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?

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I thought Japanese people were really into western things and want to look like westerners? Or at least some young people are like that...? Are your mixed race kids considered "cooler" at all? Just curious...

I agree that a lot of stereotypes are true, no smoke without fire... but yes very important not to generalise too much. And then there's also usually a difference between people who live in their own country and those who live in a foreign country.

We're in Florida at the moment, spending some time with in-laws. I thought I'd be talking more english to DD so that they won't feel left out, but I just can't bring myself to do it at this point, it feels so unnatural! They are being quite supportive though and seem to think it's a good thing that she "talks" swedish too.

Pitchounette and annamama, THose are interesting questions.

I think that all kids have a deep need to be accepted by their peers so I fully expect English to be rejected by my kids for a few years around their teenage years. I would be worried if it was the other way round TBH i.e if they rejected the society in favour of the minority language = me.
There is great need to conform in Japanese society, but the flip side of that is that those who do conform, no matter what they look like, are accepted quite well. Being mixed race in Japan and in the UK are two different kettles of fish. While the Japanese are suspicious of foreigners, they treat any kid who speaks Japanese as "one of them"
But although mixed race kids are considered cool and cute, I don`t think the Japanese want to look western. Their ideal of beauty is so far removed from ours that its mind-boggling. Despite all the foreign media images, a "classic" looking Japanese girl in a kimono turns more heads here than any large-eyed, big-breasted beauty.

I think gender matters- the gender of the child and the gender of the "foreign" parent. I think boys identify with their fathers and girls identify with their mothers. SO my son may become more "Japanese" while my daughter may be more "western". But this is a strong generalisation! After all, if they followed their parents that would mean my son would marry an English girl and my daughter would marry a Japanese man. There are too many variables involved.

Sing, I didn't want to be dismissive. I lived and worked 3 years in Japan, and that's what a lot of them told me (their cote not mine). I used to speak japanese a bit and learning the phonics was really easy as everything exist in my own language (it is easier starting with french than english). They do have a lots of sounds missings to make up and it is easier to learn it if you have heard them from a young age. Look at us miserably failling to hear/speak chinese (which is one of the richest language in the world).
I have fantastic freinds in japan and around the world and I never generalised. I do agree with Sakura that you can't compare expats and people in their home country. Most of them chose to be abroad which makes them 'atypic'.
Some people will always be fantastic at languages what ever their background is.
Multiculturalism is a chance, and you should embrassed it, it makes you more savy as a grown-up and usually more tolerant. (I met some real snobs too, not generalising)
I had debates with my japanese freinds, as I told them being french was not important as such, I was born on earth first being born in france is only secondary. They all think the contrary is true they are born in japan first, being on earth is secondary. (not that I believe in ET, what I meant is I am here as a human and there is no obvious difference between us)
To be honest I am a bit surprise that my post upset you so much, sorry about that, remember I am not an english native speaker, may be I misphrased something .
And now I am totally off-topic, sorry .

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Pitchounette, how much attachment do you have to your "home"? (Where your parents live?) I am English, but none of my family live there. I hate it where people ask where I'm from as I moved around a lot, even as a child - only between England and Scotland, but enough not to feel settled in one particular place. Before I moved to France I lived in Scotland. My parents live in US, and my sister has just emigrated to Australia. For DH it's much easier. His family has stayed in the same place and for him he's very much English - even though neither of us has any desire to go and live there (more because we're happy where we are than any negative feelings about England IYSWIM). Was talking today to a friend here who is half English but raised in Denmark (where had Dad comes from) and she has never celebrated Halloween. We do, but because of a Scottish childhood. I still find it very strange to see French OR English kids doing this weird pseudo-American "trick-or-treating" which is nothing like what I remember from my childhood. My kids are both British, because they don't have the right to French nationality, even though DS was born here, because both their parents are British. It STILL seems funny to me when other kids at school refer to DD as being "anglaise" because she's never lived in England, she was born in Scotland and spent most of her life in France. In terms of her influences, she's much more French, even if English is her best language. When we go to the UK on holiday they don't recognise the television programmes, don't like some of the food, and think kids in school uniform look funny.

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Tea. thank you for the link. We have spent a happy hour playing with it while waiting for Papa to get up. More like that please!

Hello! H E L L O! No one has posted here for ages... Everyone's kids doing ok?

DD (18 months) says "yes" & "no" to her dad and at nursery, and "ja" & "nej" to me. I'm so proud and pleased that her bilinguality is going well so far! And also, DHs family in the States, who we've just been visiting, have been supportive of me talking swedish to her, I wasn't sure that would be the case. They think it's "awesome" that she's learning 2 languages.

Hello annasmama!

My daughter (21m) is also starting (about the last month) to use the "right" word with the "right" parent - and also to respond appropriately to the question, "yes, that's what daddy says - but what does mummy say?" or vice versa.

She surprised me this morning by asking for and then repeating back to me the French for "cufflink" ...

Ah, very advanced!

I was worried that she would talk swedish in nursery and no one would understand her... but I'm hoping she's realising that she needs to talk english there, because that's what she hears around her.

Sometimes I have to keep telling myself how great bilingualism is... because I find myself worrying that poor little DD has a hard job learning 2 languages and is confused.

FWIW my daughter is one of three French-English bilinguals at her nursery. Only one ofthe other two will speak French to me (the other one just looks a bit scared) and none of them speak French to the other two or to anyone else.

I think your child will get it just fine.

I sometimes sense that bilingualism is ridiculously easy for my child - it's just hard for me, because I can't always work out which language she's speaking!

I think they do work out fairly soon what language they need to use where. We didn't use Mummy Language and Daddy Language, but talked about English and Swedish from the start, but the effect was the same: around the age of 2, dd could answer questions like "what is X in English?".

Even if they do use the wrong language, it may not be that they are confused: toddlers do all sorts of things they are not supposed to . Ds went through a phase around age 3-4 of absolutely refusing to speak English (the language of his playschool and all his friends); it wore off after a while. Embarrassing at the time, but then ime pre-schoolers are embarrassing, it's what they do. Ds also hid under the table when introduced to his reception teacher .

Not much progress to report this end: 9yos and 13yos are far less interesting developmentally than toddlers . Though I've noticed that dd is doing rather well in her French lessons, despite a horrendous absence rate, so that could well be her early bilingualism paying off.

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I would possibly wait a bit longer, my (monolingual) nephew spoke in sentences very late, but has since caught up.

But if this persisted then I would look for some other explanation than his bilingualism tbh. There is nothing to say that bilingual children will be exempt from developmental problems any more than monolingual children. Doesn't mean that bilingualism causes the problems.

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Pitchounette - If this is the first time your friend's lo has really been completely surrounded by English it is VERY NORMAL for the child to not speak at at all for a while. Some theoriests even give this phase a name... but my memory has let me down as to what they call it... "silent period" maybe - but that sound faaaaaar tooooo obvious!

There are quite a few children at my dds school going through this stage as I type!

It makes me so sad that this 'silent period' is often perceived as the child "not coping with two languages" and needing to cut back to one. I know a few children who started life bilingual and are now fairly monolingual with parents who panic that their children would be much more clever if they hadn't of bombarded them with so many languages so young.... when the truth is very different.

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IME it can take anything from a week to months. So many children go quiet at nursery and on some level it must be difficult to adjust and work out which language to speak. Even monolinguals give nursery the silent treatment - it's just a way some children ARE. Then they'll turn around and come out with a huge long speech.

Heck I go silent sometimes when surrounded by a lot of people and noise!

Eventually they work it out but if she is worried then maybe asking her doctor or a SALT would be more helpful than a nursery teacher who is probably doing some observations and ticking boxes on her chart which say he should be doing X, Y and Z and is lighting on bilingualism as a very easy scapegoat.

Is he still speaking at home?

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'Professionally' speaking I would recommend that your friend get him checked out if she's still worried at 4 assuming this is no sentences whatsovever, even as simple as 'I want juice', 'I want to go outside', 'want to get down' or 'I go play now' - all said by the 2yo I was with today. Some children are quiet by nature and don't see the need to speak in full sentences where one word will do and this can persist throughout their life! Others use twenty when one will do. Could she talk to his CM and see what her experience of him was, given that she presumably spoke in English the whole time at the setting and there were other children there speaking English?

As I said, even monolingual children go quiet when faced with a group situation like nursery. It's less about bilingualism and more about adjusting to the environment. Some adults are fine chucked into a busy bar full of people they don't know, others are wallflowers.... that's people for you! It may also be that neither of them feel comfortable talking to the teacher but talk to other children or they find the teacher's voice hard to understand because of an accent or a very different manner of speaking which are problems exacerbated by bilingualism, but not caused by it.

Glad to hear your DS2s confidence is increasing pitchounette

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The silent period certainly rings a bell for us. Ds went completely off English about 6 months before starting school. And then the floodgates opened and we haven't had a moment's peace since.

Interesting to read your experiences! I'm only joking really when I say DD might be confused by bilinguality, she's doing really well, she's talking a lot in both languages. And I agree that for kids who don't talk much, it's probably not the bilinguality that's the problem. (My DD's "best baby friend" same age is monolingual and he hardly says a word...)

Cory - we will probably start talking about swedish and english too, not mummy's and daddy's language. Thanks for tip.

My dad is coming over from sweden on monday, will be great to have some "input" from someone other than me! Anyone ever get sick of hearing their own voice...?

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