Bilingual Kids
Children are bilingual geniuses. They are born with an inherent multilingual capacity. This is something that I inherently trust and once again, feel deep respect for the knowledge that babies are born with. Such as how to be birthed, how to breastfeed, how to emotionally connect with their caregivers, and the capacity to understand multiple languages the moment they are born.
I acknowledge all of this, and I still have a difficult time not projecting my own fears and stories onto my children. Particularly around how they will cope with culture shock and not knowing much of the language. I know they are going to adapt far quicker than I am, which is also how I know I’m projecting my own fears.
When Mei was born, we once had grandiose dreams of using the One Person, One Language (OPOL) method.
Japanese is my husband’s mother tongue, however, we speak English to one another exclusively (well, if we ignore my feeble attempts at speaking Japanese to him, and his feeble attempts to understand me).
To cut to the chase, OPOL has not worked for us. It turned into me nagging my husband whenever he spoke to the girls. I would hiss, “Nihongo!” whenever he spoke to them and besides that being a a very poor recipe for marriage and parenting, the desire to have the children be bilingual has been a far higher value for me than him.
His language abilities are such that when he’s speaking to another bilingual person, he will start a sentence in one language and by the time he’s at the end of the sentence he’s speaking in the other language. Often without notice, switching tongues without a moments pause.
This is amazing to me, and something that would be a dream come true if I were ever able to do it. And yet, to him it’s just as simple as talking to a friend.
Which is why, our daughters’ language skill has been on the forefront of my mind since they were born, and yet it’s just not a priority to him. He doesn’t necessarily see the benefit the same way someone who doesn’t have those skills does.
So, as we head into preschool in Japan, I want to share how my daughters’ language skills change as we spend time there. I’m fascinated by children and language and hope that I’ll keep up posting as I notice changes in their skills so as to have a timeline as such to see how they change, grow and expand.
Here is what their Japanese language skills are now, and when and how often they hear Japanese.
We read about 1 Japanese book a day.
They hear the Japanese news everyday.
We listen to a Japanese book on YouTube once a week and make flashcards (as shown in the picture above) on six or so words that we want to learn.
They very occasionally (once a month) watch a Japanese movie.
Here is how they currently apply Japanese:
At the moment, my daughters know certain words or phrases in Japanese, but they don’t string them together to make sentences.
My eldest likes to speak “Japanese gibberish” as we call it. It sounds exactly like Japanese but the words are either not real words or if they are, they don’t go together at all.
Our eldest will go into preschool once we get there and at the moment we are trying to teach her some important phrases that she may want to say to her teacher.
That’s all for now and I’ll post again once we get there and notice some language changes. I’m excited to see how fast they learn!
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