Question
Hi,
My son is 3.5 years old. We are from South America (Colombia and Chile) so the language at home is Spanish. My son was born in Australia. He never attended child care there, so he was not exposed too much to English.
Ten months ago, we moved to Malaysia. My son is now attending a Chinese child care where tuition is 100% in English. His English has improved since, and now he is able to communicate with English speakers with no issues.
Now he has started having Mandarin and Bahasa Malay lessons. According to the teachers he is doing very well, being able to understand some instructions in both languages. He is even able to write some symbols in Mandarin.
Some of the concerns we are having at the moment are:
1. His Spanish listening and speaking are very good. When and how should we start teaching him reading and writing? We do not expect to return soon to a Spanish speaking environment.
2. We think English is not and will not be a problem as the school in Malaysia is in English. Should we speak English at home? My husband and myself are both fluent in English and both feel comfortable speaking English to him. However, my son always prefers to speak Spanish with us.
3. Is starting Mandarin and Bahasa lessons at his age the right move? We definitely would like to help him with his Mandarin skills, however, Bahasa is not our priority as we will be leaving Malaysia in three years. Neither my husband nor myself speak Mandarin so it is difficult to help him. What would be your recommendation to ensure he is becoming fluent in Mandarin.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Best regards,
Sonia
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Answer
Dear Sonia,
Thank you for your message and questions. What a lovely language rich environment your bilingual child is lucky to grow up in – your son already speaks both Spanish and English and now he will also have the chance to pick up Mandarin (and perhaps some Bahasa).
With regards to your specific questions:
1. When it comes to literacy, my recommendation is to start when your son shows interest in reading. Make sure you have toys and books with the Spanish alphabet and give him the sound when he shows you a letter cube or points at a letter in a book. This is actually how my elder daughter
learnt to readFinnish very early on (though Finnish is amongst the easiest languages there is to learn to read, so I don’t expect this to happen for all kids). Another great tip to encourage literacy is to follow the text with your finger when you read a Spanish book to your son. This way he will learn to make the connection between the sounds and the letters.
2. As you are not planning to return to a Spanish-speaking environment any time soon, I would recommend that you keep Spanish as your home language. If you were to switch to English at home, your son would be exposed to the language almost 100% of the time. This would leave Spanish in a precarious position and your son might soon become reluctant to use it. Switching the language you speak with a child is not an easy thing to do in any circumstance. Changing back to using a minority language once your child has become accustomed to speaking the majority language with you is even more difficult, and takes some serious commitment and patience from the parent. I agree with you that your son will get enough English exposure from his school (and friends) for now.
3. I presume Mandarin and Bahasa are part of the curriculum at your son’s school, so he will attend both language lessons in any case? It wouldn’t be right of me to comment on the school’s tuition, as I do not know any details about it. Be it as it may, introducing new languages through play is an excellent way of starting to learn a language and I see no harm in doing it early on – presuming the teaching methods are suitable for the age group. In your situation, I would leave the Bahasa to whatever the school is teaching and concentrate on the Mandarin.
You can still support your son learning Mandarin, although you do not know the language yourself. First, have you considered learning alongside him? Many parents in monolingual families do exactly this – learn a language together with their children to give them the gift of an additional language. However, if this is not a viable option for you, you can find lots of resources online. For example Panda Mom has a helpful site for your situation, not to forget our very own Family Language Coach, Miss Panda Chinese, Amanda Hsiung-Blodgett.
Wishing you a successful multilingual family journey!
Kind regards
Rita
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Moi Rita,
I stumbled upon your website whilst researching how to pass my multilingual skills to my daughter, and wast struck by how much we have in common, incidentally!
The background to my question: I’m Ghanaian but grew up in southwest Finland and did my higher education in English and French. I currently live in a bilingual, English and Spanish environment where English is the dominant language. My husband is Italian. Our daughter is under a year old and I would love for her to learn Finnish, French, English, Italian – which she gets from my husband – and Spanish, which she currently gets at daycare but this may change when we move. My husband and I communicate in English. I understand Italian. So far I have spoken English to my daughter because it’s been my ‘main language’ for the past 14 years.
My question: How do I pass on Finnish and French to my daughter? When is the right time to start speaking those to her? Is as soon as possible, with French and Finnish nursery rhymes on Finnish/French days the way to do it? At seven months, will she be confused to see me speak completely different phonetics to her all of a sudden when I switch from English to Finnish & French? Also, I speak British English and consider that ‘more proper’ than American English and would like her to be at least aware of that too… how do I do all of this without messing up my daughter’s linguistic ability? I expect her to learn English when she goes to school and from hearing me and my husband speak it daily.
I would love your thoughts and also, is your book appropriate for my situation, since I’m not really looking for bilingualism but rather multilingualism for my daughter?
Thank you in advance! Monica
Moi Monica!
Sorry for the long delay in getting back to you. We do indeed have a lot in common 🙂
We receive a lot of questions through different channels and answer them in the order they arrive. To reduce waiting times we are now answering some questions during Facebook Live Q&A sessions. Your query will be featured on Thursday the 19th of October 2017 in the Multilingual Parenting Facebook group. Please click on the link and answer the three joining questions if you haven’t already joined. There will also be a recording for you to listen to should you be unable to attend the live session.
Kind regards
Rita
Great advice from Rita, I especially agree with point 2.
With reading and writing I agree that this should be child led at this early stage. The priority is to speak the languages – reading can come later and shouldn’t feel like a chore. You need to be very clear in your mind which language you are speaking when sounding out the words and letter sounds to him as two of his languages are using the same sort of alphabet. Again, I suggest you stick to Spanish and let the school teach him the English sounds. I always made sure I had books in various languages for my children. Sometimes I would buy the same book in a couple of the languages (my trilingual daughter speaks English, German and French) – it was interesting to see which ones she would choose to read. We also made sure that electronic toys where not language biased – eg some were bought in Germany, some in France etc. and also movies were watched in a variety of languages.
What a great gift you are giving to your little boy!
Warm regards
Mandie Davis
http://www.lespuces.co.uk
Dear Mandie, thanks for your advise. We are usually reading him in Spanish as He does not like to speak or read in English at home.
Good idea to have mandaring books for his age available at home.
Regards
Sonia
Dear Rita, thank you very much for your helpful advise.
My husband and myself are now considering start some mandarin lessons to help our son.
All the best
Sonia