Once they started s…

> "No wonder he isn't speaking, he's not sure what is going on!"

I'm cracking up imagining a little kiddo looking at their parents super confused wondering if he's hallucinating or just going crazy (～￣▽￣)～

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#49

Post by dottjt »

I feel unless if there's an absolute need to speak two languages, I think trying to teach a child two languages is pointless. I say this from the point of view of the other experiences that a child can have, in place of language.

My background is half Chinese and I was forced into language school to learn Chinese and ended up studying Chinese for close to a decade (I even lived in China for a year).

But I never really had a need to use the language, and now I absolutely resent the language. I think a large part of it had to do with the fact that I hated my mother, and so refused to speak to her in general.

Overall I would have been much happier if I'd gone hiking instead or doing something else. Maybe I'd still have a relationship with my mother if my life didn't feel so forced.

Of course, a lot of this depends on the relationship you have with your child. I assume I was just unlucky in the overall scheme of things.

Re: Two years of raising a bilingual daughter

#50

Post by rcarr »

m00x wrote: post #25
alexfoo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brit here, mid 40s. Many Brits were taught a second language at school (11-16, some starting earlier) but there was very little opportunity to use it outside school, so most did the bare minimum and never continued with it. I learned French and German at school but they are both very rusty. I’ve since picked up very rusty Spanish. All 3 enough to survive in bars/restaurants and find my way around a new place (eventua…

You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours, and a bit more to go to Germany/Spain. Imagine being in Canada/US where you don't have any other language outside of a 6h plane ride.

> You could just jump on a train for 35 euros and be in France in a few hours

So first off, you're assuming that they live in London, as that is the only place with a direct train link to France. Second, the Eurostar website has ticket prices "from £39" which equates to €45. But that's the "from" price. Looking at all availability up to the end of October, there is one day where you can get a £63 ticket, another day where you can get an £86 ticket and all other days are £97 or over. So just "jumping on the train" isn't the cheap carefree jaunt you're making it out to be. The average full time salary in London is £37,000[1] and average rent in London is a staggering £31,524[2]. Those numbers only work because a lot of people are house sharing - it is impossible to live in the UK on £5476, especially in London. That one way ticket to France is approximately 1/7 of the average Londoner's weekly wage.

[1] https://upthegains.co.uk/blog/what-is-a-good-salary-in-londo....

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/rightmove-reveals-average-rents-i...

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