A couple of my mummy friends are concerned that their tots may not be bilingual enough and I can completely understand. When I was with Oscar, who speaks English and Dari, I was preposterously, prematurely determined that if and when there were kids they would speak – and think in – two to three languages. Through the windows of multiple languages they would have multiple views of the world; single-celled monoglots they wouldn’t be, not my kids; and my plan was to reverse-engineer them as their grandfather had reverse-engineered me once upon a time.
My father hadn’t planned us (we were all accidents) but once we were born he planned long and hard to bring us up bilingual, I think. Seeing as we were in a Chinese-speaking house, he decided he wouldn’t have to teach us Chinese. We would learn it by osmosis and when we were old enough we would learn it better by reading a couple of Chinese books. Not that we would be force-fed any novel. Delicious books by Louis Cha and others were left all about the house (some were my father’s, some were a stranger’s which had been thrown at the void deck and picked up by my mother); no one said we should read them and no one said we shouldn’t; we were left to find out for ourselves and we did.
My father didn’t leave English to chance though. (He hadn’t received much formal schooling and had learnt English by pure will – enough English to understand legalese better than I will in my lifetime – by reading newspapers cover to cover, word by word and looking up all the new words in his dictionary. It would take him a week to read a daily.) As he saw it, our Chinese-speaking circumstances put us at a disadvantage. He couldn’t disadvantage us more by doing what others did: which was, as he saw it, to speak to their children in either bad English or a middling mix of English and Mandarin and doom them grammatically. So he didn’t speak English to us and nor did he make my Chinese-speaking mother speak English to us. He decided to make us memorise whole books in English instead. Kids in ancient China were made to learn the four books and five classics by heart so that they would, in later life, never compose a bad Chinese sentence, weren’t they? My father was convinced that English syntax could be hardwired into us too.
I must have been three or four or five, at an age when I would rather draw manga princesses with starry eyes than memorise The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, when I was put on the Rote Learning 2.0 programme. I must have memorised a fairy tale every week, learning a page every day and reciting it to my father every night. I was a good girl too, barring the days I had my head buried in colouring books and forgot to be frightened of his disapproval.
The Frog Prince isn’t the Analects of Confucius, of course, and nor is it the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Would I sound smarter now had I been exposed to Gibbon then...? Maybe… Maybe not.) But I don’t think my brothers and I are relatively bilingual by accident; my father may have got something there.
6 comments:
MMM, a very interesting post indeed. I do believe your father is right, speaking to kids in a mish-mash of English and Chinese doesn't help. Hehe, let's keep this subject on the boil, and one day we can all co-author a book titled HOW TO RAISE A BILINGUAL KID.
It could make a pile, I think.
good idea! we will write the book and then retire, heh.
The ang mohs have done something similar: Raising a Bilingual Child.
Right now you are talking about a bilingual child that knows Chinese and English - two structurally different languages.
In Maryann Wolf's book, "Proust and the Squid" - she explores the science of the reading brain.
Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese (a character-based writing system) requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English (an alphabet-based, phonetic writing system). As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, "we are what we read". Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.
It might be easier to raise a child bilingual in French and Italian - Romance languages that are structurally similar, than a Chinese-English bilingual child, because you make a greater demand on the area of the brain used.
thanks for the link. shall send it to my mummy friends.
yes, agree it's easier to learn two languages from the same family than chinese plus english.
hey hey, can i just add to this interesting debate by saying that my mum and dad spoke to me in broken english (they still do), but i somehow managed to pick up grammar and syntax by reading. occasionally, the odd english my parents used will surface ("nowsadays", anyone? "more better"?), but generally no harm done.
I do take a deep breath when my mum mispronounces things in front of julian, but am not too worried. kids can tell the difference about these things after a while.
chinese-english divide: what to do?!?! we are chinese! otherwise can just go and learn spanish or something. sigh.
hmm. reading does make a difference, you are right.
reading chinese lyrics in ktv counts too!
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