grungy-gonads 54 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Hey you out there with "half"/"double" sprogs! How is the bringing them up as bilingual thing going? I'm interested to know how it progresses and how you split the E and J load? Do tell! Link to post Share on other sites
mikazooki 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 i too, am interest in this subject. my old man lives in indonesia. i saw his new kid, when she was 6. her english was less than fluent, maybe a sign of how much he spoke to her. but it was still ok. Link to post Share on other sites
nzlegend 1 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Yeah do tell! I am very keen to hear any advice on the matter as I am in that boat myself Link to post Share on other sites
BagOfCrisps 24 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 It must be so cool to bring kids up in a bilingual environment. Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 This is the deal; If you want bilingual kids, both parents have to speak English all the time. The kid has to be forced to produce English at home, and that's only achieved by both parents refusing to acknowledge Japanese. I only know of one family that has done this, and they run an English school. Their girl is fluently bilingual. Their parents say it was very tough, and the pressure to give up very severe. In this case, annual visits to English speaking countries probably played an important part. In most other cases, the kids can understand a large percentage of what their foreign parent says in English, but they answer in Japanese. The parent sometimes has to fall back on Japanese to get some things across. Often the child will use an English word in a Japanese sentence until they learn the Japanese word, whereupon the English gets replaced. As to how these kids develop within the English education system, I don't know as I haven't seen any examples. I'm reasonably certain though that they'll have a significant advantage... Link to post Share on other sites
danz 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 cant comment on the E-J thing.... but I grew up bilingually....in America... In my home, my mom only spoke hebrew to me until about 8years old...my father only spoke english...I grew in a completely english speaking environment (wisconsin)...I am conversationally fluent in both languages...although admitedly, my reading and writing is very bad, and my speaking seems to slip every year... I wonder if different languages are easier to acquire simultaneously than others... danz Link to post Share on other sites
enderzero 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 I heard an interesting tactic where the parents will assign a certain language to a certain room of the house. Only Japanese in the kitchen but only english in the dining room, etc. Ocean - How's lil H's english coming along then? I think it would be cool to have a bilingual kid, but the thought if his/her 1st language being other than english seems pretty strange. Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 I speak to him in English, he replies in Japanese. He has a very good command of swearing in English, but otherwise he can manage only a few broken bits and pieces. danz, I guess it probably makes a difference which parent is the foreign speaker. It's surely no coincidence that the expression 'mother tongue' is used. Link to post Share on other sites
badmigraine 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 Upon arriving in Japan years ago... 1st motivation to learn Japanese: need to eat and get around. Later on...2nd motivation to learn Japanese: meet girls and all that. Later on...3rd motivation to learn Japanese: make my life easier at work. Later on...4th motivation to learn Japanese: to finally be able speak to my wife's parents. Next motivation: to speak fluently enough that my kids' Japanese friends don't tease him about their pidgin-speaking weirdo Dad. I think the last motivation will be the strongest. As much as I wanted to be able to get around, to eat, to meet girls and such, well...those things pale in comparison to the horror of being found out as the stupid idiot I really am. I better hit the books. badmigraine Eyeing those grammar and kanji books over there next to the Burton catalogue Link to post Share on other sites
indosnm 0 Posted September 20, 2003 Share Posted September 20, 2003 I make a point of only speaking to my son in english. my wife also does too, but more than half the time she speaks Japanese. I am not really worried because we will move back to Oz before he starts school and any abnormalities in his english should go away with time. I know heaps of bi kids who refuse to speak to me in Japanese because I am a whitey.. depends on the kid I guess. Link to post Share on other sites
ug 0 Posted September 22, 2003 Share Posted September 22, 2003 It must be great to be brought up bilingual. I am jealous. Link to post Share on other sites
indosnm 0 Posted September 22, 2003 Share Posted September 22, 2003 Everyone says how great it must be to be bilingual ( & i agree) BUT raising kids in 2 countries such as Japan then Oz can mix them up abit. I have seen and met a few half/halfs who don't really know where they belong... Link to post Share on other sites
bobby12 0 Posted September 22, 2003 Share Posted September 22, 2003 yeah but on the other hand you get people who grew up and lived in one town all their life but still don't feel like they belong there. Link to post Share on other sites
Ocean11 0 Posted September 22, 2003 Share Posted September 22, 2003 Yeah, the whole thing is cracked up to be a bit more than it really is. Language is like breathing - drowning included. If you're completely bilingual, you can breathe in both languages, but breathing normally doesn't feel like a big deal. The sad situation is the kids who don't even have a mother tongue, and who linguistically speaking have serious asthma. badmigraine, I appreciate your point having been there myself, but I'm convinced you can get used to a lot of uncomfortable situations. (Your resume suggests that you already know that.) But believe me, having eyes the same colour as a Siberian Husky also counts for a lot in that situation... Link to post Share on other sites
badmigraine 0 Posted September 22, 2003 Share Posted September 22, 2003 Ocean, my eyes are brown...sadly, I don't have the anime-eyes thing going for me... A slightly different topic, but one of the things that has always bugged me about learning Japanese is seeing white Americans on TV who appear to have a perfect command of Japanese grammar, vocabulary, culture, etc., but whose pronunciation is absolutely atrocious...their speaking sounds like some first-timer reading a romanized version of Japanese using an American-English accent. How in the world can this be? How can one get so good at Japanese without even approaching the native sound of it? Maybe they are the academic egghead types who learned it all from textbooks before even meeting a native speaker... I'm OK with this. Good for them! And maybe Japanese TV prefers to put this kind of speaker on TV to reassure Japan that foreigners will always be different. This bugs me a bit, but it's not going to change. My accent isn't that great either, but I just can't stand the sound of perfect Japanese being spoken with a blaring white American accent! Like nails on a blackboard. Anybody else notice this? Link to post Share on other sites
MistaSparkle 0 Posted September 23, 2003 Share Posted September 23, 2003 That doesn't get on my nerves as much as the white-guy talento (dave specter, etc.), that take on japanese affects. I don't know what it is exactly, but there's something that looks really bad about it.... poseurs. Link to post Share on other sites
sanjo 2 Posted September 24, 2003 Share Posted September 24, 2003 I haven't noticed that badmigraine. I always seem to hear bad accents accompanying bad Japanese for the most part. (Like me most likely) Link to post Share on other sites
xxx 2 Posted September 25, 2003 Share Posted September 25, 2003 I've met a few screwed up versions myself. But with the right upbringing, it should be a good advantage being brought up bilingual I reckon. Link to post Share on other sites
lin 0 Posted September 26, 2003 Share Posted September 26, 2003 I hope to bring my kids up bilingual - and they will be brought up here in Hong Kong so no problems about always moving around the world. Link to post Share on other sites
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