I’ve found most of my friends wives also speak English to their children.
I’ve always thought it best for my son and wife to use Chinese and Taiwanese to establish that as their language of communication.
Whenever we go out with other mixed couples the other wives frown on my wife not speaking much English to our son.
Is our approach to language assbackwards or what?
This is a little different than the other thread though.
My wife speaks Hakka to our daughter most of the time, as do her grandparents and I speak English to her. She is 2 1/2 and she understands 3 languages pretty well but will usually speak Chinese no matter what language anyone uses to speak to her. Very interesting stuff.
My friend has a Hakka wife but she refuses to speak Hakka to the kids and says English is more important—so she only speaks English to them even though it’s not very good and will become quite limited once they reach their teens.
I have asked several couples about this and the mothers always say English is more important. They don’t seem to think speaking 3 languages is better. They also say they will quickly pick up on Mandarin once they enter school but seemed baffled when I say I’d prefer our child already having good Manadrin skills once he does enter school.
Somehow I suspect it’s something to do with language brainwashing—“Mandarin and English are the only 2 important languages”.
If they are planning to move abroad I guess it could make sense but now I am seeing freinds returning each school holiday so their kids can learn Mandarin. Once they have moved abroad and gotten used to their mothers speaking English–it seems difficult to make the change on them.
i semi-convinced my wife to speak taiwanese to the kids as that’s the only language their grandparents speak. i just can’t get my head around kids not being able to speak to their grandparents barring circumstances more extraordinary than living in the same country with a parent that speaks the language. they are fluent now, always a head turner lol
I’m still having a hard time with that one. My wife will speak enough of it that our son knows a few words of Taiwanese but I wouldn’t say “he speaks Taiwanese”.
Funny, because everyone in the family speaks Taiwanese to each other but only Mandarin to the kids :fume: .
We used to live next door to a couple when I was a kid. He was German, She was French, they both spoke their respective languages to the kids at home, and English to eachother. The kids were wayyy behind at school when I last saw them but maybe that was just them.
I asked some people about this once because I thought it was dissapointing that a lot of the kids here could not speak Taiwanese while both their parents could.
They said it was for this exact reason. That because the school system uses Mandarin, that’s what they want their kids excel in.
School lessons were done in English?
That’s quite a complex situation if they were living in an English speaking country without one of the parents speaking the local language to them.
But I bet once they got higher up in school the French and German gave alot of benefit.
In Taiwan, Taiwanese and Hakka are regularly spoken and of course Mandarin is used in school so it’s not as complex.
I remember studying this phenomenon in French class…
It’s not uncommon for children learning more than one language at a time to have delayed speech because they are still sorting out the two languages in their minds. It helps, of course, if they associate one language with only one parent. But, even still, it may be that the child only remembers some things in one language and some things in the other, not both. So, when they enter school, they may have difficulty fully understanding or expressing themselves simply because their vocabulary is not sufficient for the classroom. After a few months, however, they will catch up and be fine.
I think it’s also a common misunderstanding here about language acquisition in children. People here, including the authorities, don’t seem to undertand that children absorb languages like sponges and can become fluent in multiple languages if consistently communicated to in all of them.
Well, out of curiousity, I did a search and found several new studies published since I graduated that indicate a change of attitude towards bilingual education. It seems that it is no longer the prevailing attitude that bilingual children are at any more a risk for speech delay than their monolingual peers. It all really just depends on the child, and how complete their exposure to language in general is.
[quote]We found that (1) early (before age 5) bilingual language exposure is optimal for dual language development and dual language mastery (Kovelman & Petitto, 2002). (2) Those bilingual children who are first raised monolingual from birth and who are then exposed to a new
language between ages 2-9 years of age can achieve the morphological and syntactic fundamentals of the new language within their first year of exposure. However, this rapid acquisition of new language fundamentals is possible only when extensive and systematic exposure to the new language occurs across multiple contexts, for example, in the community
and home, with far less optimal dual language mastery being achieved if exposure comes exclusively within the classroom (Kovelman & Petitto, 2003; Petitto, Kovelman & Harasymowicz, 2003). (3) [color=blue]Bilingual children exposed to two languages from birth achieve their linguistic milestones in each of their languages at the same time and, crucially, at the same time as monolinguals[/color] (Holowka, Brosseau-Lapr
[quote=“Persephone”]Well, out of curiousity, I did a search and found several new studies published
[quote] However, this rapid acquisition of new language fundamentals is possible only when extensive and systematic exposure to the new language occurs across multiple contexts, for example, in the community
and home, with far less optimal dual language mastery being achieved if exposure comes exclusively within the classroom .[/quote]
[/quote]
Intersting. I wonder if the same thing applies when a child is only getting English at home from the father (some mothers) which could often be the case here.
I think it’s going to get increasingly difficult to keep our sons’ English at the same level as Mandarin once he starts getting up in age.
I suspect around junior high school they really start moving ahead in the Mandarin…and chldren at the age are probably only getting an hour or two of conversation at home per day at best.
Anyone here have the experience yet?