Do you read english books to your child in your mother tongue (assuming it's not english)?

[hjk]

Hi, both DH and I are Chinese and we've been speaking almost exclusively in Chinese to our 20-month old daughter since she was born. She goes to nursery 5-days a week so I am not worried about her ability to speak English at all - I am sure it will all come naturally sooner or later.

We read daily to our daughter. The books are all in English but we always tell (or make up) the stories in Chinese. I am now starting to wonder whether I should read in English instead, to start introducing "reading" to her. Any experience to share out there?

P.S. There are actually not many good Chinese pictures books around that are suitable for young children. I always looked out for good ones when I visited Hong Kong (home town) but most Chinese who live in Asia try actually try to expose their kids to English from early childhood...

There are ranges of bilingual picture books in most of the major minority languages (IYKWIM) spoken in the UK - certainly including Chinese. Our local library (Lambeth, so obv more multi-cultural than most) has a selection and yours will probably be able to source a few. Unfortunately my Google-fu has deserted me, so I can't find a link.

Oh - I found an example of what I mean
www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=wibbly+wobbly+t ooth&x=0&y=0 (also the only English picture book I can think of with an ethnic Chinese protagonist)

hjk - I used to do that - read English books in Chinese to the kids, when they were little. But as they grow I wanted them to read Chinese as well, so I started looking for books in Chinese which you can find, if you look quite hard. Where are you based? I'm told you can do interlibrary requests - we get Chinese picture books from our local library (Ealing) and from Charing Cross library. I also buy them from China and Taiwan from various online bookshops. And I make my own. I don't like the bilingual books. The pages never look quite so nice with too much writing on them! (And now that DS1 can read English he tends to read the English version too ...) But if you don't mind them you can get them from Xihaha and from Mantra Lingua. The Taiwanese bookshop I use is 168books.
And I get friends and relatives to send books too. My DSs also enjoy the Red dragonfly reading scheme books.

Can you see I'm a bit of an expert in this? And also now that the DSs are a bit older, stories from Monkey's Journey to the west are a great hit, and you can get picture book versions of it.

thanks for all your responses. I will try getting chinese picture books for my daughter, so that i can read english books to her in english, and chinese books to her in chinese.

A little bit off topic, I know, but you have to be careful if your child is not used to hearing you speaking a certain language to him/her. I am British, and we live in the UK, so Serbo-Croat is only a "father tongue" to DS (2), which he understands but does not really speak.

He brought me a Croatian book the other day, and since it was very poetic, I couldn't be bothered to translate it (as I do with his other S-C books), and tried reading it in Croatian. He was almost immediately distressed, and started saying: "No, no, no!" He hated my speaking this particular foreign language (although he doesn't mind if it's something else he doesn't know, e.g. French).

A friend of mine (English speaker, living in France) had a similar reaction from her DS when she spoke French to him: he was distressed and clutched at his (French) father for confort.

In the beginning I always translated all english books (we are both Germans). The older our daugther got the more difficult it was, esp. as some books are in rhyms and you just can't do this easily.

Therefore longer stories we tell in English and so far she didn't mind that our accent is different from the nursery teachers. Well, the girl will do everything to get a Thomas the Tank Engine story.

We try to limit the books but some just come up and as long as the majority is in German I don't mind.

Slightly off topic, but related.

I am British, DH is French and we live in France. I speak fluent French but never (ever!) to DC....to the point where if DC bring me a French language book, I just say, "that's a french book, Daddy will read that when he gets home, let's find an English book." This goes over without a problem and reinforces the language difference.

Just my twopennorth.

Afraid I never translated; I think because I have a great love of literature and always feel that an author's words ought to be respected.

Learnt this attitude from my mother who insisted we should learn the major European languages as quickly as possible so we wouldn't have to read things in translation (though I, unlike her, never got as far as the Russians). So reading the Gruffalo in Swedish would just have seemed wrong- like reading Dante in translation, my Mum would never let me.

the majority of our books are in german (we are both german) but we also have a couple of english books which we read in english.
thanks to amazon it is easy to get hold of german books and they are alway on the whishlists for birthdays and christmas.

We do just the same as greythorne does - apart from when there are a few firm favourites and so we do swap.

We are italian and we used to speak italian at home when we lived in the UK (kids learnt english at nursery).

I used to read them italian picture books, but also English ones (memories of "we are going on a bear hunt" or Thomas the tank engine still haunt me )

I have just been translating George's Marvellous Medicine to Welsh for my DS

I let him choose what language he wants me to read to him.