Multilingual Parenting
By thomas on Jun 14, 2008 in Multilingual Parenting
If you’ve been paying close attention, then you know that I have an infant son. You may also know that I have a Japanese wife. Since my parents speak English, and my wife’s parents speak Japanese, our son will need to know both languages if he is going to be able to communicate with both sides of his family. So, my wife and I are doing our best to bring our son up to speak English and Japanese.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but the other day it suddenly hit me that I can write about it on this blog (a big duh moment for me). So, I’ve added a new “Multilingual Parenting” category to the blog and from time to time I will post about my experiences trying to raise my son to be multilingual.
Why “multilingual” and not “bilingual”? That’s the fun part. In addition to English and Japanese, I’m going to expose my son to as much Swedish as I possibly can. You may remember that I’ve been learning Swedish children’s songs. There was a reason for that beyond my own personal love for “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”. I wanted to be able to sing to my son in Swedish!
But Thomas, how can you raise your son to speak Swedish if you don’t speak Swedish yourself? That’s the fun part. It’s a no-pressure experiment and I get to learn Swedish along the way! If you think about it, when we communicate with a 9 month old child, we don’t need to say very complex things. Conversations are one-way and consist of sentences like this:
Look at the flower.
This is a monkey.
Let’s eat some carrots. Open your mouth.
What a big boy you are!
With a little preparation, I think I can pull this off in Swedish. :)
And so it begins! I look forward to seeing how little Noah will progress. I know I’ll have some fun stories to share and hopefully I can hit some language topics that are a little out of the ordinary. Do you know how to play “peek-a-boo” in Japanese or Swedish? I had fun learning how and I’ll teach it to you in a future post.
Will keep you up to date!
Related posts:
- Japanese and Swedish Peek-a-boo
- Starting Swedish
- Learn Swedish With Online Swedish Radio
- Grevens Hund
Thomas,
Talking about parenting and languages … well it is surely a huge and endless topic.
When my daughter was born almost 3 years ago, I was certain that she is going to face a lot of language challenges. I and my wife are both Hong Kong Chinese, but our daughter has to learn at least 4 mandatory languages when she grows up: Cantonese (our native language), Mandarin (the Chinese official language), English and French (the Canadian official languages). We threw in a fifth language Spanish due to its importance south of our border.
When I look at the children’s books we brought for her already, they contain all 5 languages!
Edwin | Jun 15, 2008 | Reply
@Edwin: Wow! 5 languages! Good luck with that! I’m curious, can you or your wife speak all five of those languages? Or are you doing like I’m doing with Swedish and exposing her to a language that you guys don’t know so well yet?
Also, when you read children’s books to your daughter, do you do them one language at a time? For instance, do you read her a bunch of Mandarin books at once and then read some French ones? Or do you swap back and forth: read a Mandarin one, then a French one, then an English one, then another French one, then Cantonese?
thomas | Jun 15, 2008 | Reply
I know it is tough. In fact, the only language that we are confident on our daughter is English. She communicates mostly in Cantonese now, but we anticipate that her English will overtake her Cantonese in a few years time.
As for French, as we live in Canada, the kids will be exposed to French in school. However, there is a high failing rate. The problem is to keep them interested. So my current goal is to expose French to my daughter. She does not need to learn it at this stage.
As for Mandarin, here in Toronto, I can get her exposed to real people speaking Mandarin. In fact, one of her best friends at school speak the language. This way, she would attach better to the language.
Spanish is a bonus at this stage, but I still want to expose the language to her without forcing her to learn it. She enjoys very much watching TV programs such as Dora the Explorer.
I think the main idea is language expose. How you do it does not matter much.
Edwin | Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
To answer your other question. I myself is working on all 5 languages, and I will always be on the upper-hand. The only language that I might fall behind from my daughter is English. But I am foreseeing that this will not happen at least until she becomes a teenager.
Edwin | Jun 18, 2008 | Reply
That is awesome. I’m very interested to hear how it goes. I don’t have children yet, but I do want to raise multilingual children. I will be happy if all I achieve is an appreciation and a desire to learn languages.
Goddess Carlie | Jun 23, 2008 | Reply
As a Swede, I’m happy to hear that you’re interested in Swedish. How come? Here’s some translations to get you started, except for the idiomatic “What a big boy you are”:
Look at the flower. – Titta på blomman.
This is a monkey. – Det här är en apa.
Let’s eat some carrots. Open your mouth. – Ska vi äta lite morötter? Öppna munnen.
By the way, I was born and raised in Sweden by Spanish parents and two years ago I passed JLPT 1 after a couple of years studying Japanese. Together with English this makes me more or less fluent in four languages, but I’ve been planning to speak only Japanese to my future kids. I’d love to be persuaded otherwise though!
bkzk7188 | Sep 4, 2008 | Reply
Thomas, it’s great to hear you want to blog about your experience in multilingual parenting. It’s a topic that really grows, if you’ll pardon the pun!
My son Reno (2 years and 8 months) and daughter Noa (8mths) were both born in Japan, their mum speaks no English and we are currently living in Australia. We speak Japanese at home and I speak English to my kids only when we have one to one face time.
We have been here only a couple of months, and I know when the kids start going to day care next year they’ll have no trouble picking things up quickly.
The next language I’d like to learn is French, family on my mothers side has French heritage, and I’m really interested in the culture.
@bkzk7188 I’m really interested to why you’d only want to speak Japanese to your kids, when it’s not your native language and you speak others as well. Are you in Japan? Are you married to Japanese? Just curious.
Brett | Sep 8, 2008 | Reply
Yay! I’ll be so interested to see how your multi-lingual parenting goes! I’m trying to expose my kids (age 3 & 6) to as many languages as I can. I speak French, so that’s what they hear the most. But we’ll casually listen to a Chinese dvd here, or dance to Spanish music there. Still blows me away how my kids absorb language so much faster than I do! Our household, family, neighborhood, etc. are monolingual, so I feel it’s crucial to do what I can. They are in no way bilingual yet, but I hope I’m instilling a positive and curious attitude toward languages. And we’re having a lot of fun. I’m adding you to my blogroll & I’ll check in often :-)
Diane | Oct 24, 2008 | Reply
I only have my own experience to speak from but if each parents speaks to the child in their own lanaguage then the kid will pick them both up without any trouble. My mum used to and still talks to us in english only and my dad in arabic only, and me and bros and sisters are fluent in both. Now im learning Japanese ;)
angel | Dec 16, 2008 | Reply
So how goes it? (I hope that the fact you haven’t posted about this challenge lately doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned your quest.)
I would like to invite you and your readers who are also raising kids with more than one language to visit my blog, Bringing up Baby Bilingual, where I write about being a non-native speaker of the language I use (exclusively) with my son and my nephew (it’s French).
Periodically, I post profiles of other bi/multilingual families, and I would be delighted to include you all! If anyone is interested, please take a look at what I’ve already published (click on the label “profiles” in my sidebar) and email me at babybilingual (at) gmail (dot) com.
Thanks!
Sarah | May 19, 2010 | Reply
Hi,
I was just surfing the internet how to learn Swedish through easy radio programs. I guess I have found a couple from your blog so thank you.
I can’t help but notice that you have quite a multicultural background and I am glad to see someone who really respects the importance of multiculturalism and multilingualism.
If you haven’t come across, the book titled “The Language Imperative” is an excellent source where you can find everything about language. It has a dedicated chapter where it talks about childhood language learning so I hope that might give you a few ideas as to how you can bring your child to be multilingual.
Have a good day.
Peter | May 29, 2011 | Reply