6 ms·

Just a comment on your parents adopting Portuguese at home, because they thought it was important. I know this was (and still is) common among immigrants, and i

• ezequiel-garzon 5y ago
  I think that neglects how much children can help their parents learn the host country’s language. There are several variables involved, as the parents doing well economically will also help their children in a different way.
  • Broken_Hippo 5y ago
    First, this somehow assumes that immigrants aren't doing well enough. And what - poor people should speak the local language at home just in case it improves their economic standing, even though it would lead to missing a lifelong benefit for the children. But if you are already doing well, don't? If you don't keep poor people suffering like folks do in the US, being poor isn't as big of a detriment and the adults are perfectly able to improve on their own time. And it isn't like being an immigrant means you are poor.
    • FredPret 5y ago
      Poor people in the US are remarkably well-off. According to [0], if you’re in the 20th percentile in the states ($25k income), you’d be in the 80th percentile of Germany. 20th percentile and lower is the OECD definition of working/lower class. Personally I found the 80% figure hard to believe. According to something else I saw online, it was 20th percentile in the US = 50th percentile in Europe. Which still shows how dominant the US is! [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global-income-calculator/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...
      • lebuffon 5y ago
        I can't prove this but I suspect this comparison is reflecting the relative price of goods and services which is a hyper-competitive market in the USA. Other differences between the USA 20th percentile group and the Euro 50th percentile group is that one of them has healthcare and a longer lifespan.
        • moonchrome 5y ago
          Europe has far greater inequality between countries than US between states. People talk about EU/Europe but they mean developed/rich Europe, they gloss over that poor parts are way worse than underdeveloped parts of US. For all that egalitarianism and social policies they sure like to use cheap labor from underdeveloped countries and box them out of their systems for years/exclude from residential markets with rent contract requirements.
          • FredPret 5y ago
            People who compare the entire US to Sweden and Finland never think to compare Mississippi to Albania.
            • CRConrad 5y ago
              Shit is looking up in backwards south-east Europe, too. Perhaps not all that much and all that fast, but still, the direction and speed seems better than the poorer bits of the US. So how much worse off than Mississippi is Albania really today?
              • FredPret 5y ago
                That’s wonderful for Albania et al, more prosperity is always a good thing. My point is just that people should compare apples to apples, especially with US vs Europe, or US vs city states/tiny countries like New Zealand
  • darkerside 5y ago
    This is a great point, despite the other bizarre response. There may be no greater factor to a child's success than their parents'success.
• tasogare 5y ago
  > Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home Your point may have been valid if not based on a Swedish example. Sweden has to be the most self-hating country in the world and the government probably saw promoting immigrants tongue as another way to accelerate the erasing of Swedish people and culture. So in this particular case it's almost granted that the reverse policy to the one advocate by Sweden is the good to follow.
  • gpderetta 5y ago
    For what is worth in UK immigrant parents are also encouraged to speak their native language at home with their kids. We have been speaking almost exclusively Italian at home with our son at home, and still his primary language is shifting to English as he started going to school. He even started speaking english with his Italian friends!
  • sureglymop 5y ago
    What? Can you elaborate on that a bot more because it just seems to be your personal opinion. Are you Swedish?
  • TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
    The “self-hating country” and “erasing of Swedish people and culture” are far-right myths. Sweden is really very similar to other European countries.
• darkwater 5y ago
  This one thousand times. School and full immersion in another language will make your children learn it perfectly no matter what. Please speak with them and make them watch TV/videos in your family language. And if you happen to be a mixed couple, follow the One Parent One Language rule, to make things easier for the kids. Obvioualy these are rules of thumb and there might be special needs for different children.
• tkgally 5y ago
  It’s hard to generalize about the immigrant experience. While there are indeed many cases where immigrant children benefit from continuing to speak their mother tongue at home, there are also families who want to integrate with their new home countries quickly and aren’t interested in maintaining their earlier language and culture. People who were members of an oppressed ethnic minority in a country that they had to flee as refugees, for example, might prefer to focus on settling into their new country rather than trying to maintain the language and culture of a country that they may never be able to return to.
  • btilly 5y ago
    The issue isn't one of preference, it is one of intellectual development. When you speak your native language to your children, it is easier for you to teach them how to think. And if they can think in your native language, they can transfer that skill to a new language. By contrast if you speak a language that you struggle with, your lack of fluency gets in the way of supporting your children's cognitive development. And a child who has never learned to think in any language, has a cognitive deficit that is hard to fix.
    • darkerside 5y ago
      As someone who falls into that bucket, I like to think I don't have any (abnormal) cognitive deficits. I do regret not learning the language of my parents, but I have friends who are much less adapted to western culture than I am because their parents weren't so keen to assimilate. But who knows really? Perhaps I'd be even smarter if I were trilingual?
    • II2II 5y ago
      Sometimes I feel like a broken record for saying this, but know the individual child and decide upon a course of action from there. I have seen everything from the heartbreaking circumstances of the author, where the child is unable to communicate with their own parents, to children who steadfastly refuse to learn the language of their peers. Both extremes result in social and intellectual development being stifled. In both cases, there is a need to help the child navigate a middle road in order to aid their social and intellectual development. That is before you even consider the typically cited benefits of being multilingual since it is only considering being functional in their communities.
• anovikov 5y ago
  I agree with this and yet i never speak to my child Russian and we don't speak Russian at home so prevent child from picking up Russian language, Russian speaking contacts or absorb Russian/Soviet culture on the internet, to get away from it fully as soon as possible, because i see it as evil.
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  • wazoox 5y ago
    Man this is horribly sad.
    • anovikov 5y ago
      Well, i'm a political emigrant. I left Russian because i believe it's a bad country. Obviously i don't want my child o grow up Russian (and it works, at the age of 10 she can't read Russian at all and speaks it as a so-so foreigner, but has fluent English and Greek).
      • United857 5y ago
        That's a strange mindset to actively deny this culture and heritage to your kid, much of which has nothing to do with modern Russia or the Soviet Union. My parents fled Communist China but they still made sure I learned Chinese language, history and culture. Nowadays I disagree with much of US and UK politics but I still want my kids to learn English and be well versed in classic literature, etc.
        • anovikov 5y ago
          Well, in your case you have another "good" country to identify with: Taiwan (although i'm sure learning Traditional writing system solely for this end is too much). We have no "good" Russia. Moreover, we are not descendants of any "good" culture (such as those who brought us famous Russian classics): they were all either brutally killed or pushed out of the country. We are the descendants of illiterate peasants who came to power in 1917 and killed everyone else - we have no good heritage behind us, apart from the heritage of Communism, which while did some cool things to be proud about, was inherently evil - to be proud of Soviet achievements is like being proud of Nazis because they built cool autobahns.
• schwartzworld 5y ago
  > parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish I married into an Armenian family, and can attest that you don't have to teach your kids English if you live in America. I know several families who spoke Armenian exclusively at home and their kids still found themselves fluent in English by 5 years old. It's everywhere and they are sponges.
  • telesilla 5y ago
    The only challenge is writing: English is awful to learn, compared to other languages because of how obtuse and irregular it is. (Chinese & Kanji aside I'm sure, due to memorization). It's hard for kids who learn say, Spanish in school then at home struggle to master also the English language. Still, I suppose English is hard for most people regardless!
• Aerroon 5y ago
  >However there's now significant research showing to not do that. Here in Sweden immigrant parents are actively encouraged to speak their mother tongue at home and not try to help their children by speaking Swedish, because it's counterproductive. Won't this cause the situation Estonia has with the Russian-speaking minority? Enough immigrants banded together to create Russian-speaking communities. Many of them never learned any Estonian as a result, because they didn't feel they needed to. Most people in stores spoke Russian, they put their kids into a Russian speaking school etc. The end result is that there are many people in Estonia that have lived here almost their entire lives, but cannot speak Estonian at all. This makes their lives more difficult: from finding a job to getting a better education to dealing with bureaucracy. Even if you send your kids to an Estonian speaking school it causes issues. They'll suffer academically - imagine doing school effectively in a foreign language. It would make a kid want to go to school even less. In that case you're effectively handicapping their future. I'm not sure that some minor cognitive advantages are worth the risk of not assimilating.
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  • dorfsmay 5y ago
    The studies are about parents speaking one language but fully integrating their kids in the local language. What you are talking about is development of communities in a language different than the local language with their own stores, schools etc... That's a different subject altogether.
    • konschubert 5y ago
      Plus, the Russians in Estonia came there during Sowjet occupation. They saw Estonia as a colony of Russia and their kids went to Russian-speaking schools.
• moonchrome 5y ago
  My sister came back home from UK to Croatia for a couple of years but didn't want to teach her kid Croatian insisting he should speak English (as they eventually went back to UK). This was a terrible choice - he couldn't socialise with local children (preschool age) and is severely underdeveloped in that area, plus his vocabulary isn't that developed as the only place he heard English was at home. Maybe the Swedish policy works for school age children, but preschool - I very much doubt it without special education programs.
  • tilolebo 5y ago
    Preschool kids usually pick up foreign languages even faster. Was your nephew in an English speaking preschool in Croatia?
    • moonchrome 5y ago
      He moved back right before preschool (at 5 years), I guess I shouldn't have used that term - it means both "younger than school age" and "preschool program age" which is a year before school here. Problem was he couldn't even go to kindergarten as he would be completely unmanageable for them and couldn't socialise well - in large part due to language issues.
• lhorie 5y ago
  I totally get the better-for-the-kids argument, but I think there's some nuance people gloss over. My dad's Portuguese is fluent but still has quirks to this day. Obviously picking it up from school works. But my paternal grandma never learned Portuguese and her husband died young (car crash). She never developed a social circle after that, which meant her health deteriorated slowly over time (since she'd just stay home all the time) and she ended up dying isolated in a elderly home, even though she was surrounded by people. On my mother's side, my grandparents immigrated to be farmers, so my mom had a lot of siblings. They developed a quirky pidgin where sentences - especially when more advanced vocabulary was involved - mixed Portuguese and Japanese. This speaks to limitations of learning a language exclusively in a familial setting: some topics just never come up, especially considering age-appropriate subject matter. I think the educational and social-outside-home components are extremely important to learning a language - most of what I remember from Japanese comes from spaced repetition from nihongakkou (Japanese school) or self study.
• xtracto 5y ago
  This is something I've always wondered about Mexican families that emigrate to the US: Why do they push their kids to forget Spanish? English will be spoken in their every day environment. But they have an additional language for free... You have people spending years learning a second language, why throw away that "advantage"? Forget about preserving heritage or any other political motives. Just as pure pragmatic benefit, I would prefer my kid to have 2 languages.
  • EduardoBautista 5y ago
    This is definitely not the norm in Mexican families. I speak exclusively in Spanish with my parents but English with my brother. All the other Mexican (as in first generation in US) families in the US that I personally know are similar.
• mehdix 5y ago
  Thousand times this. The biggest mistake my parents made, was giving up on their mother tongue to help me learn a language they were not fluent in. I did not learn the new language from them, I learned it from school, reading books, movies and all sort of others things which were present everywhere. Their decision only made socialising with other cousins and family members difficult for me, made unnecessary overhead for our inter-family communication, made me in fact segregated. If you have kids, let your kid master their parents mother tongues and flourish.