American
I've seen quite a few people here teaching languages to their kids, either as a native language or as a second or foreign language. I personally want to raise my future child(ren) monolingual unless their other parent wants to teach them their native language that is different from mine. I think a good base in one language will help them learn better in school, but I also do understand those parents who wish their children to grow up bilingual especially if/when their parents are from two different cultures.
What do you think and why?
I moved to The Netherlands last year with my boyfriend. He is Dutch and speaks it. I am Irish and speak English, Irish and obviously Dutch. We also decided to have a baby. My boyfriend’s sister volunteered to be a surrogate and if all goes well, we’ll have a little girl in the spring. I am forever grateful to her for this.
We went back to Ireland for Christmas (we followed all guidelines in place) and the conversation of what language the baby’s gonna speak came up.
I told my boyfriend that I want her to be raised bilingual on Dutch and English so that she’ll have a better future. I think having a second language will really help her in future with school, traveling career opportunities and so much more.
My boyfriend however, want’s to raise her only in Dutch so he can understand her. I asked him to elaborate and he said that he’s not good enough at English to raise a child. I told him that he is and that if he’s unsure, he can go to a class. He also said it might get her bullied for speaking what kids think is nonsense. This is in no way true. I work with kids everyday and they’re fascinated by the fact that I speak three languages.
I asked my family and my boyfriend’s family and all of my family as well as my boyfriend’s sister agree English is an important language to have and that they want to be able to talk to her. My parents also think I should raise her in Irish but I think three languages is too much for a child but I do plan on teaching her a little when she’s older. My boyfriend’s family think she should only be raised in Dutch because they can’t speak English.
So Reddit, WIBITA for raising my child bilingual?
Edit: Thanks so much for all the likes, comments and awards. The general consensus in the comments is that people are surprised that my boyfriend was opposed to my daughter being bilingual. I would just like to say that I was just as surprised as you guys are. I was surprised he’d say he has bad English because he doesn’t. He isn’t as good as some other Dutch people I’ve met but that doesn’t mean anything. He can talk to me and my family perfectly in English. Also, I feel the need to say this is the only disagreement we’ve had so far on how to raise our child.
I’m Swedish and fluent in both Swedish and English. Siri handles English better, and some features are only available when set to English.
So I set it to English. Now I can play songs on Spotify with English titles, and I can control my smart home. Then someone texts me in Swedish and Siri starts reading it, and you can’t understand a word. Nor can I respond in Swedish.
So I set Siri to Swedish. Now the calendar reads stuff correctly, texts are read correctly… until someone texts me in English. And I can’t play any Spotify songs unless they have Swedish titles.
And so it goes…
I remember using googles voice assistant and it switched between languages depending on what language you spoke in.
How come Siri doesn’t? And how do you handle it?
Most of you are not bilingual. If you are, feel free to ignore this. If you are not, a piece of advice from a trilingual writer writing bilingual and trilingual characters.
- When a character is fluent in 2 or more languages, they will not have a very heavy accent. When you know a language you know it’s pronunciation. Light accents? Yes, especially when the second language is earned later on in life (started after teen years). But it won’t be heavy and native speakers will have no issues with comprehension.
- The stereotype bilingual characters will never be like “uh… what’s the word for [word in another language] again?” or substitute words in another language for the word they forgot in the one they’re speaking is false. However, what most writers get wrong is which words they mistake. A bilingual character will not forget the word hello (that’s a bad way to demonstrate bilingualism). What they might do is curse in a different language if they are the only one who speaks it. They might forget technical terms or area-specific complicated words. They might have light grammar mess ups. Especially verb conjugations for Latin-similar languages. I’m talking Spanish, French, and the like. They might mess up the and a if it’s English, or noun endings for languages like Russian. In letters accents might be forgotten if their first language, like English, doesn’t require them, and their second does.
- Learning a language first doesn’t mean its going to be known better. I live in a country where I speak my second country everyday, and my first and third only at home. I know my second like it’s my first and most people don’t realize it’s not. Practice is important. Some people might forget their first language. I know someone who moved to a different language speaking country at age 13, and now (as an adult) knows the second language like the first and the first like a language learned in high school that was then mostly forgotten. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
EDIT: I have a lot of people saying that their experience doesn’t match this. I KNOW! I’m not the universal bilingual person! Different things work differently with different languages and it depends when, how, where, etc. you learn it. What I am saying is that these are the most common mistakes, for example though I do get that with a language that’s harder to learn (me when I was learning my third language) you do something I called “shifting your mind” (I meant in a severely disliked comment b
... keep reading on reddit ➡
I'm still monolingual for the most part, but sooner or later, that will change.....
As an Indian, I feel the major reason we are able to work as a single country is that majority of our educated population is bilingual, or sometimes even trilingual. Most of the federal/union's official work is done in English which is a foreign and neutral language, people learn their third language when moving to a region and learn the local language.
As a person who has only read about the region, i am curious what languages do you guys speak.
And truly multicultural! If you cared about them and really wanted them to have that experience, this is obvious.
But you won’t do that because your thirst for relevancy is too strong. It’s actually remarkable how egotistic these people are.
To answer my own question, I hold a very contradictory view about this tbh. Having grown up in a family that exclusively converses in Mandarin only, I have very limited exposure to English-speaking environment, except maybe in work or Reddit (not "speaking" per se but anyway lol). While we can boast to others that we know and understand multiple languages, I don't really feel great about it because our comprehension in one specific language is mediocre at best (at least for me). Often times when I want to write something that is not my mother tongue (i.e., English), I have to depend on Google Translate to make sure my grammar/vocabulary usage is correct. You probably don't want to go through my hassle of having to open a Google Translate tab every time when you want to type some long paragraphs like this one. Sometimes I'm really quite jealous of my banana colleagues who are capable to speak English in a wonderful way with their brilliant usage of English idioms (or higher level English words), something that I have very limited knowledge of. This is like a "jack of all trades, master of none" kinda thing lol. So, for those who can comprehend more than one language but not an absolute master in any one language, how do you think about yourself?
I was talking with a teacher at my school who is concerned about a child that has extreme excess saliva dripping down his face a lot and she said he doesn’t appear to move his mouth much when he talks. She consulted the direct hire school SLP- the direct hire school SLP said it is because “he is bilingual and mandarin has a lot of sounds that spit a lot/ create excess saliva”. He is 5 years old and the direct hire SLP also said his age is another reason why there is excess saliva.
I have NEVER heard of this!!! I am a contract SLP but I told the teacher it would be best to rule out a medical cause like a sinus infection or being low tone. I just thought the comment about the child speaking mandarin was very inappropriate.. is there any truth to what she said ?
I’ve done my research and noticed that the minoritized languages of Spain are in a much better health state than Welsh, and I will give the example of Basque because as it’s 100% different from Spanish it’s more comparable to the Welsh-English situation. (Both Galician and Catalan are closely related to Spanish to a point where they’re veeery easy to learn just by exposure, which is not the case of Welsh for being celtic, so it’s a different context than Basque)
I’ve found that 50% of Basque students study entirely in Basque, 23% partly Basque partly Spanish, 26% entirely Spanish with Basque as compulsory subject and only 0.6% entirely in Spanish.
Because of this, a lot of the younger generations can speak Basque despite lots of older people not having had the opportunity to learn it in school.
(total Basque population = total Welsh population, 3 Million)
Despite the Basque Country having ~ 600,000 native speakers, a very similar number to Welsh, I see much more music and online content and events and festivals in Euskera than in Welsh. And I looked for it. But it makes sense because here very few people learned it as a second language.
(Euskera is only protected / co-official in Spain. Not in France, so this post is only about the Spanish side)
Following the example of Euskadi and Nafarroa, Wales could achieve similar results in the future. It’s still way behind. But Welsh is an indo-european language, so should be even easier to teach to english-speaking kids.
Would this be something that you wish for the future? Yes or no?
edit: Seeing so many positive answers made me really happy :)
The old language will live.
One of the fandoms I'm in has several bi/multilingual characters. Does anyone have any tips on characters who speak multiple languages? Like when they might slip into their mother tongue, if at all?
Just a random curiosity that struck me.
I can understand both Chinese and English, but I can’t stop watching Chinese translated clips of HoloEN because they are really interesting.
Fàilte gu snàth cabadaich dà-chànanach a' mhìos
Tha an snàth seo do dhaoine sam bith a tha airson an cuid Gàidhlig a leasachadh tro chòmhradh.
- Bu chòir do gach post a bhith dà-chànanach, Gàidhlig an toiseach is Beurla gu h-ìseal (cleas am fear seo).
- Faodaidh tu cabadaich mu chàil sam bith a thogras tu.
- Na gabh dragh mu dhèidhinn mhearachdan.
- Chan fhaodar Google Translate (no a leithid) a chleachdadh.
—
Welcome to the monthly bilingual chat thread
This thread is for anyone who wants practice having conversations in Gaelic.
- All posts should be bilingual, Gaelic first then English below.
- You can chat about anything you like.
- Don't worry about making mistakes, just use whatever Gaelic you have.
- No Google Translate (or any other machine translator) or the Gaelic Mafia will send for you.
Siuthad!
Maybe this is a California thing, but every ad I’m seeing requires you to speak Spanish.
As a native Portuguese speaker who rarely swears, I find it almost not disturbing hearing and even saying bad words in English, Spanish or the rare ones I know in Japanese. Do you feel the same?
)