When your child speaks a language you don’t

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2015/03/18/when-your-child-speaks-a-language-you-dont/

by jamessun • 11 years ago

88 87 11 years ago

DavidSJ4• 11 years ago

  Your children are not your children.
  They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
  They come through you but not from you,
  And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

  You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
  For they have their own thoughts.
  You may house their bodies but not their souls,
  For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
  which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
  You may strive to be like them,
  but seek not to make them like you.
  For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

  You are the bows from which your children
  as living arrows are sent forth.

...

http://www.katsandogz.com/onchildren.html

StevePerkins• 11 years ago

Just curious why you chose to truncate a few lines away from the finish, rather than simply pasting the poem in its entirety? Was it because the last few lines take a vaguely-religious turn, and you thought the audience here would be hostile? I have no strong opinion either way there, I just find the edit interesting.

DavidSJ4• 11 years ago

It's not because I thought the audience would be hostile, but I don't like those last few lines (mainly because of that turn), and think it's a better poem without them. Do you think it's better to leave it intact?

jobu• 11 years ago

Thanks! Great poem, and in many ways I see it in my kids. On the flip side I sometimes feel like this as a parent: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3659 (minus the last two panels)

KFW504• 11 years ago

It seems there may also be an additional (and potentially larger) cultural element here that goes beyond language, though it would be less pronounced at such an elementary age. Further, it would be interesting to explore how this family's experience maps to first-generation American families in the US.

e40• 11 years ago

I kept waiting for the payoff from the title. It never arrived. It's not the language her daughter speaks at daycare, it's that she's at daycare. That's the cause of this. Same thing happened to my son and he went to an English-speaking daycare. They grow apart from you, for a reason.

emodendroket4• 11 years ago

You found yourself smiling and nodding at daycare teachers who were saying things you could understand less than half of?

Spearchucker2• 11 years ago

I'm German, and speak that with my son. My son's mother is French, and she uses that with my son. She and I speak English when we converse. He goes to a bilingual French/English nursery school, which has mostly French expats' kids in it, and (happily) four kids that also speak German.

We never really discussed this when my son was born - it just happened, because doing it any other way was alien enough to not enter our heads. Seems to be the norm in Europe.

Yes, I struggle with French (his mum's German is pretty reasonable). I have a secret weapon though - I'm also native-fluent in Afrikaans, which I use when I scrape a shin, drive angry, or tease.

Being fluent in three languages never seemed like a big deal - my mother spoke seven. It is a big deal when you speak to a Brit about it, or to an American. I guess when you're used to chicken, beef might seem a little odd.

solve5• 11 years ago

That babies can learn multiple languages with ease is a surprise to no one in the world.

Only surprise is that education systems around the world continue to waste so many years of people's lives trying to teach them additional languages when they're teenagers, instead of having done the bulk of the work when they were babies, the way that nature's been doing it successfully for tens of thousands (or more) years.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 11 years ago

What works for babies does not necessarily for adults. L1 and L2 acquisition are quite different.

LeonRobrotsky3• 11 years ago

teach them additional languages when they're teenagers, instead of having done the bulk of the work when they were babies

My (semi-related) reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9226046

My instructor chose to go full immersion, basically what children are subjected to. The other instructors took the grammar/vocab workbook route.

therobot24• 11 years ago

Unfortunately languages other than English are not pushed very hard in American (public) education. It's really quite sad compared to the rest of the world. My first exposure to another language in school was 8th grade, which was the choice of an elective Spanish or French class. To prevent having to take a class at the college level, the minimum requirement (if i remember correctly) was only 2 years of a foreign language in high school.

I'm probably biased, or maybe it's because i went to a smaller school system (graduating class of only 120), but there's not nearly enough available with regards to programming, statistics, finance (you should learn how to at least do your taxes while in high school), language development (foreign and speech), and writing (we really only learn boiler plate stuff). Instead we get more 'teaching the test' so schools can keep what little funding they have.

solve5• 11 years ago

I spent 9 years of my teenage life trying to learn languages in US schools. It was a complete waste and I remember none of it. The approach was ineffective.

tonyarkles• 11 years ago

In (non-Quebec) Canada, there's often an option to do French Immersion, even though the primary language is English. My parents put me in this program for elementary (K-8) school, and gave me the choice for high school, which I opted out of. There's a few positives and negatives that I found watching myself and my peers:

Pros:

- The 9 years that I spoke French in the classroom for every class except for English was enough to make the language stick. I'm 31 now, and I can still speak, read, and write French. My vocabulary is weak since I don't use French on a regular basis, but when I was in Paris, I had no problem understanding what was going on, ordering food, taking a cab, etc.

- I feel like having the 2nd language has made it easier to pick up other languages. I'm by no means fluent in Spanish, but when I was regularly doing DuoLingo Spanish lessons, I felt like things stuck very quickly.

- I also feel like some kind of structures in my brain from this help me pick up different programming languages. It seems like, compared to most of my peers, switching between new languages and learning new languages is generally a straightforward task for me, including weird ones like Erlang and Haskell. The majority of the effort goes into learning the concepts, not learning the syntax.

Cons:

- After graduating high school doing full immersion all the way through, many of my peers struggled with writing in University. I distinctly remember my first roommate getting an essay back and he was freaking out about the terrible mark he got. He asked me to look over it to see if I could see what was wrong with it. I read through it and just told him "Well... the problem is that you used English words, but you wrote it in French."

- Likewise, many of them had difficulties in math and science, where they understood the concepts very well from high school, but didn't have the English vocabulary to describe what they were doing.

All in all, I'm super happy that my parents made the choices they did, and that I dropped out of immersion before high school. I think, too, it helped a lot that I read a pile of English books growing up, both fiction and non-fiction, which hopefully helped supplement my English vocabulary while I was learning French at school every day. I was the 10 year old who held on tightly to his copy of the Peter Norton pink shirt book :)

bigtunacan• 11 years ago

This is interesting. It must depend on the school districts, but I live in central Iowa and my children attend public school where they started learning Spanish since Kindergarten. It is odd for me since I can not speak the language myself.

j_s• 11 years ago

  > Being fluent in three languages never seemed like a big deal

So the joke goes: three languages = trilingual, two languages = bilingual, one language = American

epaladin• 11 years ago

I tested myself to see if I fit the stereotype by trying to explain this joke to a Japanese friend, in Japanese. After a collective effort which determined that there isn't a concise noun phrase in Japanese that's equivalent to "bilingual"/"trilingual" etc (anyone else know if that's actually the case?), I think the point was communicated, which I hope implies graduation to at least some limbo between "American" and "bilingual".

smcl2• 11 years ago

It's a cute joke, but I feel that the US gets an unfair rap around languages. I know for a fact that plenty of people the UK (where I'm from) declare their hopelessness with foreign languages with a good deal of ... I don't know ... pride? humour? There's always going to be a number of talented bilingual folks there, but they're in the minority. I'd be interested to see how the UK and the US compare, I wouldn't be surprised if the US had a greater proportion of bilingual people.

_delirium• 11 years ago

I'm not too surprised that Americans and Brits don't speak other languages. I doubt people here (Denmark) would speak more than one language if Danish were the lingua franca of international commerce. As it is, the vast majority of Danes are fluent in two languages, English and Danish, because they are both necessities to function in modern Denmark (Danish is the national language, and English is the commercial/business language and language of travel).

People do learn other languages, but at about the level Americans learn other languages: a few years in school, rarely able to carry on a conversation. Older people are more likely to be able to carry on a German conversation, but among younger people it's uncommon. If anything there's increasingly a little bit of nationalist suspicion about people who speak third languages, especially third languages natively. It's normal to be fluent in English and Danish, but if you're raised speaking another language at home, that smells of the dreaded "multiculturalism", and people may actually criticize you for raising your kids speaking a foreign language at home instead of fully assimilating into Danish culture and raising them in Danish. (Goes doubly if the foreign language is Arabic or Turkish.)

legulere• 11 years ago

At least Swedes seem to be ridiculously good at speaking German after having just a few years of German in school. Language learning has lots to do with similarity.

The other important point is how much you use a language. Americans simply don't have contact with languages other than English most of the time. You also see this effect in Germany where the English level is fairly low for speakers of a language that is so similar to English. And this because tv and movies get dubbed in Germany.

munificent2• 11 years ago

One thing many people in Europe don't realize is how huge the United States is. (This ends up often causing some hilarious confusion when they come visit and realize you can't do a road trip tour of the country in one weekend.)

Let's do some comparison. For kicks, and because I work with some Danes, we'll use Copenhagen. Denmark has about 5 million people. The state I live in, Washington, has more than 7 million.

From Copehagan, you can travel 28km and be in Malmö Sweden. Hope you know Swedish! Meanwhile, I'll still be in the metro area of the city I live in, Seattle.

Go 151km out and you can reach Stralsund in Germany. I'll be able to just reach the tip of Canada, since Seattle happens to be near the corner of the state. But if I go East, I'm still less than a quarter of the way out of Washington. And, of course, even taking Canada into account, I'm still surrounded by only English speakers.

Up to 251km, and now we've reached Kolobrzeg in Poland. Still mostly in Washington, though I can just reach the edge of Oregon. Everyone there speaks English.

At 392km, we can get to Kristiansand, Norway. Meanwhile, I can still be in Washington.

A 530km jaunt across the Baltic gets us into Lithuania or Latvia. That just gets me to Oregon, Idaho, and a bit of Montana because Idaho is so narrow.

Going the other way, a 784km paddle across the North Sea gets us to the UK. That gets me a little bit of the way into Nevada and California. 44 states are still out of reach.

804km will make it to France. That gets me to... still just Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and California.

To get to a place where English isn't the main language, I have to go about 1,700km to Mexico. That distance will take a Dane well past Moscow.

To get to Florida, the last place I lived, I have to go about 4,000km. That distance will take our Danish friend to Sudan, Saudia Arabia, Novosibirsk, or well past the North pole. In fact, it will take them just about over the Atlantic all the way to Canada.

So, yes, I do wish I was multi-lingual. But I don't think it should come as a shock or be considered a failure that most Americans are when it lets us converse with all of the more than 300 million people that are in a several thousand kilometer radius around us.

lordnacho• 11 years ago

I'm the kid of parents who didn't speak my nursery's language, and the parent of a kid who also speaks a different language at nursery.

It's really not a big deal. They may speak a little slower, but they get it. I was a little worried a few months ago when my kids wasn't speaking well, but it's come on very suddenly.

One thing I think about is immersion. When I was a kid, there was only one TV station, and it showed stuff in Danish. You couldn't get away from learning the language when you spent all day speaking it with other kids, and then going home and watching TV in the same language. Nowadays, you can get TV in just about any language you like. I wonder if it makes a difference.

ekidd2• 11 years ago

My wife is a native French speaker, and she's always spoken French to the kids. Unlike the author of this story, I've never really felt like I was getting left behind.

Before the kids were born, I spent a while studying an Assimil course (a fine course, from a French publisher, for people who like to learn mostly through osmosis with some notes). Afterwards, I plowed my way through 450 pages of a French non-fiction book, understanding maybe 75%. So when my wife started speaking French to the kids, I could kinda-sorta follow.

Several years later, I decided to improve my French. I forced myself to speak it as much as possible, and I read another 10,000 pages (about 40 novels' worth). I also bought DVD box sets of easy series and watched them straight through. Happily, my brain decided, "Oh, so it's French or nothing. Better learn some French, then."

Today I watch French TV and read French novels without much trouble. I can converse with French preschoolers, but adult conversation is a bit tricker—my spoken vocabulary is more like that of a bookish 9-year-old than that of an educated adult. On a good day, this doesn't slow me down much. I could probably work as a programmer in French, but I'd have trouble negotiating a consulting deal without more immersion.

Ironically, I currently speak French better than my kids do, because I get more exposure. Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt.

LeonRobrotsky3• 11 years ago

Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt.

In high school, I had a German immigrant, fresh out of college as an instructor. The moment one stepped into that classroom to the moment one stepped out, nothing but German.

Hell, it didn't stop there. If you tried to talk to him at all, in or out of the classroom, he wouldn't acknowledge you unless you spoke to him in German, and he would only speak German to you.

Strangely enough, the German students were the only ones capable of holding conversation in a foreign language.

I graduated in 2008, haven't 'used' German in 7 years, but I still find myself thinking in German every once in a while.

Immersion (even for ~50min, 5 days a week) is easily the best way to learn. I don't know why anyone wastes their time with anything else.

EDIT: Hah, I just remembered how he never cared that we talked to each other during class about whatever, just that it was in German, not English.

DasIch2• 11 years ago

Is that really that unusual? All foreign languages are taught this way in German schools.

teirce• 11 years ago

Immersion (even for ~50min, 5 days a week) is easily the best way to learn. I don't know why anyone wastes their time with anything else.

I think once you're somewhat proficient in the language, this is true.

I'm currently taking Spanish courses in uni, and my professor is from Cuba. She's the sweetest lady, but has a tendency to ramble off in Spanish. About 50-60% of the time I can (vaguely) follow her, but the rest of the time I'm just hopelessly lost. And judging by the silence the rest of the class has a tendency for, I'm not alone.

Anyway, I'm certainly not trying to counteract your point, just to say that there are steps up to 100% immersion that I feel are necessary.

mmaldacker• 11 years ago

If you want to read up more on this, look up third culture kids. The wikipedia page is a good start.

gclaramunt• 11 years ago

tl;dr: being a parent is totally different from what you plan to be as a parent

(and that's actually awesome)

ColinWright• 11 years ago

The military have a saying:

    No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Seems appropriate.

mathieuh• 11 years ago

I suffer from the opposite problem: my mother speaks a language I don't. She is French, but despite giving me a French name never spoke to me in French while I was growing up. She'd speak to her family in French, but never to me or my brother.

I've studied to B2 level on my own and managed to osmose a fair ability to distinguish words and sounds, but I'll never be able to get the native-level fluency I could have. It's something we both regret.

magic_beans• 11 years ago

I could never understand how this is possible. If you have a child, wouldn't it be natural to speak to her in your native tongue? I would NEVER speak to my child in anything other than English, even if I lived in France, if only to avoid propagating non-native grammatical errors.

amyjess• 11 years ago

Reminds me a story a friend and former coworker told me. She's of Cambodian descent, and whenever she has to talk to her mom, her mom can only understand her English if she affects this incredibly thick Cambodian accent.

I always found that interesting, having to put on a fake accent so people can understand you.

mrrrgn• 11 years ago

It's the same for me in French. I can understand Americans (who have a thick accent) much more easily than natives. I think it's because my brain can tune into the palette of sounds produced by Americans more readily. Some sounds that are very distinct to natives sound the same to me; it artificially inflates the number of homophones I have to deal with.

pluma• 11 years ago

Kindergarten isn't day care. Kindertagesstätte (or KiTa for short) are day care. Kindergarten is equivalent to pre-school.

jkot• 11 years ago

I know this situation too well. It gets worse when child is asking for pacifier, favorite tv show, playground etc. Also child does not pronounce clearly, and its very hard to understand for non-native speaker.

I wonder why author had not learned German in advance, they had almost 2 years time. English speaker can pickup German in 5 months, very similar and easy language.

te_platt• 11 years ago

I have a friend who grew up in a home where her mom and grandma spoke to her only in Spanish and her dad only spoke to her in English. She was surprised when she went to Kindergarten and her teacher spoke English. She thought Spanish was what women spoke and that English was for men.

tsuyoshi• 11 years ago

I am American and my wife is Cambodian. We live in a Cambodian neighborhood in the United States. We have a daughter, born in Cambodia, who is now 4. I speak to her in English and her mother (and everyone else in the neighborhood) speaks to her in Cambodian. Until she started preschool last September, virtually everyone except myself talked to her in Cambodian.

Not too long ago, she asked me why some person (I think it was a waiter at a restaurant) spoke English and not Cambodian. For her, everyone spoke Cambodian, and then some of them also spoke English. I tried to explain that in America, most people actually speak English and not Cambodian. After that explanation, she kept asking "is this place America?" everywhere we went for a few days.

jedc• 11 years ago

I know a German couple where both parents speak English and German. (Though the wife is much more comfortable with English than her husband.) The way they interact with their daughter is that the father always speaks German to her, and the mother always speaks English. At one point, the mom had to tell her daughter that "you have to have daddy read you that book, because it's in German." :)

It's working pretty well so far for their daughter; she's certainly comfortable and fluent (for her age) in both languages.

mootothemax• 11 years ago

She thought Spanish was what women spoke and that English was for men.

I know a woman who grew up in Germany, and whose parents spoke Polish at home.

As a child she was convinced that German was for children, and Polish is the language you speak when you've grown up.

frooxie• 11 years ago

Generalizing from a single case can be tricky. I read this somewhere: "I had a friend growing up whose mom is white and dad is black. Apparently when he was little, he asked his mother why white people had vaginas."

laurentoget• 11 years ago

As a parent of a bilingual 18 month old, my experience is totally different. I speak english most of my day at work, my son speaks english at daycare, and we speak french together at home. When I get to daycare he immediately switches to french and this feels like we have a shared secret. I left a CD of french songs at the daycare and they play it when he needs soothing.

I think this boils down to the fact that I think of myself as an immigrant, not an expat.

mipapage3• 11 years ago

I'm going to share this in case someone finds it useful...

I am Canadian and married to a Spanish women and living in Spain. While my son started out sponging up both languages, he eventually took off in Spanish and left English behind. In order to have some form of relationship with him I had to speak Spanish with him.

People would lecture me, "oh, give him that gift of English" or "how can you not be speaking English to him?".

Now that he is older and has discovered the Internet, he has a need to learn English. And he's learned. I'm sure it was there all along, he went from not speaking English to speaking it in about two weeks.

My wife and I would speak English around him, and sometimes I would speak English to him, but it really wasn't until he needed to, like the child in the OP story, that he learned English.

emodendroket4• 11 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately kids get pretty clever about this and resist doing language acquisition that isn't necessary.

mipapage3• 11 years ago

When I came to Spain a lot of (Spanish) people would give me the "why do we need to learn English?", and then the market crashed. To this day I interact with younger folk who continue this line of thinking; the ones who leave and learn English and find work are going to be much better prepared...

ccozan• 11 years ago

This is almost OK. Wait until you have twin boys, like me. They are 20 months now, grown at home, no day care ( KiTa as in Germany ;Kindergarden is later on).

They don't speak, but very few words with a meaning ( mama, papa, apa ). But! Here it comes: they speak between them and communicate using a almost invented language. The language is so strange, because is based on using the same word ( twin 1 uses 'bahdi', twin 2 'budji' - approx phonetic rendering), repeatedly but changing tonality, like in cantonese. It's really amazing to see how they can talk each other and coordinate while playing for hours using this language, me and my wife feel we are completly left out :).

jskonhovd• 11 years ago

I did the same with my twin. It's quite common from my understanding.

rm445• 11 years ago

Fascinating - do you remember it? (As opposed to being told about it / vague memories-of-memories). Are there any remnants in how you communicate with your twin now?

munificent2• 11 years ago

Idioglossia, very common among twins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idioglossia

neurotech1• 11 years ago

In the 80s there was a group of Russian girls (almost identical, sisters or cousins) that spoke to each other in a strange language. They didn't responded if someone spoke to them in English.

It turned out they spoke Russian, but the words and pronunciation young kids use at home is very different to what they teach as Russian in America from textbooks and language tapes. It took a native bilingual Russian speaking doctor to figure out that mystery.

luxpir2• 11 years ago

I can speak two other languages fluently, but I live in England and neither of those two other languages are native. As such, my infant son rarely hears them.

I know others in my situation who have given up, resigning themselves to being able to help with language homework.

I'm tempted to push on though, much like the (possibly misguided) attempts of a man to speak to his son only in Klingon for the first three years of his life in the 90s.

I have already accepted that the result will be along the lines of my son having a passing familiarity with the sounds and basics of the two languages. Better than nothing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_Language_Institute#d.2... // http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg...

Spearchucker2• 11 years ago

Far be it for me to suggest to another how to raise their child. If it were up to me I'd so totally stick with it. The insane pace of development in these early years will never happen again. Another language is another life. The mind is also very good at adaptation, so anything you teach incorrectly today will auto-align/correct when your son is older and experiences that culture for real. What you're doing takes courage. Respect.

luxpir2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the encouragement. Did you do something similar yourself?

I'll give it a bash, I think, based on your words. Just think of the influence that comment might have had on his future life if it does pay off. Thanks again!

Edit: I see from further up the thread you've got a complex situation of your own underway. It's great when you've two native languages at home because English seems to always be an easy third to pick up.

dmacvicar2• 11 years ago

Viennese daycares—known here as kindergartens—have a very long Eingewöhnungszeit—literally translated as “getting adjusted period” or "acclimatization." Dropping your kid off on Day One while she shrieks "MOMMY!" is looked upon as child abuse.

I went over this in Germany (living here since 10 years) and it is just ridiculous. During my second child "acclimatization" after seeing a mother in tears and making progress for her absence in intervals of 5 minutes each day, I realize this long "acclimatization" period was for them, not for the child.

aklein• 11 years ago

My 18 month old daughter has a full time nanny who has spoken to her only in Spanish (at our request) since she was 3 months old; my wife and I speak to her only in English, and we don't speak any Spanish. It's been really fascinating to see what my daughter chooses to say in Spanish instead of English: always agua (her first word), siéntate ("sit"), mas ("more"), wacala (spanish slang for "yucky" - for poop)... other words, she can interchange depending on who she speaks to. Sometimes I can't understand her, and can't tell if she's trying to tell me something in Spanish, or her diction just isn't good enough yet. I suspect it's the latter, I think she's already adept enough at recognizing mommy and daddy don't speak Spanish...

dmacvicar2• 11 years ago

My children (ages 5 and 3) were born and raised in Germany. We only speak spanish at home. They both went to day-care very early.

Today they speak like natives. When they play alone or between them, they do it in german, and while I defend myself in german quite good, he corrects me all the time, especially with the right pronunciation.

Sad true is, lot of people, including educators are ignorant about multilinguism. They did at some point ask me and my wife to speak german at home with them because they were behind with the language.

I will not even mention stupid ideas politicians have had about the topic.

nzealand• 11 years ago

I don't understand the authors point of view.

My toddler is teaching me Spanish.

I am not being left behind, I am simply catching up.

scobar• 11 years ago

The sentence, "The truth is this: I think Noa is raising us as much as we are raising her." and the paragraph it heads really resonated with me as a parent of a young child.

Upon seeing the title, I expected the article to be about the unknown languages infants sometimes seem to invent. We speak two languages to our son, but my wife and I both understand each language quite well. Our son was very vocal as an infant, but less than half of his words were English or Portuguese. He's nearly three now, but he'll still use some of his invented words to unnecessarily lengthen phrases. I imagine this is to mimic adults who express themselves with more words. He may believe that longer phrases are given more consideration as he tends to do this more often when making a request with a small chance of success, like asking for another treat after being told he can only have one.

gingerlime2• 11 years ago

My wife is Japanese, I'm Israeli, and we both live in Berin, where our son was born. We talk to him in our native language, and between us in English. He goes to the Kita, where they speak only German...

He's still fairly young (17 months), so doesn't really talk much, but we can spot a few German words (Ja! Nein). He does seem to understand Hebrew and Japanese when we talk to him, and says one or two words in Hebrew (Aba, means Dad) and in Japanese (Wanwan, means Dog).

We're very curious on how things will evolve from here. It's very likely that his German will be his strongest. But we're sure he will understand and can speak with us. Our biggest hope is that he can help translate German for us though ;-)

blackkettle• 11 years ago

wanwan is the sound the dog makes (like ruff-ruff in English). wan-chan is a colloquial term for dog. [just to be a nit-picking ass].

gingerlime2• 11 years ago

I'll make sure to tell it to my son (and my wife!) so he learns things the proper way ;-)

needacig• 11 years ago

Does anyone else think it kind of shameful that the author could live in Austria for 12 years and still speak such poor German? Now you can't understand everything your child is saying. Congrats.

When your child speaks a language you don’t

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