looking for advice for anyone who is raised by lingual children in English and Japanese. I heard that it works best if one parent only speaks to the child in Japanese and the other only speaks to the child in english. I can get a little frustrating and confusing I’m sure. but what I mainly confused about is how do I let the child know when to use each language with others. like this kid can’t go to school and start spouting off Japanese….
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24 comments
>how do I let the child know when to use each language with others
You don’t. The kid will figure it out, just like they figure out which language to speak with which parent. And which language to use with various grandparents, uncles, cousins, etc.
The kid will mix some words up in the beginning, but kids have an amazing capacity to learn and adapt.
I can’t speak to Japanese specifically as I started learning as an adult, but I was raised trilingual so hopefully this comment is helpful to you.
Kids are incredibly adaptable. They will learn pretty quickly where to use each language, so that isn’t something to worry about.
If English is the dominant language (at school, outside, etc.) though, I highly recommend supplementing Japanese with classes or other learning materials and media. Though I started English a couple years after my L1, I use English a lot more in day to day life so it’s outpaced my L1 ability and literacy.
Lastly, kids respond differently to being raised bilingual. For example, my siblings who were raised with the same languages weren’t interested in learning or maintenance, so they can understand most of what is said but refuse to speak anything other than English.
Where do you live? If you are in an English speaking country, you should mainly speak Japanese at home. If you are in Japan, speak English at home. Once they start going to school, it will become a struggle to get them to use/keep the non-school language.
I’m not really sure exactly what your asking but I had to speak English to some family members and Japanese to other so if you have any questions I’m happy to answer.
Are you asking if they can figure out if people speak Japanese? unless I was in hoshuko or Japan I never assumed someone could speak Japanese and just spoke in English.
As a bilingual child (English and Spanish), kids learn pretty quickly that they are speaking different languages and that they work in different settings or with different people. Even if he were to go to school and use Japanese, the moment he gets blank stares he’ll quickly learn that this is an “English language place” and adjust.
If a child has the opportunity to be bilingual, give them that opportunity!
Most bilingual children show a little bit of a language delay or have issues code switching, but that usually resolves by the time they’re 6 or 7. By then they can move between the two.
Bilingual children usually have better speaking and/or listening skills (depending on how much they’re encouraged to speak). If you want them to read and write, you will have to support that.
How the child gets their second language is up to you. If you’re living in an English speaking country, they will learn English at school and from friends.
If your partner is a native speaker or fluent (N2-N1) in Japanese, they can be the “Japanese” parent while you are the “English” parent. If you’re both fluent in both languages, maybe have alternate days of Japanese and English. Of course, don’t force the child if they’re using English on a Japanese day, but definitely encourage it.
If neither of you speak Japanese, you might want to hire a Japanese au pair, tutor or babysitter to come in with explicit instructions to use only Japanese with the children
A few tips:
Play games with your kids to increase vocabulary: I’m looking at something blue! Yes, it’s blue bear! Show me something red! Yeah, your shoes are red!
Narrate your actions and the actions of others: Mommy is cutting up some tasty broccoli for a delicious dinner. Look how green it is! Daddy is watching football on TV. How exciting!
Watch shows in Japanese. My friends’s kid’s favorite is Bluey on Disney+. You can also watch things like Anpan Man or Nippon Mukashi Banashi.
Read Japanese books. While reading ask questions: What do you think the brown bear sees? A chicken?! Maybe… I think it’s… a toenail!
Find local Japanese speaking parents or a Japanese Saturday school (there maybe some preschools too, depending on where you live) and enroll you child do they can learn more Japanese and make Japanese speaking friends.
I have nothing to add or offer in this conversation.
I just want to say that this post and the replies put a smile on my face.
I was raised in the US by an American father and German mother.
My mother never taught my siblings and I her language because someone told her that raising bilingual children would confuse us, and put us at a disadvantage. I always felt like I was robbed of one half of my culture because of someone’s ignorance ;_;
We are Spanish and English, learning Japanese.
They know when to speak what. Don’t stress about that at all. What you’re talking about is called One Parent One Language, or the OPOL Method. You should employ it immediately. They should also be reading in both languages at their level.
Not Japanese, but I grew up bilingual English and Spanish (in an English-speaking country). My mom only spoke English, and my dad only spoke Spanish to me.
Kids are generally pretty good at reading the environment. If everyone around you is speaking English, that’s the language you speak too. Since English was the language I was mostly surrounded by, it because my default.
If I ever spoke to my dad in English, he would pretend not to understand me, so I got the message pretty quickly that I always had to speak Spanish to him specifically.
What you’re describing is a fairly common technique called One Parent One Language (OPOL) used when the parents are native speakers in different languages [but according to studies on the topic, is only really effective if done very consistently](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2167/jmmd441.1). In my case, as someone who was raised bilingually (in English and Serbian), both of my parents primarily spoke Serbian to me when growing up but once I started going to school I started picking up English and we settled on a “speak English on weekends, Serbian on weekdays” schedule.
When I was really young, I did speak Serbian when speaking English by accident but it’s something I stopped doing very quickly (though I do sometimes misspeak and a Serbian word slips out). My mum says that I was embarrassed about it at the time, but I don’t remember it at all it obviously wasn’t that important after all. I wouldn’t worry about it too much — kids say strange things all the time anyway (I also discovered that a lot of people will completely ignore if you insert a foreign word into a sentence — they just think they misheard you).
Three things to keep in mind:
* Kids don’t want to exert effort, and speaking a language they are weaker in (which is always going to be the language their peers **don’t** use) is going to be annoying for them. So it will be necessary to force them to do it somehow (at least, it was in my case and every other heritage speaker I know).
* They are almost certainly going to be weaker in the language only spoken at home. I speak Serbian to an acceptable degree (I went to Serbia recently and had no issues even with more complicated things like government forms and processes) but I would still say my English skills are actually native while Serbian is more of a language I am comfortable in but still have many gaps in my knowledge. I have friends who were raised in a similar environment to me and their Serbian language skills vary widely — from not being able to speak at all, to having native-like abilities in the language.
* I stopped being interested in Serbian when I was in high-school but after starting to learn Japanese my interest in my heritage language was rekindled, so there is the question of how interested your kid will be in continuing to work on their heritage language skills in their teens. I picked it up again (and my skills are better now than when I was in high-school and still lived with my parents) but it wasn’t particularly easy either.
If you are in Japan, I personally think it will be easier if both parents speak English to the kid, and they pickup Japanese from daycare/school. One-parent-one-language is very difficult. Whichever language they aren’t using at school is going to be the one that they resist learning.
Some kids are easier than others.
I have two kids bilingual in English and Japanese. We do the one parent one language method. Mother speaks 95% Japanese to the kids and I primarily use English. Every night we read children’s books before bed with my wife reading Japanese books and I read English books. Both kids were perfectly bilingual by age 4 with very minimal code switching.
On schooling. Our primary environment is English but both of our kids are in Japanese Saturday schools. My older kid has a lot of homework from this and my wife spends a lot of time and effort to help out and make sure the kids keep up with the subjects – especially kanji. This is very important if you want your kids to be literate growing up. If you are outside of Japan and live in a city with a Japanese Saturday school option, I highly recommend it.
If there is no Japanese school option, I believe the Japanese government has resources available for native Japanese speaking parents to use in home schooling type of situations. But I don’t have specifics on that.
I spoke to one parent in eng and the other in japanese, I have a pretty good understanding in Japanese but I still have a lot more to learn because I never went to a Japanese school (aside from Saturday school), my English skills are native level since I went to an english school 🙂
Kids arent stupid and they know who can and cannot speak Japanese lol
My kid is 1.5 years old and just learning to speak. He doesn’t seem confused at all switching between English and Thai. I think he understands better than I do.
I spoke Japanese with mum and English with dad. I grew up in an English speaking country and visited family in Japan regularly so it became obvious who to speak what to.
If going this route, make sure you don’t let your kids speak a mix of English and Japanese. Anecdotally, my other ハーフ friends whose parents let them do this are nowhere near as fluent.
Have you seen the SYR Bros. Youtube channel? These 3 boys grew up in Japan to Japanese speaking parents, never left the country, don’t attend international school, and are 100% native sounding English speakers. Apparently their parents had them consume lots of English media when they were small and they speak to each other mostly in English.
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpFcejpztlc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JpFcejpztlc&si=EnSIkaIECMiOmarE)
We mix freely to get our daughter used to a multilingual environment and mix languages for kids shows too. One parent one language would mean I would have to pretend not to understand Japanese and my wife would pretend to not understand English which doesn’t feel natural to us.
In general, children adapt very quickly. I used to babysit a girl that spoke German, French and Mandarin and started learning English in school at 10 years old as well.
I’ve been reading this book called the invite gift by Charles yang, it’s about how kids develop the ability to speak as they age, and the basic takeaway is that you just talk to them and they’ll eventually get it. Just talk to them in both languages, the mind is built to work through that
I’ve never personally done it, but I took a ‘Child Language Development’ Class at uni.
But basically, children are really good, better than adults, at discerning which language to use with which person AND about discerning whether or not they’re being understood. I imagine it can be as simple as they pick people that look like the people they speak that language too, but if that person replies in a way they don’t understand OR if they act confused by what the child says, then the child simple tries the other language until they get the feedback to affirm it is correct. That feedback could be as simple as a smile compared to furrowed eyebrows.
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It’s actually quite interesting. Apparently they’re also very good at keeping both languages seperate. Apparently they can appear to develop SLOWER than normal, knowing half the vocabulary of other kids, but considering they know TWO languages, they technically know the same amount of language of both but appear to know less, but they quickly catch up by about 9 years old (from poor memory?) and it’s not a sign of slow or underdevelopment, just sheer volume of content they have to take in.
> who **is raised by lingual children** in English and Japanese
So, who’s going to teach the kids English?
I grew up in the UK with Japanese parents. Parents only spoke Japanese and so I only ever spoke English in school.
There’s a subreddit for this topic I believe. I think your idea is great. Please get ideas from the other subreddit. I have family members who were forced to do the ‘home language’ at home and just learned English outside. and they resented the language and never wanted to speak it, so as an adult they aren’t actually fluent. Make a community for their foreign language…same age friends who speak that language, cartoons in that language, etc.
My wife is Japanese. We live in Canada. The kids are bilingual.
Part of it was the ‘mom only speaks Japanese to the kids’. The bigger element was the kids also only ever watch TV shows or Movies in Japanese, and take classes at a Japanese cultural center for basic reading and writing.
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