I am not sure how it happened, but 8Asians started to follow me on Twitter! When I was notified of this, it got me to go back to their site to read some of their entries. I eventually came across an article about teaching your kid Chinese, as a response to an article that the author had read about the decision to not teach your kid Chinese. It was interesting to see the perspectives on this issue, being one who went through years of Chinese school. Though I hated getting up on Sunday mornings to go learn, the extra homework that inevitably came with extra schooling, and the difficulty of learning the characters, it is something that I am tremendously grateful for.
So I, for one, lie on the side preferring bilingualism. I grew up speaking Mandarin at home and English at school. Any notion that children will get “confused” learning two languages simultaneously is absolutely absurd. I’ve never had a problem with that, not even accidentally saying a single word in the wrong language. Some people seem to have it in their minds that integrating two languages into learning is conflicting, but it certainly is not. That’s the beauty of a young mind. It can pick up on so much so effortlessly (or at least so it seems).
As I read through comments to those posts, I started to think: it’s not just about the communication aspect. Being bilingual (or multilingual) opens the doors to be bicultural. And to be multicultural is to understand. That is not something that can be learned very easily either. Though plenty of people in their adult lives can move elsewhere and adopt their new culture, a lot of the old culture still remains at odds with the new one. It’s not easy to balance the differing views. Growing up learning to mesh them, however, could give you a worldly view on things.
Plus, from a practical point of view, if you want to stay in touch with your family abroad and allow everyone in your family to understand each other, it’s an important skill to have. Otherwise, you will end up having to translate (or be translated for) at family gatherings. I have always prided myself in my Mandarin fluency – it allows me to get around as I need to when I am visiting the country and it allows me to interact with my relatives without needing my parents to translate. Just by knowing the language, I feel so much more connected to the culture too, since so much of it has historical and cultural roots.
I think the older generations also respect you more if you know the language(s) of your heritage. So many of them shake their heads and mutter to themselves when they hear of other children who don’t know the language or can barely get by with it. For me, however, they are either proud that I can speak to them or holding back from their mutterings because they know I’d understand what they’re saying. It gives you so much more freedom.
Now I can understand parents who may want to wait for their child to start learning another language (like the lady in the article mentioned above, about not teaching your kid Chinese). For the first few years, it will be relatively easy for them to pick up on the language, so there’s no need to throw them into lessons when they’re still learning to walk. This is especially true for people who may not be native speakers themselves, since there isn’t much they could teach the child. However, I do think that anyone of a heritage growing up in a culture other than the one they were born to should start learning the language sometime in elementary school.
I certainly want any of my future offspring to be bilingual, if not multilingual.
