Raising bilingual children

This is not one of the more “polished” posts I usually try to write, but it’s something I wanted to share. Raising children who are bilingual is a surprisingly challenging endeavor. For some background, my wife is Japanese, and I am American.¹ Our daughter is now over 2 years old, and has really exploded in her language skills. But things have taken unexpected turns. Initially, we wanted her to learn both languages at the same time, so the agreed-upon rule was that I would speak English to her, and she would speak Japanese. Simple enough. This is what we did for the first two years.

However, it became clear that she wasn’t learning English as fast, because she stays home with Mommy all the time, so her Japanese was stronger, and she preferred using that. When I taught her to count, or asked a question in English, she would sometimes respond in English, but otherwise, her “default” language was Japanese. In early 2009 when we went to Japan, Baby’s Japanese really exploded because she was already familiar with the language, and she spent two months around her extended family there.

So, I was surprised when she came back from the trip speaking really good Japanese and almost no English. I tried to gently push her to catch up on English, but this didn’t work. She understood every question I asked her, but her responses were almost always in Japanese. Her language skills were still developing nicely, so we decided it was best not to pressure her. In Japanese, they have a term for this called bokokugo (母国語) which means a mother’s native language. We did further research and we found that most children learn their mother’s birth language first, since they spend so much time around Mom usually, and since she will be living mostly in the US, she’ll learn English later. Because she can understand everything I say, that gives her head-start over kids who emigrate to the US later in life.

Interestingly, I noticed this weekend that she started speaking more English to me. Baby and I spent a lot of time at home (I was on-call) while Mom went shopping for Mother’s Day, and because I was spending more time with Baby than before, she began to use more English. So, just being around kids and conversing with them helps them learn a language much better than trying some kind of “plan” or “solution”.

¹ As a joke, I tell me my wife I am an American barbarian. So, if I don’t understand something she said, I joke “Sorry dear, I am just a barbarian.” We tease each other all the time.