Bilingual family chat thread

[teafortwo]

I come from a very mono-linguistic background. All my family and extended family speak the same language and being able to speak another language was seen as something rather nice but not really necessary for life. A bit grammar "Ooooh aaaarrr - d'jya know 'e gows to Grammar school yeeeaah! 'e even tawks French, my God!" I suppose.

My family are lovely and deep thinking clever people who don't talk like that - but it is just to show you in a sentence what I mean!

So... it is intensely fascinating and a great challenge to find myself bringing up a bilingual daughter.

I am a bit very addicted to reading any articles or books on bilingualism and am keen to know people in real life who are also bringing up bilingual children. Actually most of my friends children speak two languages - Some Moldavian friends of mine gasped at the idea that I only speak English fluently... "Just English? But how do you live?!?" They asked - as if I had announced I never drink water.

I thought - it might be fun to have a kind of Mumsnet bilingual chat thread where we can talk about the day to day highs, the lows, the funny bits and the sad bits of having a bilingual family and swap advice, ideas, theories, reading material (I am after a good summer read) and anything-else it would be useful to pool.

So.... .... what do you think?

Yes, thats true about kids ability to pick things up. Im just a bit sad because I orignially had ambitions of her speaking fluent WElsh. But I`ve decided to concentrate on the English rather than have her give up on either and just end up communicating in Japanese.
If I can give her a taste of Welsh through books and songs that may spur her motivation and interest and she might decide to study it by herself in the future??

And yes, kids definitely downplay their abilities in front of their peers, but they tend to realise the value of the other languages when they reach adulthood.

If you can give her a fun taste of Welsh now, it may not be too late to become fluent later on. I work in the Modern Languages dept at our local university, and I'm sure not all those lecturers can have been bilingual from the start; yet some of them are pretty amazing. Motivation counts for a lot.

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I still read to my DDs who are also 9 and 12 - the odd chapter of whatever English book they are reading at the time. They love it, it's very soothing to be read to.

Also it helps them learn the pronunciation of words they don't hear much in spoken English.

I am a big fan of reading aloud. I hope to still be reading with my dd when she is 12 too.

RS - Here is some French fun for you...

www.cite-sciences.fr/francais/ala_cite/expositions/cite-des-enfants/jeux-2-7-ans/

THanks Pitchounette,
Yes, they say that hearing a language at an early age is crucial for the accent. But I didnT realise that it could also help them with the actual learning of the language in the future. That is very interesting and makes sense. I will just read as much Welsh as I can to her and not stress too much about it. If she decides to pick it up later, thatll be down to her. Same for DS. If they show an interest in the future (after visiting Wales, for exmaple) I will be ready and willing to teach more.

REgarding what I am doing so far with the English:
I think a trip back once a year to the country of the minority language is absolutely crucial for motivation and to get them to see the language in context.

I am developing a small library of books here, thanks to Amazon. She is 3.1 but will happily listen to stories I know she cant yet understand, as long as the pictures are beautiful or the story is engaging. As I read I know she can sense emotion in my voice. Then as time goes on I see her using words that she couldnT understand when I initially read the story to her, but she uses the vocab from the books at a later date. I find it worrying that almost all the English she has learned has come only from me, so I am very concsious of using lots of adjectives every day. I do a lot of describing, more than I would naturally. I don`T like the way my speech can often sound forced as I use unecessary words, but she has to learn them somehow and this is the only way.

conscious

"Thats not my..."books seem to be very good for my DD.

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I don't read to them every day - not enough time! But getting them to read to me is good too, it means I can help with pronunciation, explain unfamiliar words and gauge their level for choosing future books.

At the moment I am helping DD2 read an Agatha Christie, and at school while the rest of her class are having their English lesson she does work on the book set by our tutor.

Hi Sakura (what a lovely name, I wanted it for DD but got vetoed by my husband!). As you are in japan it is very important that you speack english and welsh to your DD. At school japanese will become her favorite language and it is very poor in phonics, that why japanese people have trouble to learn other language. (at least that their excuse).
The more language you hear below 5, the more easy it is going to learn other languages later on (idealy starting from birth) as your brain "connect" all the different phonics.
If you want her to have fun with English try CBeebies www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ my daughter loves it (she started it around your DD age), it is the best web site for children (it's free and educationnal), I wish I could find something similar in french, and other languages....

thank you mamaloco,
I didnT realise you could get cbeebies online. Ive heard so much about it on mumsnet. I`m going to check that link out now, seeing as DD is on my knee anyway and DS is having his nap.

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Pitchounette - yes for the past 4 years they have had an hour a week with a native speaker, mainly studying poems and novels and doing creative writing as they don't do much of that at school here. It's been really good - much better than if I'd been trying to teach them myself.

Though the fabulous student we have had for the past 2 years has just gone back to the UK so she's tutoring DD2 by email, post and Skype!

Re reading aloud: my Dad used to read aloud to us well into our teens; indeed he still does it when we go home for Christmas. It's been great as a common reference thing for us four siblings: we are quite different people, with very different interests, but we do have a lot of common ground, because of the stories we have heard together.

"it is very poor in phonics, that why japanese people have trouble to learn other language. (at least that their excuse)."

Evidence please. Sorry but I don't understand.

I am just back from a lecture at dds school on being bilingual on account of your Mother-tongue and place of birth not matching. It was very interesting.

I thought of BriocheDoree when the subject of children with speech difficulties who were brought up bilingually was spoken about.

It was explained that it can be a MASSIVE advantage to be bilingual because there are two pathways for the child to choose from to communicate. Thus giving more opportunities to be successful than children with one language.

slng,
Japanese is a language that has very few sounds and because people can usually only pronounce the sounds existing in their own language it is very hard for Japanese to "hear" the variety of sounds that exist in other languages.
They cant differentiate between L and R (they say lice instead of rice!) and B and V. They cant hear the difference between SH and S, because in their own language there are no differences.
(think of English people who have trouble rolling their Rs)
This is why its important to get kids listening to languages from an early age as I think after about the age of 7 they will end up speaking with a "foreign" accent unless they are particularly talented.

Sakura,

I understand that. I took a year of beginner's Japanese at college, so have some understanding of Japanese sounds some basic constructs. (But I understood that the sound of "r" in Japanese is not quite the English "l" and not quite the English "r", which some people have trouble with. Just like in Chinese the sound "d" is not quite "d" and not quite "t". But I really don't know that much about Japanese so apologies if I got that wrong.) But the "trouble to learn other language" is not a peculiarly Japanese "trouble". And to say it's "their excuse" seems to imply a collective lack of effort and sounds a bit disparaging.

Off topic, but:
The Japanese are extraordinarily poor at learning other languages. They use a number of excuses and the lack of sounds is merely one of a range of excuses they use. THe British are also poor at learning other languages compared to Europeans for exactly the same reasons as the Japanese i.e they believe their own language is superior and that others should learn it; they believe that learning languages is unecessary for life/work/travel (Japanese go on package holidays to places where only JApanese is spoken, just like the British do).
So I think what mamloco means is that the Japanese use the "excuse" of phonics amidst a range of excuses they use for not being able to learn languages well.

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Sakura,

Are you certain that the fact that Japanese society is possibly quite homogeneous, and the fact that historically Japan is rather isolated due to its geography, do not play a more important role in the learning of other languages, than the belief that their language is somehow more superior?

I don't wish to argue about this, but I have to register my objection to unsupported conjectures and general statements that are blatantly NOT true due to incalculable number of counterexamples. It is the logician in me... And I like to think that I have not imagined all the Japanese language students and all the intrepid individual travellers and all the academics who write their PhD theses in English that I have met.

And I have a horror of general statements about any particular nationality or race ever since a shopkeeper at the Edgeware Road in London asked me if I liked money since Chinese girls liked money.

OK. This is seriously off topic now. I will go and boil my own head in silence and solitude.

It is a very interesting subject though slng, your point of view is very valid and its an interesting topic.

I am exaggerating here for emphasis, but I think that the fact the Japanese society is very homogenous and the fact it has been historically isolated contributes to the Japanese belief that its race and society are unique, and cannot be understood by others, thereby contributing to the notion that other languages and ways of thinking are so far removed from them that it would be impossible to learn them properly.

I have found similar beliefs of "uniqueness" in most societies. Russian people, for example, believes they have a Russian "poetic" soul that only Russians can understand; the British believe that only they can understand sarcasm.
I exaggerate, of course, but pertaining to language, there is a definite cultural unwillingness in JApan to embrace other people and languages.

I donT mind generalising about cultures because after living in many countries you beging to see that, while there are exceptions, tendencies do exist more strongly in certain countries than others- both good and bad. The people themselves are usually the first to admit this. I think the important thing is to not to assume everyone from a particular culture is like the sereotype. I also think its important for people to understand their own cultural biases (I have met British people who honestly believe Americans canT understand sarcasm!)