hey all,
I’m asking because:
Wife is pregnant, she can talk fluent french/english/japanese.
I on the other hand can talk arabic/french/english.
Is there any hope that the kid can pick up all of these, or should I give up on one ? how would you go about dealing with this situation ?
I was thinking no Japanese at home… try a mix arabic/french from my side, wife will try english.
I apologize if this the wrong sub to post this, I was just wondering if anyone had similar experience.
Thanks
16 comments
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So a total of 4 languages? I think the difficulty would be that these languages have different alphabets and grammar structure. If both you and your wife speak French and English I would say start with those and you can add Arabic and Japanese as a young child. Being in Japan will help with the Japanese exposure. And with Arabic I would say speak to your child, sing, show movies or tv shows. You just need to give your child exposure to the language as much as possible. Maybe look outside the home like schooling or tutoring? But that would be when they are older
I speak French / English / a bit of Japanese. The wife speak Japanese / English.
I was going to try for all the languages I speak, but I started a bit differently. I focused on English only with a once a week call to my mother back home so my daughter can hear some french. My wife speaks 50/50 Japanese/English to her.
But with my daughter (now 2.5 years old) spending a lot of time with her grandparents, who speak only Japanese, and going to a public Japanese daycare, I saw her Japanese going through the roof, with the English improving at a much slower rate.
I have abandoned the hope of teaching French to my daughter, but will happily help her the day she wants to learn.
Not sure how trilingual (or more) parents do, so this may not have been all that helpful.
2 parents’ languages + kindergarten language until they are old enough to decide for themselves.
My kids speak Dutch, English and Japanese fluently.
No Japanese at home usually, since they learn that at school; English when we speak as a family; Dutch when I speak to them individually or they speak to my family in my home country, they also visit the Netherlands regularly and use FaceTime with cousins/aunts/uncles/grandparents; finally, games books, tv, radio in a mix of all three.
My wife speaks Japanese/English, I speak Dutch/French/English/Japanese. Our oldest son speaks all four.
He goes to a French school and speaks Japanese with my wife/her family, usually we speak English in the household and I speak in Dutch when I speak to him directly. (He did go to school in The Netherlands until he was 4 tho)
Similar to what others mentioned basically we leave Japanese to the school/their friends circle. At home is basically parent’s language each.
It all depends what level of fluency you are expecting. Being able to say simple things (“what’s for dinner?”) in many languages is no issue, but if you aim at them being able to read books, have deeper conversations etc. with ease, it becomes much harder. Our kids are 4 and 5 and speak both German and Japanese (father speaks only Japanese, I speak mostly German with them, Japanese daycare). It is already noticeable that their Japanese is becoming dominant and their German remains basic. I think it will be challenging enough to cultivate ONE second language besides of Japanese at a higher level and assume they will need longer stays in Europe during summer vacation to keep their German up in the future. If you want to have them speak several languages, just casually talking at home will probably not be enough and you have to think strategically about how to expose them to each language for longer stretches of time (conversations with native speakers, stays abroad, reading books, watching videos etc.). I personally would probably concentrate on Japanese + either French or English to make it manageable.
It’s fairly common in Singapore and Hong Kong homes in Japan for their kids to seem to *automatically* speak Chinese, Japanese, and English quite well.
Near my house by the [German School Tokyo Yokohama](https://www.dsty.ac.jp/en), I go to their [Octoberfest](https://www.dsty.ac.jp/offentliche/info/oktoberfest-2022) and events. **ALL** the kids, teachers, and parents speak German and English well… besides Japanese in wildly varying abilities.
Over at the Indian School, all the kids speak some Japanese, besides English and their particular Indian language. At the lycée français international de Tokyo, all the kids speak Japanese quite well besides solid French and having a variety of English abilities.
The only monolingual laggards are the kids at the American School and The British School in Tokyo.
Remember that 75% of the people in the world speak more than one language—It’s no big deal.
*Source:* I’ve been a substitute teacher at several of those international schools.
It’s a good question and good to think of this early on. I would say it depends on your goals and your feelings about “picking up a language”.
My wife was an interpreter at one point. Her expectations of our child is for his Japanese to be native level and his English also native level. And by “native” I mean university-level educated native, could walk into the boardroom and nail a presentation or be a news announcer, or a journalist, etc., level. She has very high expectations!
At that level, it’s going to be/has been an effort to provide the education and exposure to different experiences to try to get there. I am not considering a third language at all at this point. If we do introduce a third, it will be perhaps in middle school and with the expectation of a “nice to have” hobby study.
There is a theory out there that a child must have a primary langauge that he/she learns to think deeply in, to analyze and theorize in. If a primary, deep-thinking language is not developed properly, the biligual child may struggle.
I don’t know about this. Maybe. I used to hire exclusively bilinguals for research jobs. I do recall one or two out of a large number of job candidates that appeared to struggle to speak both English and Japanese at a truly professional level, but these were rare occurences.
If neither of you are native Japanese speakers, I would suggest thinking about whether you are comfortable with your child being native in Japanese and maybe French or English as the other language – either of which is possible in Tokyo with international schools. After that, the third language for conversations with family or travel. Or you move out of Japan, which would make things easier from an education standpoint but may not be possible (just had some friends do this last week).
I guess it depends on your child(ren). My wife and I speak fluent Japanese and English (her Japanese is native and her English is pretty good for someone who grew up in Japan, while I was born in Japan but raised mostly in the US) and while our sons were in Northern California their Japanese and English were growing pretty well since they had both Japanese and American friends.
Once we moved to Texas, their Japanese dropped off pretty badly even though we spoke Japanese at home. They didn’t have any friends who spoke Japanese (they had a handful of “Hafu” friends but they all spoke English, too). I suppose with internet and apps things might be easier to be at least bilingual but not so much back in the pre-iphone days…
Keep in mind that language includes cultural context which is impossible to gain at once for 2 or more languages. Either you will be good with one language or semi-good with multiple languages. What I mean is that things like grammar and pronunciation may be perfect but the depth of the culture that one gets while growing up in one country cannot be replicated while living in another. Besides part of growing up is having FUN CAREFREE LIFE rather than being busy learning languages and cultures. I personally think all new parents should read “Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn–and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less”.
I stress about this myself. I speak to my 2 y/o daughter in English, my wife and her nursery Japanese. She’s definitely dominant in Japanese while understanding English… But not really speaking it. I asked my wife to include English more, but she’s worried about her mispronunciation. Any tips? I really don’t like missing out on what she’s saying. I’m learning Japanese, but it’s slow going
From personal experience, if one parent is Japanese and the child is in the Japanese education system if possible limit speaking at home to the other parent’s language. Otherwise, Japanese language will become the default and speaking in the other language may become a struggle.
I would say its depend on your background and environment that your kids have around them. I speak Japanese, English, Vietnamese and a bit of French. I would consider Japanese as my first language cuz I feel most confident using it. Im also fluent in English, just dont have the accent. Vietnamese is the same.
100% native level with the same mistakes a native makes? up to 3 languages.
I am not a parent, but I learned about this in interpreting school from a professional in the field.
Tl;dr: Don’t teach languages to your kid that you don’t speak at a native level.
(I’m going to assume for this post that you live in Japan and are a native French speaker, not a native English speaker)
Basically what it comes down to will be your level of fluency in each language, as well as your dedication to teaching each language right from the beginning.
If you want your child to speak French, English, Japanese and Arabic all at native level, you will need to bring them up in a native-level environment for all of those languages. That means you will need to be speaking to your kid in all 4, reading books to them in all 4, watching TV in all 4 and making sure they learn the equivalent words in all 4.
This is hard enough with two languages, let alone any more. It is not impossible, but the child will naturally gravitate towards one language (likely whichever one they use in kindergarten, probably Japanese). You’re going to then have to force them to speak English, French and Arabic with you to equal proportions at home to make up for it, which will be stressful for everyone.
People often say that there’s a risk your child will get “confused” learning so many languages at once – this is not really true, but there is a good chance that their linguistic development for each language will be limited because you aren’t able to spend the same amount of time talking with them in each language compared to mono linguistic couples. For example if a Japanese couple spends 5 hours per day speaking Japanese to their kid, you have to spend 5 hours per day per language to reach the same level of proficiency for each. There’s simply not enough time in the day for that.
The parents’ fluency also has a huge impact. If neither of you are native-level speakers of a language, it’s impossible for your child to pick up native-level proficiency from you in that language. Fluent is not the same as native. Kids are amazing at absorbing information, but there’s a limit to how much you can learn from fluent non-native speakers and external sources like TV. Again, they will gravitate towards their “strong” language if they can’t properly express themselves in another. Kids don’t care about fluency, they care about being able to communicate.
Therefore my advice to you would be to give up trying to teach languages to your kid that neither you nor your wife speak at a native level and to give up teaching languages that only one of you knows. That knocks out Arabic, English and Japanese, but given that you live in Japan and your kid will probably need to know Japanese to get by, you really need to be raising them with some Japanese or they’ll struggle immensely.
Overall you should probably be raising them with French and Japanese at home, in (as much as possible) equal proportions. If you are a native French speaker and your wife is a native Japanese speaker, you should try to only speak to your kid in those two languages respectively – you in French and your wife in Japanese. Once they start going to kindergarten and start communicating in Japanese with other kids, you could then ease off the Japanese at home and start introducing English, which should give them a healthy advantage when they start learning English in school.
In the best-case scenario your kid could end up a true bilingual, native-level Japanese and French speaker, with good fluent non-native English. Alternatively, if your first language is Arabic, you could try to teach that instead of French, but I think you’d have a hard time simply because your wife doesn’t speak it at all. The kid will grow up with only you to speak Arabic with, which will severely limit both their ability and desire to learn.
Sorry for the giant wall of text, but I hope someone finds it interesting and educational.