Monday, September 10, 2012
The Critical Mom's Guide to the Bilingual Child
Expect them to talk a lot and to mix up their languages constantly until they are two, four, five . . . depends on how many languages you have them on. Ignore teachers who insist that they should speak the national language at home or who threaten they won't be able to spell. Teachers are wrong about this. From birth to three or four children can absorb as many as five languages. I've known children raised on three, and mine are on two: German and English. Curiosities of their speech include the straight mix--as in "Wo sind meine red shoes?" and the cute translation, as when a package arrives and they want to unpack it, but they don't know the English word for "unpack," so they just translate the German one, "auspacken": "Mommy, can I pack it out?" For a long time your American friends will say the kids have a German accent and your German friends will say the kids have an American accent. Ignore both sets of friends. The kids actually sound unusually precise and correct to the Americans, and the Germans find that they have a peculiar freedom of intonation that sounds almost inspired, if not sloppy. Read to the kids constantly in the language that is not spoken outside the house--English--and insist that they speak that language at all times at home. When they complain, "But Mommy, I don't know the English word for . . ." you will have to learn the German words for "goal," "referee," "penalty kick," and "goalie" in order to explain, and then you will have to insist that they talk about soccer in English. Go back to reading The Cat In the Hat, Goodnight Moon, Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Seven Silly Eaters, The Dutchess Bakes a Cake, Tikki Tikki Tembo, The Gruffalo, and any other book that delights while instructing. The very first rule is that when you're reading an English-language book to your child you have to enjoy it. If it bores you you'll read it badly; if it has a moral it's bad for the kid. Then they'll get older and they'll only know certain words in German because they never hear those particular words . . . the really big cuss words . . . at home. They only hear them at kindergarten, and then first grade, and they only hear them in German. And to make matters even more charming, the teacher has the idea that the kids should learn what words are not acceptable to say, everybody write them all down, and by the end of the lesson your child has absorbed the unimaginable phrase "Ass-faced ass fucked," which actually rhymes in German, and even sounds good, provided, of course, that you don't understand it. Which is the thing I was always counting on when we visited New York and all three kids used to scream obscene insults at the top of their lungs. "Oh," I'd think. "Thank God nobody around here understands a word of that." Except that then they get their own computers, find the horrible stuff on You-Tube before you get there, and learn all those awful phrases, and more, in English--and doubtless in other languages. Keep reading to them, even if you're hanging on by your fingernails; they are probably ready for everything from the Madeleine L'Engle books to The Wizard of Oz to Rick Riordan to the ever-present Diary of a Wimpy Kid, (complete with endless sequels and movies) with which they impress their friends by having it in English. Enjoy it when they speak English, too, even when the two of you aren't quite speaking the same language, as when I told my daughter, then three, that she and I would be flying to New York, and she asked, "Mommy, do we have wings?"
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Another great blog comment and I am reminded of my neighbor's child who asked her what was anyone doing about the wimpy kid's diarrhea.
ReplyDeleteThose Diary of A Wimpy Kid books . . . yuck. Another one I can't stand is Captain Underpants . . . which I find regressive and just plain yucky. I was reading my kid lovely Scottish fairy tales when a good friend sent these. But I do find them useful, occasionally, when I teach teachers How To Teach English: if you have kids who have never held a book in their hands in their lives, then a yucky comic about anal jokes really does the trick.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I must say, my son loved Captain Underpants. He picked 'em at the bookstore at age 7 and he read 'em by himself. To me, reading is reading; it's good to see kids do it, whatever their choice of book. My son is now 18 and his reading this summer (also self-selected) included Proust's "Recherche..." -- in French -- "Walden," some Conrad, some Vonnegut, and a Virginia Woolf novel his ex-girlfriend had said was the best novel ever written (he disagreed, preferring Conrad). Oh, yeah, and "Girl, Interrupted," which he'd seen me reading for an essay I was writing. He devoured that one in a day and much enjoyed it. Wait til he sees Angelina Jolie (whom he first loved as the cartoonized Lara Croft) in the movie.....
ReplyDeleteOK OK . . . . it's a relief to hear a story like this, but I am still stomping around thinking Cap'n U is just ewwww . . . gross!
ReplyDeleteReally enjoyed this post! I plan to raise my (future) kids bilingual in English and French, but this made me remember the day that my baby sister came home from preschool to announce to all of us that so and so had gotten in trouble for saying the other s-word. Which turned out to be stupid fuck.
ReplyDeleteHee hee. Where we live, the teachers love what they fondly imagine to be British English: actually it's a fairly heavy German accent with a light dusting of British. American accents sound, they say disapprovingly, like chewing gum. I feel another blog post coming on about this. Another concern I hear from parents is that "my child won't speak one of the languages!" I say just keep talking to the child in that language. I do sometimes really scream "Say it in English!" but I think what makes the difference in their fluency is that I read to them in English all the time.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment!
Had I mentioned that one day when I was in a loud, indeed militaristic, manner insisting that all three children speak English, the oldest, by way of comment, belched loudly. To which his sister replied: "Burp it in English!"
ReplyDelete