American Born Chinese Kids

[chrix]

Yes, I was brought up bilingually in Germany, with German and Japanese. I'm immensely grateful to my mother for her persistence. She had read up a lot on this topic, and she spoke only Japanese to me, even though her German in-laws insisted I should learn German first. If you do that and wait too long, then it's too late. Later she sent me to Saturday school (the number of Japanese schools is much lower, so I was lucky that there was one in Hamburg). It was hard at times, having to go to school on Saturdays as well (though my high school had classes on Saturdays as well), but especially after I fell in love with the kanji around the beginning of junior high, it was all good from there. Over the years, a lot of classmates, especially 混血兒, kept dropping out. Years later, when I went to a meeting of German-Japanese people in Hamburg, I was quite shocked to see that most of them actually don't speak Japanese that well. I guess I just hadn't been aware that that's rather normal.

It boils down to the distinction between colloquial and formal speech levels: while you can easily acquire the colloquial type of fluency at home if your parents consequently speak their language to you, acquiring the formal type of fluency in a different country requires a lot of effort in terms of learning and teaching, and that's true for any language. My experience with Asian-Americans has been the same. Most Asian-Americans have not mastered the formal part, and will thus be reluctant to speak to strangers, since that kind of language situation is usually formal.

Studies conducted on Italian-Americans have brought us the three generation rule. It goes like this:

- 1st generation, English rather poor, speaks mostly Italian

- 2nd generation, brought up bilingual, act as intermediaries for their parents, however English mastered in both colloquial and formal levels, Italian usually limited to colloquial level

- 3rd generation, usually monolingual in English

Hispanics are no exception. It's only that the number of new arrivals is so high that some people mistakenly believe that they are somehow averse to "learning English like everybody else". Studies show that 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics are similar.

[Goujian]

I grew up in NYC, and all I spoke to my parents was Shanghainese, but I'm sort of terrible at it. Whenever I speak Mandarin, I don't have an accent when I concentrate and speak it carefully, but whenever I speak quickly, I tend to stutter/have an accent.

I learned Taiwanese Guoyu, not so different than Shanghainese accent.

[mcgau]

I'm wondering how many languages you will teach a kid like my cousin?

He is a 6-year-old BBC (Belgium born Chinese) whose parents are actually a bad example of learning too many languages and dialects.

His father is from a family of Teochew origin living in Saigon. At the old day when my uncle went to school, he learned French. As Cantonese was the lingua franca in oversea chinese community, he also spoke it. When he grew up, he acquired English and Mandarin too.

But it's hard to tell what his mother tongue is. I know all these languages a little bit and i would say my uncle are fluent in all of them and he can express himself fairly well, but his accent is foreign even in Teochewese, Cantonese and Vietnamese.

Now come to my cousin. He's learning Flemish, French, English (in school) and Chinese(in sunday school). Would you take him to learn Vietnamese too?

I'm curious to know what makes people have NO mother tongue and how to avoid it happening on a bi- , tri- or quad- lingual kid?

Edited April 24, 2010 at 02:20 AM by mcgau

[Lu]

What does the kid's mother speak?

If the parents have the same mother tongue (the language they are most comfortable speaking, that they would most like to speak to their child in. This is not necessarily the most 'useful' language they know), then I'd limit it to that language at home, and whatever language is spoken outside. In Belgium it's usually French or Dutch (Flemish). Other languages learned at school don't really 'count', the child doesn't use those on a daily basis.

If both parents speak different languages, it depends: if they both spend significant time with the child, they can both speak the language they are most comfortable in, and the child will learn both, plus the language spoken outside. If one of the parents doesn't spend a lot of time with the child (for whatever reason), then I'd drop that language.

I've known a girl who was growing up trilingual. Mother is Taiwanese (speaking Mandarin), father Austrian, they were living in Holland. Their daughter spoke Mandarin, German and Dutch fluently, and in addition was learning English, French, Latin and Greek in school. She was doing just fine, linguistically. But her parents did really spend time on this.

[chrix]

I can top this, I know a guy, who's grown up quadrilingually, born to an American father and an Argentinian mother in a French-speaking part of officially Dutch-speaking Antwerp

(though trilingual kids are not as uncommon as you think, if you have a binational marriage in a third country and both parents make a firm commitment to teaching their child, it will work)

[bhchao]

I learned Taiwanese Guoyu, not so different than Shanghainese accent

Yes, standard Taiwanese Mandarin closely resembles the accent from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and to a lesser extent Anhui.

Many Mandarin teachers in Taiwanese schools instrumental in developing Guoyu came from those provinces in 1949.

[DysphoricPanda]

Oh my god I'm so happy I found this site!!!I've been having so much trouble finding people  I am ABC and I live in the South which is..... harmful in a lot of ways for my ethnicity. The people here who are not Chinese or any other type of Asian make fun of those who are since the population here isn't really diverse. And when it is diverse, most of the ABC's, the ABT's the ABK's reject or ignore their cultural identity and want to fit in with the nonPOC's. They don't even want to learn their language because they're scared of being singled out and bullied because of their identity and it's really sad. But it's even worse because other ABC's ostracize me because I WANT to learn Chinese and I LOVE my culture.  They hate being associated with their ethnicity and when they see me they criticize me for being so interested in it. I can't share things that I love that happen to be from Chinese culture to anyone and it makes me feel really isolated. I feel rejected from both nonPOC's and my fellow ABC's. ...has anyone felt like this?