Have a “just turned 3” year old girl, at Japanese nursery who is developing Japanese well.
At home, I only ever use English with her, and my wife speaks to her mainly in Japanese (maybe 15% in English).
While my wife and I only speak to each other in English, she is not bilingual to the extent it would be fair/realistic for me to ask her to speak to her daughter in English all the time at home (which I know is the optimal scenario).
I try and spend a lot of time with my daughter – and her English is slowly coming, high vocabulary, but struggling with sentences.
Would it be worth putting her into an international nursery (a decent, local one I have identified) for two days a week? It would be 80k per month (including extension hours) for just 2 days a week. While I could afford that, I still appreciate it is a lot and I’m unsure of the return on investment we might expect.
Anyone with similar experience?
3 comments
It depends what school. If it’s a small local, you need to visit and make sure their teachers speak good English.
We visited many nurseries with my wife, some international nurseries had only Japanese staff with horrible accent, and the price of a real international school.
The one we ended up choosing has good english speaker, real native-level with perfect accent. My only complaints are that while this is international nursery, most of the kids there are purely Japanese, communication with the school is in Japanese, the kids speak Japanese as their first language among themselves, and some teachers use japanese, not all teachers speak english.
this is good enough to get used to English, not good enough for English to be the main language for your kid. (though if it’s only 2 days per week that may be fine for you)
Other one (such as Seisen, or British international school) are real international school. Main language is english, paperwork is english, kids speak english.The only way they maintain that is by avoiding 100% native japanese. So they pre-screen with an interview you making sure your family speaks good english.Because if there are too many japanese speaking families, kids end up speaking japanese at school.
In summary, it depends on your budget and expectations. The only thing you need to be careful is to avoid paying the full price of an international school and end up with a bunch of japanese (or any nationality for that matter) staff speaking broken accents and transmitting it to your child.
PS: In the host family I was long ago, the kid was speaking perfect english. At one point she got to an international school with lots of staff from india and started picking up their accent. The mommy removed her from the school. Later on, the kid got good accent back and could imitate the indian accent perfectly, it was funny.
Maybe some English Books & Cartoons/Programming…if that doesn’t help progress then perhaps the international nursey option afterwards. Like one poster said, the proper accent will be very important
If you are able, you may find that spending holidays abroad with English speaking family, and then when she’s older at summer camps overseas could be enough, without having to mess around with two different preschools etc. Especially if she gets a lot of input at home with you and with videos, books, etc. I think videos and books are really important for introducing vocabulary outside of the usual day to day activities that happen at home.