Is anybody else not as consistent about using their mother tongue with the dc's as they could/should be, and feeling guilty about it?

[emkana]

Trouble is that a/ dh's German is virtually non-existent so family language is English anyway, and often at the weekend I just seem to stay in English even if it's just me talking to the dc's, and b/I have been in the UK for so long now and feel so comfortable in the language and obviously use it all day every day and watch TV in it etc that it just comes naturally.

The children's German skills are varied - dd1 is very good, dd2 so-so (but her German really really picks up when we go over to see my Mum, which we do virtually every school holiday), ds is speech-delayed so it's difficult to say.

They do watch German TV and seem to understand virtually everything and I read to them in German (ds daily, dd's alternate days - the other day they read with dh).

We speak Welsh exclusively at home (bore da ci'r lleuad!) but our DSs have picked up English from friends, telly, playgroup etc. DS1 wasn't fluent in English when he started half days at school, but he is now. I do think (having been lucky enough to have been raised bilingually myself) that the benefits of having two languages from birth are immense. It makes it so much easier to learn other languages later on, and there is evidence it uses parts of the brain not usually excercised by monolingual toddlers. If ther is the option of your DCs having two languages, I'd say try your damned hardest to give it to them, they will thank you so much.

Good luck

My opinion is, just be consistent and don't worry about what other people think - if your children ask you in 15 years' time why you didn't make more of an effort, it'll be you that has to answer, not the other people!

In terms of how, I've gone through a few phases - as a baby, just speaking to her in the language (French) as much as possible; then, when she spoke English to me, responding in French; then getting to the point where she would say, "cake", and I would say, "maman dit "cake", que dit papa?"; then, slightly different (linking to language, not person) "comment dit-on "cake" en francais?" (it goes without saying, I hope, that, if she didn't know, I tell her, ratehr than just leave her hanging!) and, now, I just say "en francais?" or even "je ne comprends pas"! (Also goes without saying that, if she's very distressed, I still speak only French to her but of course I "undertsand" whatever language she chooses to use.)

That and plenty of DVDs, CDs, visits to the country, a French -language playgroup on Saturdays is (slowly) working ...

Same here littleducks. I speak English and my DH - when he remembers - speaks Arabic. I have a thread on here cos we have talked ( i have nagged) about it and he is now talking to dds (4 and 5) ALL the time in Arabic. We will see how it goes.

cory, that was an interesting point about taciturn people having more difficulties establishing bi-lingualism in their kids than chatterboxy people. Luckily I am the latter type!

English is the minority language for me as I live in Japan. At first I thought I'd be fine because English is such a global language, but you'D be suprised at just how little the English language has really penetrated Japan. The Japanese have HUGE problems with foreign language acquisition. After seeing friends of mine (with an English mother and Japanese father) fail miserably at teaching their kids English I have started to panick and I only ever speak to them in English. Luckily the family language is English (DH is fluent) so that's an advantage. But it's so easy to just answer them in the majority language, because its easier to do so, but we really must be strict with ourselves and only talk to them in the minority language!

I rely heavily on Amazon, and on mumsnet for book recomendations or phonics teaching.

moondog I would dearly have loved to pass on Welsh to my kids as I am fluent and I feel its such a waste not to. I am fluent in Welsh, but I think that English is my mother tongue. As I say, I am panicking about the English so I want to get that established, but when it is I would love to re-introduce some Welsh. I did try to teach DD Welsh at first, and want to go back to it later. THe problem is I don't know if I could handle teaching two languages, with me being the only source of both languages. Any tips would be welcome!

Bore Da Bessie!

Hi Sakura, yes I know you are a Welsh speaker and your situation is an interesting one (if I am not mistaken, there was a documentary about you on tv a few years ago??)

My sisters are in exactly the same position as you-one married to a Korean ,the other a Frenchman and living now in Korea and French Caribbean and feeling sad about their kids not really speaking Welsh.

In our case, we were brought up bilingually far far away form Wales, so already the connections were frail and of course they are frailer still now.

But their children are all proud to be half Welsh, hear lots of Welsh when here or when family visit them, can follow a basic conversation and are very interested in it all. It's not perfect but it is as good as it is going to get which is better than nothing. All of us had a morbid fear of having kids who sort of drift around the world, speak English with a mid Atlantic accent, have no identity, and belong nowhere.

It hasn't happened thoguh.

Thanks- good to hear you have a strong welsh identity although you weren't brought up in Wales yourself.
NO, that documentary wasn't about me!! I'd love to know who it was about though! I may know her, although then again maybe not because I haven't come accross anyone online or in real life who speaks welsh here.

Oh!?

It was really intersting and was called (brace yourself)

Oes gen ti sushi mi?

Aaaarghh!!!
On about 8 years ago I would say.I have googled but can't find it but it was on S4C so if you were really interested ,yuo coudl probably track it down.

Nooooo! Oes gen ti Sushi mi?
Haha, I've GOT to see it. Will google it now.

Hi again all

Thanks for all your advice!

Cory my mum had Polish parents but was born here, her approach to child rearing generally is VERY Victorian - you don't want to know, trust me Thing is ever since I became a mum she has undermined most of my approaches to raising my children, sadly though the language one is the one I am most scared of failing at

MIFLAW you made a very valid point and I thank you for that. You are right I won't be able to point the finger if I don't put the effort in.

On a separate note I am 1 of 5 kids myself and interestingly out of ALL of us I am the ONLY 1 who has made use of the language that our parents 'forced' us to learn. I even went as far as getting hitched to a Polish fella, lol

My conclusion? Frankly the literature that was available to us (in terms of teaching aids) was very boring and at the Polish school we attended on Saturdays most of the teachers were elderly and employed pre-war methods i.e. uninteresting and irrelevant. There was also a very heavy emphasis on religion (Catholicism).
Perhaps for me most importantly as a family, we only made a handful of trips to communist Poland which were soooo dull I cannot even begin to describe. We spent day in day out in the middle of nowhere visiting family members or my father's friends and acquaintances. Exciting!

Thanks again for your advice and wishes and it's great to know that there are many in the same boat!

Good Luck to you all too

LOL at your dull trips home; don't know why but it just tickled me.
And actually it has just made me realise that the quality of holiday the kids get when I go back home is quite important and relevant. I'd love to do something like Centreparks (probably can't afford it)or as I was saying on another thread, to go to a welsh farmhouse on a homestay or a welsh seaside village or something: something fun, where they can absorb British culture. Camping would be ideal but you've got the weather issue. (I am NOT travelling all the way from the sub-tropical south of Japan to camp on a drizzly, muddy campsite!!)

I am afraid I am in the same boat as emkana - I too am in Japan (waves to Sakura!) but my kids (12 and 11) are not bilingual...

I have moments of panic, like you, Sakura..but then I try and justify the fact, by thinking that they can understand English, and will no doubt be using it more often at some point in the future.

We are very much part of our community here, and because I speak fluent Japanese, I tended to gravitate towards all the local playgroups, instead of the foreign wives' meetings....

BTW, one of my good friends in the city where I live in Kanagawa is a Welsh speaker - she has been in Japan for over 40 years. She had 6 children and none of them spoke a word of English (or Welsh)while they were growing up, apparantly.

They are all, however, fluent English speakers now.

Would you like a contact number/email for her?

if so, e-mail me at emmarose34 at yahoo dot co dot uk

House swaps would be the perfect way to really get into local culture Sakura. Peopel would love the connection too.

I can't get my head around not speaking one's mother tongue to one's children. I just can't,irrespective of how well you speak the language of your spouse.

I did speak my mother tongue to my children and still do but not exclusively.

I was surprised to find that as I went to toddler groups and mixed a lot with other mums in English, English baby language and English nursery rhymes also seemed to become part of me- more so because dh (no previous experience of children) didn't seem to have a lot to offer in that line. It was almost as if I was rediscovering some kind of parallel English childhood which I know perfectly well I never had.

I solved the problem by talking twice as much to fit everything in

Message withdrawn

Cory, that is a really important point.If you are mixing in baby groups and circles you assume a soret of alien vocab. anywayb (ie alien to the pre children version of yourself) so if that is the only point of reference, it must be easy to slip into that.

One of my sisters is like that-she has lived so long in France that even though her children fully bilingual, there are some things she seems to struggle to word find for as she has only ever done those things through medium of French, such as sorting tax, taking a driving test and giving birth.

Not really the type of things you dioscuss with your kids hence I suppose little incentive for her to find out what English equivalents are.

When I trained as a SALT, one of the students on placement with me was Greek and she found it so hard, not having the easy flowing babytalk at her fingertips (known as 'motherese' in socio-linguistic circles).

In retrospect thoguh it was a good think as it was a clinic for kids with complex communication disorders, and in those situations, those children need less speech to process, with simple grammar and common vocabulary-the exact thing she could provide in actual fact.

Message withdrawn

Things I have only ever done in my second language include:

worked in my first profession

given birth

written a book

made love

Moondog, yes I'd love to do a house swap, that'd be ideal. I'd have to get the house sorted out; the other problem is next time I'll be going back without DH, so he'll be IN the house...
HI Tanterose, its great to meet someone who's in Japan.
I live in a rural area in the south so there aren't many foreigners here (just men who come for the surfing or the girls ), which isn't good for my kids' English language aquisition .
I have 2 Canadian friends ( one with 6 kids funnily enough) and one English-speaking Romanian friend and the rest are Japanese! But its the British culture I want to pass on to my kids rather than a generalized Anglo culture IYSWIM.
DD starts kindergarten in 2 weeks so I reckon it'll be Japanese all the way from then on and I'm starting to get worried...
THanks for your e-mail address, I'll note it down and it might be nice in future to contact your friend

Pitchounette, yes I suspect that if the mother is at home with the kids when they're young and her's is the minority language then those two things contribute to the kids being fluent in both languages.

Moondog, I haven't heard of motherease; I'll google it. I suspect I don't have it in English as it's the Japanese baby talk/ lullabies I hear all around me and its therefore so easy to just slip into Japanese to the extent that the English feels rather forced with a baby. But I am really strict with myself and do force out the ENglish and an occasional bit of Welsh.

Your life sounds very interesting Sakura.
How did you get there and learn Japanese may I ask?

Yes, a house swap to Wales would give you and the children a true window into life in Britain and British (even Welsh) culture. There are tonnes of sites-for teachers, gay people, religious people and so on.Guardian has a good one and this one is great. You can find out who wants to come to your country and sift accordingly.

Hell, I'd love to do a house swap with you and you don't get more Welsh than me! (I've laready donme one-just to London though-with an MNer which was wonderful.)

Only trouble is, my dh works all over the world so likes being home. I'm off to Bangladesh to see him next week for Easter, then bakc again in the summer and to Korea to see my sister.

How are you and your kids treated and viewed? I know that Koreans are very sniffy about mixed race people and 'marrying out' generally. My sister had a really hard time to begin with.

You're right though-a house swap with husband in situ may not be so appealing.

Seventeen homes up in Japan.
Thousands in Britain.

ooh, yes I don't mind doing a house swap with you. I've looked at that Guardian website before. This year I'm going back alone for financial reasons, but next year, if we do a house swap and save money that way, DH could come with me.
Unfortunately my life'S not exciting, not exciting at all, but it's interesting it appears to be so on paper! I'm a SAHM who mumsnets too much and that's the jist of my life at the moment.
I met DH whilst studying for a postgrad degree in the UK. He was taking a career break and we were in the same halls. I couldn't have pointed out Japan on the map at that time, but I married him, emigrated here and then began learning Japanese ( I have a Russian degree which helped with the grammar and with understanding what is involved in learning a language i.e how f*cking difficult it is and therefore how much of a gift it is to our children to raise them bi-lingually!)

wow this thread is very intereting for me!
I speak as an adult who didn't grow up bilingual and can only speak a tiny amount of her mother's language, which embarasses me greatly when I visit our relatives in her home country- we cannot communicate directly as they speak no english.

I would say do not beat yourselves up too much about not being consistent. As long as the children are hearing the minority language in some sort of context- either hearing you speak with others in that language or in a stimulating/fun context, they are still getting exposure despite inconsistency.

I had practically no exposure to my mother's language. I spoke to her recently about this and she said that english just came first for her- a language she mastered in her early 20s in the UK, she wasn't biligual or anything before.

It really winds me up when people say- why didn't your mother teach you? there are other factors involved- my father only speaks english and about 5 words of my mother's language. I'm sure he would absolutely not have tolerated her speaking to me & my siblings exclusively in her own language when in the company of him or others. I'm 30 and it really makes me sad about this missed opportunity.

Just because one parent speaks another language- this does not mean you will 'automatically' grow up biligual, I am proof of this! you really have to work at it, but at least they are hearing & using the language, even if not in every situation.
phew, I've written an essay!

Pitchounette- you've hit the nail on the head about getting into a habit of speaking to one person in a certain language.

I've been with my French OH for a year & it annoys him that I don't speak to him in french much although I speak it pretty well.TBH I find it awkward and difficult, his level of english is way beyond my french and I feel guilty for making him feel bad

With our friends english is the common language- living & working in the UK, so naturally that comes automatically for me. So I can understand how that happens for people who speak more than one language, depending on your environment one becomes more dominant that the other.

Off on a tangent, when I speak with a french speaker who has limited/no english I can converse easily & my confidence soars. Am a freak or is this something others have noticed...?!