8 ms·

>But if a child grows up speaking that second language — Korean, say — with cousins and grandparents, attending a “Saturday School” that emphasizes the language

>But if a child grows up speaking that second language — Korean, say — with cousins and grandparents, attending a “Saturday School” that emphasizes the language and the culture, listening to music and even reading books in that language, and visits Korea along the way, that child will end up with a much stronger sense of the language. Did this from Kindergarten through 10th grade. "Saturday School" was a full program that followed the Japanese Ministry of Education's requirements for accreditation (since in my era, most students went back to Japan after their parents' 4-6 year stint in the US office). I do notice that my Japanese is stronger than that of my peers who stopped going to these schools at a much earlier age. >“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. For me, this was a big problem since my English vocabulary remained quite weak compared to my peers all the way through high school (mainly because I had a strong preference for reading Japanese material at home). The general lack of confidence in a broad range of English skills is a long lasting effect that is orthogonal to my actual knowledge or skills. I'm a "true bilingual" but I don't know if I'd want my imaginary children to be the same. If you're committed to living in the States, maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. My personal feeling is that being highly proficient at English and being "okay" at a second language works out well, but at the same time I know many friends of Asian descent who are self conscious of their "child-like" use of their second language. A conundrum.

ThomPete 9y ago
My oldest was 3 when we moved to the US my youngest was born there. Every year they spend 6-8 weeks in Denmark with their grandparents and at home we speak Danish and only occasionally do we speak english with them. They both have less vocabulary but the oldest can read both Danish and English. We never taught him to read danish but believe that spending time in Denmark for that amount of time still exposes them to enough Danish to internalize some of the language constructs and general orientation of language. It's been quite interesting to follow.
nneonneo 9y ago
My parents are Chinese but I grew up in Canada. Consequently, I am fully fluent in English, but my Chinese is quite poor by comparison. I am "okay" by your standard, in that I can converse comfortably on day-to-day topics with native speakers, but my vocabulary falls apart with complex subjects. I am indeed fairly self-conscious of my "child-like" use of Chinese; on a recent visit, I was shocked that I could not read a 3-year-old cousin's picture book completely without stumbling on words. I have since redoubled my efforts to learn the written language :) I did Saturday school, cultural programs, and got involved with the community. Consequently, I do feel closer to my Chinese heritage than most people of a similar "CBC" background. However, there is just so much cultural background that I will never see or experience, and that saddens me somewhat. There's always a compromise. Had I been more fully immersed in Chinese, I can fully expect that my English would not be so good - and for my academic work, that would be a detriment. So, perhaps I should be happier, as you say, that I ended up maximizing my English skill.
- chj 9y ago
  Regarding your Chinese, you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid. I can't imagine how it could be of use to your career, but once you grasp the language, there are so many interesting and subtle things to discover that you probably won't regret the time.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    > you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid I really don't think this is the case. An ordinary Chinese kid is learning Chinese 24x7 -- for decades. If you start learning a new language when you are an adult, the expectation seems to be that you'll be both fluent and proficient in a few years. There is a myth that children are able to do this. It's just not true. Talk to a 5 year old. They have mediocre fluency, and very little proficiency. The average English speaking 5 year old only has a vocabulary of 5000 word families. Contrast that to the average high school student with over 15,000 and the average university graduate of over 20,000. Even by 10 years old, try plonking them down in front of the news and ask them to summarise what was said. Most 10 year olds can't do it, because they lack both vocabulary and grammar. Look at English text books for junior high school students. Note how basic the English is. And still many students struggle to comprehend (though by the time a child is 10, they have pretty amazing fluency because that's what they practice all day, every day). I guarantee that you can vastly outperform a child in learning a second language if you spend comparable amounts of time and effort. I say this having taught English as a second language. Now you may ask why, after years of study and frustration in classes that most students can produce no language. The main reason: if you don't review every day, you will hit a ceiling pretty fast. Students usually have class 1-3 times a week for 1-2 hours per class. This is literally useless. 5 minutes a day, every day, will give you dramatically better results. The next biggest reason: teaching fluency is unpopular because historically many teachers never achieved any real fluency (and they inflict the poor teaching they received on the next generation). Also, fluency is virtually impossible to test objectively and takes a huge amount of teacher time to even evaluate. I worked it out one day. I was expected to work in classes where my opportunity for 2 way conversation in the class worked out to less than 30 seconds per student per hour. Pretty much guaranteed failure. Next biggest reason: Students are told that 2000 words of vocabulary will make them fluent, and so limit themselves to this level (that is surpassed by 3 year old native speakers -- talk to a 3 year old and judge for yourself). Students also forget the frustration of being a child and not understanding what's going on. Children frequently burst out in tears and tantrum all over the place because they are so frustrated. We have this idea that the acquisition of our first language was effortless, and so wonder why we need to spend so much effort in the next language. Next time you talk to a child, question why they don't understand what you are saying. Very often the surprising answer is because they don't speak English very well! And finally (finally for this already long email, not because I ran out of reasons): Adult speakers are unwilling to act like children. They are unwilling to put themselves in situations where they do not understand what's going on and where they have no control over their surroundings. They are unwilling to be silly, and to make mistakes and to interact with language resources that are aimed at their level (like cartoons). Again, watch a 4 year old. Copy them. (The same Spongebob episode 500 times in a row until you are repeating the lines to yourself as it is playing). It's not because it is harder as an adult. Just the opposite. As adults we are so used to having thing be so easy that we are reluctant to put in the effort of a 4 year old.
grecy 9y ago
> If you're committed to living in the States I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled. The world would be a much better place if every person living in a developed country were forced to spend a year living in a different one during high school, for example. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime - Mark Twain
- hueving 9y ago
  >I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled. It depends on what you mean by 'travel'. I think spending anything less than a month in a place just makes it more like a visit to a theme park than anything enlightening.
  - isostatic 9y ago
    Obviously you can't immerse yourself, but from spending maybe 6 or 7 days in Gaza over 3 or 4 visits I have a far better idea of the conditions that those people live in. It's far easier to empathise with what you read on the news when you've been there and can picture it.
    - Victoria88 9y ago
      I've made $64,000 so far this year w0rking 0nline and I'm a full time student. I'm using an 0nline business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great m0ney. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Here’s what I've been doing….. please don't copy "™" in url thanks HERE► :) www.joinmate2.com™ :)............WORK AT HOME Copy&Paste This Link ◕Good Luck◕
  - grecy 9y ago
hartator 9y ago
> maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. I wonder in which extent this apply to programming languages.
- almostApatriot1 9y ago
  Spoken languages are much more complex than programming ones, and the vocabularies are immense. You're talking about 200K+ words in English alone.
  - 21 9y ago
    Not to mention that you also need to learn how to speak it. And sounding native is extremely hard.
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    The comparison works a little better when you take the whole ecosystem into account: you can pick up Java in a few days, but that doesn't mean you'll understand Java EE configuration files, or know how to animate your Android app. Once you start specialising, you will realise that 24-hour days are very finite. Even then, I don't think the comparison works because programming ecosystems come and go. The rate of change is much faster than in human languages. So whether you specialise or try to be a generalist - you can undo that decision within the next decade.
microcolonel 9y ago
Frankly, I don't see why vocabulary should be a metric for language learning success beyond a certain threshold. I try to avoid big dumb words.
- yorwba 9y ago
  That threshold might be higher than you realize. I could read a Chinese news article reasonably well -- except for all the words that actually relate to the topic. Each language essentially has a collection of mostly separate vocabularies that only apply in certain situations, but to avoid communication problems, you need to handle any situation you might encounter. If you have a somewhat diverse set of interests, that can be quite a lot.
hkmurakami 9y ago
One thing that I forgot to note. My Japanese is so good that very rarely can someone discern that I didn't grow up in Japan (it's usually through mannerisms or attitude that they glean that I have some foreign background). But even then, I've experienced a glaring lack of cultural fluency that only comes with spending a lot of time in the society. A lot of unwritten rules and customs that we all take for granted for our native cultures.
- veidr 9y ago
  I think that's a really interesting point, somewhat orthogonal to language mastery itself, and probably particularly impactful in Japan. A kid might grow up with perfect Japanese and be able to say anything, but choosing what to say can be another matter; how to make or respond to a request, how to deal with an affront, how to present yourself in a hiring interview, or a first meeting with a girlfriend's father... I'm a white Californian guy, and my wife's Japanese. Our kids are dual-nationality and growing up bilingual, but this was a major factor in the decision to raise them primarily in Japan for the first part of their lives — so they get those things intuitively. I myself went to university in Japan, and what I saw there convinced me this was a big deal. I was put into the "special Japanese" class, due to my wildly asymmetrical Japanese ability — I could speak Japanese an order of magnitude more effectively than I could understand it being spoken to me (reading/writing was still out of the question, as I'd only been learning for a year). But the interesting thing about that class was that all of my classmates were Japanese, who had grown up abroad for some/many years during childhood. So I got to witness their struggles with the finer points of the language and writing kanji (which was normal, and what you'd expect) and also with the implicit rules and norms of Japanese culture and interpersonal interaction. That latter bit was kind of mindblowing to me at the time. Since I was this white kid, nobody ever expected me to speak Japanese, or even be able to use chopsticks. (That's still largely true, incidentally, and it really seems to chafe at some long-term expats here, sometimes causing them to write epic rants about Japan...) In fact, I'd grown to understand, if I were to flawlessly execute the finer points of Japanese etiquette, it would veer into uncanny valley territory and make people uncomfortable — something like a chimpanzee putting on his own bowtie and sitting down to eat a formal meal with a knife and fork. But through that one class, I got to peek and to see how much different it was if you were Japanese. They had to be very careful when speaking their minds, to avoid sounding insolent, rude, or unqualified. Where I might get a reaction amounting to "oh, interesting to hear the American opinion", my Japanese buddies expressing the same thing might get "oh, you aren't really Japanese," or even essentially "fuck you, weirdo". It was interesting for me to see their struggle, and to realize it had nothing much to do with language. Being largely exempted from it, though, it wasn't that interesting to me... until I had kids. But hopefully they will be "bi-cultural" or whatever we call it, in addition to bilingual. (I am pretty confident that it will take a lot fewer years of practice for them to acquire "full Californian" status than it will to be perceived as "full Japanese".)
killedbydeath 9y ago
It's not obvious that speaking second language better will come out at the expense of English. I grew up bilingual and was at the top of my class for my second language compared to monolingual natives. There are whole countries of bilingual/trilingual people in Europe who speak their main language very well still. I think knowing a second (and later third) language gave me a better understanding of language structure. Same in sports, if you are athletic, you will have easier time picking up new sports.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  To a first order, it's about how much time you invest into each skill. For me, a non Latin language didn't have noticeable spillover effects into English until much later in my life when I developed decently advanced linguistic proficiency in both languages. This isn't to say I didn't do well in school -- I was at the top of my class in high school and went to the top ranked university in the country. Still, had I invested more time trading and writing English material during my childhood and adolescence, those skills would have developed much earlier. And I agree with you about sports. I'm an advanced or white level athlete in 4 or 5 sorts, and it's very easy for me to become producer at a new sport, and I often notice body control, posture, focus, or valance related carryovers.
- usrusr 9y ago
  My pet theory is that multilingualism multiplies the delta in natural talent: gifted people become stellar writers/talkers, whereas less talented people might suffer from career-inhibiting deficiencies in all languages and often would have been better off focusing on a single language. I'm far from considering myself multilingual, but if I could somehow trade a part of my English skill for a magical boost in my native language I would gladly take it: half of my English abilities would still be plenty for understanding the occasional stackoverflow post, this place here would be just fine without my contributions and ordering food at a restaurant is actually easier when you can fully embrace the "helpless tourist" level. In my natural language, one level better might be the deciding difference between writing as a necessity and writing as a selling point.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
>A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff I'd like to see more data on this as I don't think it's necessarily true. One thing I've noticed about bilingual people is that they are more expressive... creative in the words and turns of phrases they use. Also, I'd say people from Iceland have a larger vocabulary and greater command of the English language than the average home grown American. I remember asking a lady "Does everyone here speak English so well" She responded "Of course" with an expression of mild disgust that made me feel like a dunce
- veidr 9y ago
  I find this hard to believe, too. I would also like to see the data broken down by how much kids read. I would be surprised if a kid who read 4x more books (fiction, or any kind of book) and spoke 3 languages didn't have a larger vocabulary and better expressiveness than an average-reading TV-watching monolingual kid.
mrexroad 9y ago
Thanks for sharing. My kids are going through similar education, Saniku Gakuin twice a week after public school. While it's a bit intense in terms of homework and tough to balance with sports, but they find the work far less "meaningless" than the busy work they have to do in public school. My oldest is somewhat dyslexic, so he has a strong preference to reading japanese books--but I'm just happy to see him reading. I often struggle myself in finding appropriate words, even though I speak only English.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  What a coincidence, I attended Saniku from kindergarten to 3rd grade, many decades ago (then I switched to Saturday school which was less academically demanding). I'm happy to hear that your children are enjoying the school. I think their Bible Study sessions before class helped me gain some Judao Christian cultural knowledge that serves me well to this day.
Berobero 9y ago
Nice to hear from someone like you; my daughters are currently going along your same path with Japanese. Japanese is a second language to me, but our family has always been Japanese-only despite living in the states. It's honestly exhausting on all parties involved to try to commit to developing "true" bilingualism; my wife (Japanese) in particular seems to wonder if this level of commitment and effort is really necessary. After all, it's not like our daughters won't be able to speak Japanese if we stop, it's just that the "expected" level of literacy isn't going to be there (sans further effort on our daughters' part, anyway), and we're living in the US, so how important is that in the end? I too know people who "lost" their chance to keep up with Japanese and regret it now, but there's a real price to pay in developing that, it feels. If nothing else, our daughters "lose" their Saturday, as well as other time to the homework. The saving grace is that our older daughter says she likes the people at the Japanese school better than the her regular American school (which is still a fine school to being with, and a Japanese/English bilingual program to boot). I'm realizing it's really difficult to know what's best for your kids in the end, and there's some many potential tradeoffs...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  I hope to write to you in more depth at a later date, but for now forgive me with just a short remark. If your children (like me in elementary school) only (want to) spend time with their Japanese school friends and not their American school friends after school and on weekends or fort birthday parties and whatnot, expect them to have some level of difficulty in the social microcosm of American elementary school (like I did). Obviously anecdotal, and not being in a tiny private school (50 students per grade) might help ameliorate things.
shas3 9y ago
I grew up in India with an Indian language at home and school medium of instruction, English. I'm generally considered very good at written English (attested by great grades, scores, etc.) and good at articulation but average at getting spoken English correct. But I'm improving at spoken English as I live in the US. Dunno if your situation is similar.

ThomPete 9y ago

My oldest was 3 when we moved to the US my youngest was born there. Every year they spend 6-8 weeks in Denmark with their grandparents and at home we speak Danish and only occasionally do we speak english with them. They both have less vocabulary but the oldest can read both Danish and English. We never taught him to read danish but believe that spending time in Denmark for that amount of time still exposes them to enough Danish to internalize some of the language constructs and general orientation of language. It's been quite interesting to follow.

nneonneo 9y ago

My parents are Chinese but I grew up in Canada. Consequently, I am fully fluent in English, but my Chinese is quite poor by comparison. I am "okay" by your standard, in that I can converse comfortably on day-to-day topics with native speakers, but my vocabulary falls apart with complex subjects. I am indeed fairly self-conscious of my "child-like" use of Chinese; on a recent visit, I was shocked that I could not read a 3-year-old cousin's picture book completely without stumbling on words. I have since redoubled my efforts to learn the written language :) I did Saturday school, cultural programs, and got involved with the community. Consequently, I do feel closer to my Chinese heritage than most people of a similar "CBC" background. However, there is just so much cultural background that I will never see or experience, and that saddens me somewhat. There's always a compromise. Had I been more fully immersed in Chinese, I can fully expect that my English would not be so good - and for my academic work, that would be a detriment. So, perhaps I should be happier, as you say, that I ended up maximizing my English skill.

chj 9y ago
Regarding your Chinese, you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid. I can't imagine how it could be of use to your career, but once you grasp the language, there are so many interesting and subtle things to discover that you probably won't regret the time.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  > you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid I really don't think this is the case. An ordinary Chinese kid is learning Chinese 24x7 -- for decades. If you start learning a new language when you are an adult, the expectation seems to be that you'll be both fluent and proficient in a few years. There is a myth that children are able to do this. It's just not true. Talk to a 5 year old. They have mediocre fluency, and very little proficiency. The average English speaking 5 year old only has a vocabulary of 5000 word families. Contrast that to the average high school student with over 15,000 and the average university graduate of over 20,000. Even by 10 years old, try plonking them down in front of the news and ask them to summarise what was said. Most 10 year olds can't do it, because they lack both vocabulary and grammar. Look at English text books for junior high school students. Note how basic the English is. And still many students struggle to comprehend (though by the time a child is 10, they have pretty amazing fluency because that's what they practice all day, every day). I guarantee that you can vastly outperform a child in learning a second language if you spend comparable amounts of time and effort. I say this having taught English as a second language. Now you may ask why, after years of study and frustration in classes that most students can produce no language. The main reason: if you don't review every day, you will hit a ceiling pretty fast. Students usually have class 1-3 times a week for 1-2 hours per class. This is literally useless. 5 minutes a day, every day, will give you dramatically better results. The next biggest reason: teaching fluency is unpopular because historically many teachers never achieved any real fluency (and they inflict the poor teaching they received on the next generation). Also, fluency is virtually impossible to test objectively and takes a huge amount of teacher time to even evaluate. I worked it out one day. I was expected to work in classes where my opportunity for 2 way conversation in the class worked out to less than 30 seconds per student per hour. Pretty much guaranteed failure. Next biggest reason: Students are told that 2000 words of vocabulary will make them fluent, and so limit themselves to this level (that is surpassed by 3 year old native speakers -- talk to a 3 year old and judge for yourself). Students also forget the frustration of being a child and not understanding what's going on. Children frequently burst out in tears and tantrum all over the place because they are so frustrated. We have this idea that the acquisition of our first language was effortless, and so wonder why we need to spend so much effort in the next language. Next time you talk to a child, question why they don't understand what you are saying. Very often the surprising answer is because they don't speak English very well! And finally (finally for this already long email, not because I ran out of reasons): Adult speakers are unwilling to act like children. They are unwilling to put themselves in situations where they do not understand what's going on and where they have no control over their surroundings. They are unwilling to be silly, and to make mistakes and to interact with language resources that are aimed at their level (like cartoons). Again, watch a 4 year old. Copy them. (The same Spongebob episode 500 times in a row until you are repeating the lines to yourself as it is playing). It's not because it is harder as an adult. Just the opposite. As adults we are so used to having thing be so easy that we are reluctant to put in the effort of a 4 year old.

grecy 9y ago

> If you're committed to living in the States I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled. The world would be a much better place if every person living in a developed country were forced to spend a year living in a different one during high school, for example. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime - Mark Twain

hueving 9y ago
>I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled. It depends on what you mean by 'travel'. I think spending anything less than a month in a place just makes it more like a visit to a theme park than anything enlightening.
- isostatic 9y ago
  Obviously you can't immerse yourself, but from spending maybe 6 or 7 days in Gaza over 3 or 4 visits I have a far better idea of the conditions that those people live in. It's far easier to empathise with what you read on the news when you've been there and can picture it.
  - Victoria88 9y ago
    I've made $64,000 so far this year w0rking 0nline and I'm a full time student. I'm using an 0nline business opportunity I heard about and I've made such great m0ney. It's really user friendly and I'm just so happy that I found out about it. Here’s what I've been doing….. please don't copy "™" in url thanks HERE► :) www.joinmate2.com™ :)............WORK AT HOME Copy&Paste This Link ◕Good Luck◕
- grecy 9y ago

hartator 9y ago

> maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. I wonder in which extent this apply to programming languages.

almostApatriot1 9y ago
Spoken languages are much more complex than programming ones, and the vocabularies are immense. You're talking about 200K+ words in English alone.
- 21 9y ago
  Not to mention that you also need to learn how to speak it. And sounding native is extremely hard.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  The comparison works a little better when you take the whole ecosystem into account: you can pick up Java in a few days, but that doesn't mean you'll understand Java EE configuration files, or know how to animate your Android app. Once you start specialising, you will realise that 24-hour days are very finite. Even then, I don't think the comparison works because programming ecosystems come and go. The rate of change is much faster than in human languages. So whether you specialise or try to be a generalist - you can undo that decision within the next decade.

microcolonel 9y ago

Frankly, I don't see why vocabulary should be a metric for language learning success beyond a certain threshold. I try to avoid big dumb words.

yorwba 9y ago
That threshold might be higher than you realize. I could read a Chinese news article reasonably well -- except for all the words that actually relate to the topic. Each language essentially has a collection of mostly separate vocabularies that only apply in certain situations, but to avoid communication problems, you need to handle any situation you might encounter. If you have a somewhat diverse set of interests, that can be quite a lot.

hkmurakami 9y ago

One thing that I forgot to note. My Japanese is so good that very rarely can someone discern that I didn't grow up in Japan (it's usually through mannerisms or attitude that they glean that I have some foreign background). But even then, I've experienced a glaring lack of cultural fluency that only comes with spending a lot of time in the society. A lot of unwritten rules and customs that we all take for granted for our native cultures.

veidr 9y ago
I think that's a really interesting point, somewhat orthogonal to language mastery itself, and probably particularly impactful in Japan. A kid might grow up with perfect Japanese and be able to say anything, but choosing what to say can be another matter; how to make or respond to a request, how to deal with an affront, how to present yourself in a hiring interview, or a first meeting with a girlfriend's father... I'm a white Californian guy, and my wife's Japanese. Our kids are dual-nationality and growing up bilingual, but this was a major factor in the decision to raise them primarily in Japan for the first part of their lives — so they get those things intuitively. I myself went to university in Japan, and what I saw there convinced me this was a big deal. I was put into the "special Japanese" class, due to my wildly asymmetrical Japanese ability — I could speak Japanese an order of magnitude more effectively than I could understand it being spoken to me (reading/writing was still out of the question, as I'd only been learning for a year). But the interesting thing about that class was that all of my classmates were Japanese, who had grown up abroad for some/many years during childhood. So I got to witness their struggles with the finer points of the language and writing kanji (which was normal, and what you'd expect) and also with the implicit rules and norms of Japanese culture and interpersonal interaction. That latter bit was kind of mindblowing to me at the time. Since I was this white kid, nobody ever expected me to speak Japanese, or even be able to use chopsticks. (That's still largely true, incidentally, and it really seems to chafe at some long-term expats here, sometimes causing them to write epic rants about Japan...) In fact, I'd grown to understand, if I were to flawlessly execute the finer points of Japanese etiquette, it would veer into uncanny valley territory and make people uncomfortable — something like a chimpanzee putting on his own bowtie and sitting down to eat a formal meal with a knife and fork. But through that one class, I got to peek and to see how much different it was if you were Japanese. They had to be very careful when speaking their minds, to avoid sounding insolent, rude, or unqualified. Where I might get a reaction amounting to "oh, interesting to hear the American opinion", my Japanese buddies expressing the same thing might get "oh, you aren't really Japanese," or even essentially "fuck you, weirdo". It was interesting for me to see their struggle, and to realize it had nothing much to do with language. Being largely exempted from it, though, it wasn't that interesting to me... until I had kids. But hopefully they will be "bi-cultural" or whatever we call it, in addition to bilingual. (I am pretty confident that it will take a lot fewer years of practice for them to acquire "full Californian" status than it will to be perceived as "full Japanese".)

killedbydeath 9y ago

It's not obvious that speaking second language better will come out at the expense of English. I grew up bilingual and was at the top of my class for my second language compared to monolingual natives. There are whole countries of bilingual/trilingual people in Europe who speak their main language very well still. I think knowing a second (and later third) language gave me a better understanding of language structure. Same in sports, if you are athletic, you will have easier time picking up new sports.

hkmurakami 9y ago
To a first order, it's about how much time you invest into each skill. For me, a non Latin language didn't have noticeable spillover effects into English until much later in my life when I developed decently advanced linguistic proficiency in both languages. This isn't to say I didn't do well in school -- I was at the top of my class in high school and went to the top ranked university in the country. Still, had I invested more time trading and writing English material during my childhood and adolescence, those skills would have developed much earlier. And I agree with you about sports. I'm an advanced or white level athlete in 4 or 5 sorts, and it's very easy for me to become producer at a new sport, and I often notice body control, posture, focus, or valance related carryovers.
usrusr 9y ago
My pet theory is that multilingualism multiplies the delta in natural talent: gifted people become stellar writers/talkers, whereas less talented people might suffer from career-inhibiting deficiencies in all languages and often would have been better off focusing on a single language. I'm far from considering myself multilingual, but if I could somehow trade a part of my English skill for a magical boost in my native language I would gladly take it: half of my English abilities would still be plenty for understanding the occasional stackoverflow post, this place here would be just fine without my contributions and ordering food at a restaurant is actually easier when you can fully embrace the "helpless tourist" level. In my natural language, one level better might be the deciding difference between writing as a necessity and writing as a selling point.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago

>A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff I'd like to see more data on this as I don't think it's necessarily true. One thing I've noticed about bilingual people is that they are more expressive... creative in the words and turns of phrases they use. Also, I'd say people from Iceland have a larger vocabulary and greater command of the English language than the average home grown American. I remember asking a lady "Does everyone here speak English so well" She responded "Of course" with an expression of mild disgust that made me feel like a dunce

veidr 9y ago
I find this hard to believe, too. I would also like to see the data broken down by how much kids read. I would be surprised if a kid who read 4x more books (fiction, or any kind of book) and spoke 3 languages didn't have a larger vocabulary and better expressiveness than an average-reading TV-watching monolingual kid.

mrexroad 9y ago

Thanks for sharing. My kids are going through similar education, Saniku Gakuin twice a week after public school. While it's a bit intense in terms of homework and tough to balance with sports, but they find the work far less "meaningless" than the busy work they have to do in public school. My oldest is somewhat dyslexic, so he has a strong preference to reading japanese books--but I'm just happy to see him reading. I often struggle myself in finding appropriate words, even though I speak only English.

hkmurakami 9y ago
What a coincidence, I attended Saniku from kindergarten to 3rd grade, many decades ago (then I switched to Saturday school which was less academically demanding). I'm happy to hear that your children are enjoying the school. I think their Bible Study sessions before class helped me gain some Judao Christian cultural knowledge that serves me well to this day.

Berobero 9y ago

Nice to hear from someone like you; my daughters are currently going along your same path with Japanese. Japanese is a second language to me, but our family has always been Japanese-only despite living in the states. It's honestly exhausting on all parties involved to try to commit to developing "true" bilingualism; my wife (Japanese) in particular seems to wonder if this level of commitment and effort is really necessary. After all, it's not like our daughters won't be able to speak Japanese if we stop, it's just that the "expected" level of literacy isn't going to be there (sans further effort on our daughters' part, anyway), and we're living in the US, so how important is that in the end? I too know people who "lost" their chance to keep up with Japanese and regret it now, but there's a real price to pay in developing that, it feels. If nothing else, our daughters "lose" their Saturday, as well as other time to the homework. The saving grace is that our older daughter says she likes the people at the Japanese school better than the her regular American school (which is still a fine school to being with, and a Japanese/English bilingual program to boot). I'm realizing it's really difficult to know what's best for your kids in the end, and there's some many potential tradeoffs...

hkmurakami 9y ago
I hope to write to you in more depth at a later date, but for now forgive me with just a short remark. If your children (like me in elementary school) only (want to) spend time with their Japanese school friends and not their American school friends after school and on weekends or fort birthday parties and whatnot, expect them to have some level of difficulty in the social microcosm of American elementary school (like I did). Obviously anecdotal, and not being in a tiny private school (50 students per grade) might help ameliorate things.

shas3 9y ago

I grew up in India with an Indian language at home and school medium of instruction, English. I'm generally considered very good at written English (attested by great grades, scores, etc.) and good at articulation but average at getting spoken English correct. But I'm improving at spoken English as I live in the US. Dunno if your situation is similar.