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Traveling to Europe for the first time last year, my eyes were opened to how many languages there were that you don’t typically hear about in the mainstream. It

Traveling to Europe for the first time last year, my eyes were opened to how many languages there were that you don’t typically hear about in the mainstream. It surprised me to learn there were other languages in Spain other than Spanish (and that the Latin American dialect had key differences to the European one). Likewise that “Italian” is not the main language spoken by many people in Italy, which apparently has at least a few related but different languages (Neapolitan, Veneto, etc.) in use. Closer to home, I see my Asian American friends who never grasped the language of their original culture being frustrated that they cannot pass down the language to their kids. A couple we are close with is a Taiwanese husband and Korean wife. The husband knows virtually no Chinese and the wife knows virtually no Korean. They want to teach their son both, but can’t. I suppose this is the start of the process of how we ended up with the current generations of say, Italian Americans or German Americans or Irish Americans who mostly lost the ability to speak the language of their ancestors several generations ago.

veqq 4y ago
> They want to teach their son both, but can’t. Yes, they can. It is very easy. Each parent only speaks to the child in their own language. That is all. ---------------- The children of immigrants lose languages because their parents are ignorant of basic pedagogy (in most cases the parents just raise the kids in English, then get mad they don't magically know the language they were barely exposed to.) Presumably, they think they should have full conversations with each other in Korean and Chinese to expose the kid - however as a baby understands that they speak all 3 languages, the baby would default to the most common one (English). The key here is to establish boundaries of language use e.g.: "I speak Chinese to dad. I speak Korean to mom." The parents should not respond to the child in English - they have to preserve the boundary to encourage the kid to use the other languages. If one of them uses English with the child, it will greatly weaken or ruin the effect. Adding cartoons, other speakers etc. for these languages helps but isn't as fundamentally necessary as this. You can even add multiple nannies which only speak their own language to the child. (There is some amount of regular exposure needed, but that's not an issue for 2 parents.) The child will pick up English from other children and tv.
- decafninja 4y ago
  As I said, the husband cannot speak Chinese. The wife cannot speak Korean. They both speak only English. They’ve already lost the languages in their generation, thus cannot pass it down to the next. If the grandparents lived close, that could sort of be an option, but apparently they do not.

veqq 4y ago

> They want to teach their son both, but can’t. Yes, they can. It is very easy. Each parent only speaks to the child in their own language. That is all. ---------------- The children of immigrants lose languages because their parents are ignorant of basic pedagogy (in most cases the parents just raise the kids in English, then get mad they don't magically know the language they were barely exposed to.) Presumably, they think they should have full conversations with each other in Korean and Chinese to expose the kid - however as a baby understands that they speak all 3 languages, the baby would default to the most common one (English). The key here is to establish boundaries of language use e.g.: "I speak Chinese to dad. I speak Korean to mom." The parents should not respond to the child in English - they have to preserve the boundary to encourage the kid to use the other languages. If one of them uses English with the child, it will greatly weaken or ruin the effect. Adding cartoons, other speakers etc. for these languages helps but isn't as fundamentally necessary as this. You can even add multiple nannies which only speak their own language to the child. (There is some amount of regular exposure needed, but that's not an issue for 2 parents.) The child will pick up English from other children and tv.

decafninja 4y ago
As I said, the husband cannot speak Chinese. The wife cannot speak Korean. They both speak only English. They’ve already lost the languages in their generation, thus cannot pass it down to the next. If the grandparents lived close, that could sort of be an option, but apparently they do not.