Trains!

[aeon]

My wife and I are trying to bring up our son bilingually in English and Chinese. Just recently he has become interested in all things to do with trains, but while I have a pretty good railway-related vocabulary in English, I only know enough to buy a train ticket in Chinese. My wife, the native speaker, is not surprisingly equally limited - how many lady train-spotters have you met?.

My question is, does anyone have an English to (pref Simplified) Chinese train and railway-related wordlist that they could post, or know where there is an English-Chinese train vocabulary glossary on the Internet?

[skylee]

Like these? ->

http://hantown.blogchina.com/1528405.html

http://www.eol.cn/article/20050525/3138469.shtml

http://www.hkrs.org.hk/members/gibbons/glossary.htm

http://www.hao360.com/page/details_words.asp?id=4044

[aeon]

Thank you, those links are very useful.

How do you make the difference between 'locomotive' (the engine which provides motive power), 'rolling stock' (the part of the train which carries the load, whether they be carriages for people or trucks for goods) and 'train', which is a locomotive plus rolling stock?

[Jive Turkey]

Aeon, you bring up an interesting issue in bilingualism. As you probably already know, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to be completely bilingual. By completely bilingual, I mean having equally high levels of competence in both languages at say the level of a university educated native speaker. One obvious cause of this is getting formal education in only one of the child's languages, or getting only a limited amount of formal education in one and a lot of it in the other. An early stage cause, though, is the one you bring up. I'm pretty sure that if my Chinese wife and I stay in China and have a daughter, that daughter is not going to learn as much English about the topics that a mother and daughter frequently discuss, i.e. dolls, monthly anomalies and sex. She'll still know a lot more language about those things than almost all non-native speakers, though, and like your boy and trains, she'll have the language skills to learn more about it on her own later on so long as she's had some stimulation in English on the topic.

[skylee]

How do you make the difference between 'locomotive' (the engine which provides motive power), 'rolling stock' (the part of the train which carries the load, whether they be carriages for people or trucks for goods) and 'train', which is a locomotive plus rolling stock?

As a layman I would call them 火車頭/機車, 車箱/車廂, 列車, respectively.

My dictionary has a different explanation for "rolling stock" -> "everything on wheels that belongs to a railway, such as engines and carriages 鐵路機車及車輛". (Perhaps there are some regional differences in the definition.)

[zh-laoshi]

As you probably already know, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to be completely bilingual. By completely bilingual, I mean having equally high levels of competence in both languages at say the level of a university educated native speaker

I'll disagree. My current wife was born and raised in El Paso, Texas to Mexican parents. She speaks/reads/writes English with no Spanish influence at all, and does it as fluent as any University educated native speaker. She is equally fluent in Spanish and has no Anglicized influence at all. So it is possible to be completely bilingual.

My first wife is Ukrainian, and our son spoke only Ukrainian for the first five years of his life. But when he got to school, he picked up English in a few months and can now speak both languages equally well.

If Chinese only is spoken at the home, and the child picks up/speaks English at school, that child will become completely bilingual when he/she gets older.

[fenlan]

zh-laoshi, you haven't addressed the question of the large proportion of the native speaker's vocabulary that is learned at school. I have known a lot of bilingual people in my life, but they all said that the language that they learned only at home and not through the education system was not on a par with the other language. One half Irish half Chinese girl I knew tried to avoid speaking Cantonese as Chinese speakers laughed at her "babyish" Chinese. It is only possible to be *completely* bilingual, if a child has completed a very wide reading programme in the second language comparable to what would have been garnered at school. It is possibly the case that Spanish and English is a more viable combination, especially in some Spanish-speaking parts of the United States, where some of the education and a lot of the mass media may come in Spanish. Anyhow, you haven't addressed the point that you would need to address to claim that bilingual fluency is possible: how to make up the vocabulary of the second language to a level equivalent to that imbibed by a first-language learner through the education system.

[Jive Turkey]

Fenlan hit the main points. I would add that it is possible to be what most people would consider a native speaker in two, or maybe even more languages without actually being fully bilingual. I know plenty of people like your wife who speak their two languages with no noticeable inteference from one onto the other. They were what the layman would call "native speakers." I would consider none of them bilingual, and those I've actually discussed the issue with agreed that they aren't bilingual if that is defined as having equal competence in both languages. It's pretty much impossible for anyone to have equal competence, even if they grew up with native quality input from the beginning and received formal education in both languages.

I've met a couple of people who have high levels of functional bilingualism in English and Chinese. Both used the two languages from a very young age and had had formal education in both languages, though not necessarily bilingual education with the two languages used as medium of instruction concurrently. No native speaker of English or Chinese would deny that these two people were native speakers of either language; the layman would say that they are "bilingual." However, these two people would be the first to tell you that they aren't. They were both translators/interpreters, one of them being a highflyer at the UN. They could and did work both ways when translating, which is a rarity. Nevertheless, they could both point out numerous areas of language where they were much stronger in one language than the other. I'll bet your wife could tell you a few areas where she is stronger in one language than the other.

[aeon]

Personally I'd define 'bilingual' as having adult-level ability to communicate in two languages. That doesn't prevent one language from being stronger, and thus defined it's not uncommon.

If you define bilingual as being equal in two languages, then our son was bilingual when he was 3, but after a year in China he is no longer, because his Chinese is now better than his English. It also means that you can call yourself 'bilingual' if you can communicate to only a low level in two languages, but not if you have a good vocabulary in both languages but posess technical vocabulary in one language which you haven't mastered in the other...