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bilingual toddlers
Submitted by tony on April 16, 2008 - 10:29am.
my wife and I are both Chinese-American, and amazingly, we both actually speak okay Mandarin despite being born here (now I can final appreciate "mandarin-only Sundays" that my parents got us to do). so, we're trying to teach our tot both Chinese and English. He knows most words now in both (amazing how "airplane" in Chinese sounds so similar to.. um... a word for male anatomy).
I've heard that it's better that one parent (or grandparent or person) exclusively talks one language to the tot, while everyone else speaks the other. Is this true? Any other bilingual language experiences out there?
Re: bilingual toddlers
My sister is Chinese and her husband is Vietnamese. Since neither of them knew each other's language, they communicate in English. My mother lived with them for about 8 years and made it a point to teach my neice Chinese from a very early age, so she grew up bilingual. Sometimes she would translate Chinese for her dad, just to keep him in the loop. Before she was school-age, her preferred language seemed to be Chinese. But after she's gone to school where most of her friends are English-speaking, she preferred English more and more.
My neice is 10 years old now, and my mother hasn't lived with them for a couple of years. She has noticed that my neice's Chinese has regressed a lot. It's pretty much 'use it or lose it'.
I'm Chinese and my wife is Caucasian. It'll be a hurdle to teach our baby Chinese since my own Chinese is just moderate. I'm counting on my mother for help in that regard!
Bi-lingual Kiddos
I just want to "second" the comment about English being pervasive if you live in an English environment. Both of our kiddos are bi-lingual (english/spanish) and we've found that with SO much English everywhere (TV, school, kids at the church, at the store, etc) the only way we can keep the spanish on par with the english is if both my wife and I speak it at home. There is support for this in the literature as well - the language that is predominant in the child's culture will have the inherent advantage, so you have to 'super-load' the other language. I have several friends who took the one parent speaking the language approach -- in every case the child understands the second language, but only produces English. That's my 2¢.
thanks guys
thanks for the tips. Daniel - that's pretty cool - at the very least, your oldest will be able to understand a ton. I don't think my Chinese is good enough to speak it all day, but luckily my in-laws are around and have been trying to speak as much mandarin as possible. They're sorta like the 3rd parent.
I just ran into a 2.5 year old who can understand everything in Chinese and in English. His parents to do exact same thing - mom's always in Chinese, dad's always in English.
I gotta wonder, though, do the parents who don't speak that second language start to feel left out?
Bilingual home
Hi Tony,
In our household, I speak Mandarin and my wife speaks English. So far, our oldest being four and a half, understands what I say but more often than not replies in English. In my opinion, the English environment is just too strong. So, in line with what BobW wrote, we have seen positives from the one parent in one language and the second parent in the other language theory. A key part of this is that I do stay home with the kids. So even though I am about the only person that speaks Mandarin with them, most of their time is with me.
This is one of my favorite websites:
http://www.chinesepod.com
It is my hope that they start developing podcast that are more geared toward child education, however, I still enjoy having the podcasts play in the car and at home. This way I have a lot of Chinese happening in the background of our day to day lives.
Peace,
Daniel
The Key is Consistency
My wife is Swedish/Finnish. I am an American mutt.
According to the literature, there are two main methods. One is to speak one language at home and the other in public. The other is for one parent to speak one language and the other speak the other.
My wife learned to speak both Swedish and Finnish by the second method as a child. Her father spoke Swedish and her mother spoke Finnish. She also spent summers with her grandmother, who spoke only Finnish. This caused problems when the children for a while refused to speak Finnish with their mother.
We seem to be blending the methods. Our daughter speaks Swedish with her mother at home. Our daughter asked that they not speak Swedish in public. It made her self conscious. Some times I join the conversations in Swedish, though I am far from fluent. We try to stay in the language in which the conversation begins.
I think you do want to separate the two languages, so the child switches vocabularies and grammar rules instead of mixing them.
Good luck! Tell your son he is lucky to to learn two languages. It stretches the brain!
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