Is being bilingual really worth the hard work?

[herdream1]

I am a foreign national who lives in UK with a DD age 8. My DH is English. So far I tried to support/push my DD's learning my native language and let her attend Saturday classes, which is basically for ex-pat children who are going back to my country, thus very high expectation and lots of home works. Also it is 1 hour drive one-way. My DD seems happy to go, but also curious about other clubs she can go to if we drop it.

Lately I am not sure if it is really worth continuing this Sat literacy class, or even trying to make her bilingual by talking to her in my native language.

I can not see being able to speak my native language will help her get a job in the future (except if she lives in my country, which I am not particularly keen).

For GCSE (and A-level??), she can study for the exam when she is older, if she chooses.

I am ok with her not speaking my language. But I will continue if she can expect return worth the efforts.

Can anyone assure me that it IS worth continuing the second language education when it takes so much hard work and there seems no practical use for it in the future?? Many thanks.

Forgetting the career and cognitive benefits for a second, myum didn't teach us her language and she says that one of the biggest barriers to our closeness is the inability to converse with her children in her mother tongue. It makes her very sad.

It's also created a barrier to us understanding her culture and feeling at home in her country despite half my family being from there.

If she had her chance again she would have made more effort. I think you will find it beneficial as your dd grows.

Widow - being a native German speaker and with a great command of English, you will learn Dutch in about 1.5 seconds once you master the accent.

I'm native English, speak German almost fluently and after my first couple of months in the Netherlands was very comfortable in Dutch. The challenge was more to get the Dutch people to speak Dutch to me rather than automatically switching to English, which they are all so good at (sweeping generalisation of course!)

I am very happy that you started this topic. I don't think that being bilingual gives you any cognitive advantage. My daughter is into arts and maths and she is not exceptional at learning languages how ever hard I try. Being bilingual doesn't give you many job options (bilinguals are not as good at translating as we think). Speaking one of the 6 main languages can be beneficial, but other languages are not as useful.

I take my daughter to a bilingual school on Saturdays but it is purely for learning music, maths on much higher level than her local primary school can offer. In many countries unis are free and the education system is much better so it can be another option for her. She can meet more people, move to different countries, experience different cultures (reading books/watching tv/reading articles that will never be translated to English).

How can you not think that being bilingual gives one any cognitive advantage when study after study after study has shown that it does?

Do you also not think that the sun rises from the east?

Re job opportunities - In marketing of products and services, there is a distinct advantage in speaking the language (and thereby understanding the culture to some degree) of the place you are trying to sell to. I'm not talking about secretarial communications that could be all in English, obviously.

Language is a significant asset in consulting and finance, too. When you are analysing or valuing a company, for example, you can't translate everything. Companies just hire people who speak the local language for those projects. A private equity or fund's Eastern European people will invariably be full of people who speak Polish, Romanian, Greek etc. (I have made a career in these fields and know what I am talking about)

I think it's good to be exposed to another language from an early age. It gets you out of the mindset that your own language is the only way of doing things, teaches you that there are sounds which don't exist in English, plus the cultural aspects mentioned above.

I would drop the classes but continue speaking at home. Not for school homework but out shopping, in the car, in the park etc. It seems a shame to lose your heritage within the family.

Most companies don't care two hoots about people speaking languages! Linguists are not at the top of any earnings ladder. Language learning is often a skill that you have loved to acquire but then gets sidelined as everyone else from abroad speaks English! This is why so many children and parents do not care about languages in this country. This is not the case abroad where learning English is taken seriously. We are just lazy about languages.

I don't think that 'everyone else from abroad' does speak English in fact, but I agree that we are lazy about learning languages.

I also think that you give yourself an enormous amount of goodwill if you make an effort to speak the other person's language; even halting attempts seem to be appreciated.

DH got my DSs speaking Dutch along with English. It doesn't serve much purpose for them, unless they want to learn German in later life, but does open up the ability to be able to communicate with more people in their native tongue.

It does have the benefit, to them at least, of allowing them to speak to each other behind my back!

DH speaks Arabic to the DC and I encourage it. I think it would be odd for him to speak a foreign language ( English) to his own children. I'm sure there are subtleties and nuances that would be lost if he used English - it's harder to get the tone right in a foreign langauge.

We visit his home country most years and the DC are fully involved on the culture because they can chat to everyone. DH's culture is an important part of who they are.

Ds could've attended Sat classes too but we decided against it because of the time it would've taken away from other things like music, sport, family time etc. Instead, I try to keep it up at home having occasional conversations or dinner in my language. I have not made it a priority which infuriates my family :) But he can keep a fluid conversation in my language, read things like Spiderman comic books and understand a movie.

The benefits are already showing. In secondary school, his results in Latin and French (my language is not French) are outstanding and he says that invariably the kids that get the top grades in French etc in the school are all the bilingual ones (I mean bilingual in other languages other than French). It seems to me that growing up exposed to several languages creates a flexibility that makes learning other languages etc easier in the future. DS claims it is psychological. He feels that, generally speaking, non bilingual kids "resist" more speaking and having to think in a foreign language.

My advice is don't force it, don't let it get in the way of other activities, but don't let it disappear from her life entirely. A little bit goes a long way IME.

" he says that invariably the kids that get the top grades in French etc in the school are all the bilingual ones (I mean bilingual in other languages other than French)."

This is definitely the case in dd's school - she says that 90% of the kids in top set for French are bilingual (welsh/english) - though this is only yr 7, so I guess it may change.

My DD is recently adopted and currently trilingual- the difficulty is going to be maintaining her first two languages as they're fairly uncommon here. DP and I are trying to learn the first one. We also live in a bilingual country and the other official language here is DP's first language, so DD will most likely end up speaking that to quite a high level. That may well be at the detriment of her second language, but I'm not really sure what we can do about that unfortunately.

The other way of looking at the question is what would you be doing instead of going to the language classes, i.e. what's the opportunity cost? Would you rather be using the time for sports/exercise, music, dance, drama, hanging out together, cultural days out, academic work, practical things such as shopping wisely, cooking family meals, gardening, looking after animals, sewing or whatever.... It's hard to provide a definitive answer to your original question other than "Well....it depends..." but there so many avenues for learning and developing our children are undervalued these days.

I really wish my parents had brought me up with a second language.
My Dad grew up with a minority language as his home language, and my Mum learned it at school, so wasn't a confident speaker, but understood it. They didn't use it in our home, and there's many, many times over the last 40 years or so when I wish I'd got the basics of it, if not fluent. It's not a language that would help my job prospects or anything, but life's about so much more than work.
I don't know if it's worth going to the Saturday club, but I'd have thought it was definitely worth speaking it at home with your dc. They might not appreciate it at the time, but they will as adults, even more so after you've gone IME.

It is indeed difficult and we found this to be increasingly difficult as English took over every aspect of their life - their friends, their school, the homework, etc..

We go back to my home country several times a year and this is the only way they really do learn and get excited about persevering - however we also dropped classes 1 hour away a few years ago.

Personally I came to believe that as long as they could understand and converse in my native language, that would be enough. I wasn't too bothered about them being able to read/write although my DD1 has learned to write by texting her friends (ok just chit chat, but still!!!)

I figure that it has given them a good understanding of their roots and culture and hopefully broadened their horizon - but I have become much lazier with child n.3 and n.4, who are a lot less fluent than the first two!

Here is what the vice-chancellor of Cambridge Uni (the son of Polish immigrants) has to say about languages:

www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jun/02/cambridge-university-boss-wants-languages-pushed-in-uk-classrooms
You shouldn't just think in terms of job opportunities. Don't you have anything from your childhood, your way of thinking, culture, books you've read, the history of your country - even if they're only a fraction of your own identity - that you want to transmit to your DD?
My teenagers are bilingual and have a second life in my country of origin. They have loads of friends they meet at the local pool every summer, go out to clubs, are invited to parties and football matches. They even have a different voice and personality when they interact with friends in the other language. They didn't really care about it when they were little but now they love being bilingual.

If jobs are your main concern after all, the director of the Language Centre at Cambridge University said that British employers (private companies but also the Foreign Office) are desperate for graduates (particularly engineers, doctors, scientist, managers etc) with fluency in a foreign language. Asian languages are particularly sought after because they can't easily be picked up, so bilingual people have an advantage, but also Brazilian Portuguese, for instance, comes high up in the list.

A friend of mine, a single mother and a native English speaker who has lived in Portugal for several years, has managed to bring up her DD bilingual. Portuguese is the language of her DD's father whom she sees maybe once a year. One very noticeable effect is that the DD English vocabulary is very extensive - her teachers comment on it.

Being bilingual can give some children a cognitive advantage, but sometimes the reverse is true. I've known "bilingual" children who actually cannot speak fluently in either language. I think it is generally a good thing, but does not suit everyone. It isn't necessarily worth a load of grief and erosion of family time.

I believe that various studies show that being a sequential bilingual (the situation where you learn the second language after you have learnt the first one) brings significant cognitive benefits, but being a simultaneous bilingual (the situation where you learn both languages at the same time, such as via a normal OPOL situation) brings only slight cognitive benefits.

Very few people actually achieve true bilingualism, where they speak/listen/write and read both languages as well as an educated native speaker of each language. Fluency in certain aspects of the second language is what is much more usually achieved.

I saw a previous poster mentioned "opportunity cost", which I believe is a very important issue here. Say it takes a child who doesn't have the opportunity to regularly use a language outside of the classroom about 2,000 hours of study to gain a very high level (CEFR2) in the target language, whereas it may take a child who does have the opportunity to use the language at home about 600 hours of study, and a lot of speaking and immersion, which should not be considered in hours studied for purposes of calculating opportunity cost.

NB: I made up the hours noted above and they will obviously vary greatly depending on the situation, child, language, definition of being very fluent, etc.

Some references:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=UAehOcVfr3Y
www.babelium.uminho.pt/Ingles_comparativo.pdf
m.sussex.ac.uk/languages/ml/ug/electives/levels

I believe that the above research (referred to in then first paragraph) which shows sequential bilinguals get more cognitive benefit than simultaneous bilinguals from being bilingual is primarily because they put much more effort in to learning the second language. With mental effort one gains cognitively.

So the question is what has the child foregone by spending the 600 hours that they spent learning their second language? I believe if a child spent these 600 hours actively studying a subject such as music they would achieve similar cognitive benefit as if they had studied and acquired the second language. Also doesn't further consideration would be whether the benefit of the alternative skills learnt during these 600 hours outweigh the benefit of learning the second language.

Hope that brain dump made sense?

I am trilingual and had several key breakthroughs at work (Finance and IT in London) because I was able to communicate in other languages. I also value immensely the fact that I can relate to other cultures and ways of doing things than my native one.
I would keep speaking my native language with my kids and seek opportunities to practise through reading, tv, friendships, and holidays in my homeland. The Sat classes though would go as you also need to allow time to rest, for fun or to do something else like music.

I once met a woman daughter of a diplomat who had been brought up bilingual plus had been exposed to every language they had encountered because of moving countries etc. She said she thought in images because she could not articulate a thought verbally only in one language. The same happens to me after having lived in this country for years. My thinking has gone all blurry - age doesn't help :) - and I don't articulate thoughts verbally but rather visually and emotionally.
This aspect of multilingualism has always worried me. That's why I wanted DS to have one main language - English - and mine to become a secondary one. I wanted him to achieve the highest level in one language.

I agree with makemelaugh, I have known this in students. Some "bilingual" children end up "no-lingual". It happens.

it is interesting - I have always wondered about people who just 'don't get languages' who are raised with more than one language and whether they end up in a mess with it.

I mean it stands to reason that as some people are rubbish with maths, some rubbish with science and some rubbish with picking up modern languages then some people who are bring brought up to speak more than one language might well fall into the rubbish at languages group so do they then struggle with both languages or just one of them?

I'm slightly sceptical about the concept of bilingual children ending up 'no-lingual' - what about areas where lots of people are bilingual by default because two languages are in everyday use? I'm in a Welsh speaking area of Wales, & all the first language Welsh children learn English as soon as they go to school. None of them appear to have problems communicating in English, whether spoken or written, despite home life & the majority of schooling being in Welsh. People will happily flip back & forth between languages mid-sentence if need be.