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foreign-born parents in the U.S. overemphasize learning English and neglect their native language
You don't know how many cases my mom has seen of Chinese first-generation-immigrant parents whose children speak English just fine but can barely even understand whatever dialect of Chinese their parents speak. This becomes doubly a problem when their parents don't speak English well (or sometimes, at all).
I'd really like to advise all of them, if you send your kid to a public school, they'll pick up conversational English just fine. Teach your kids your native language; they have precious few other opportunities to learn it, especially if your ethnicity is a small minority of the population (i.e. hard to find others of your ethnic background).
Comments
Ugh, thanks for reminding me. I know that I should put more effort into it, but...I hate my inertia.
Hey, I'm also guilty of this. I can speak but not read/write.
Though I have a partial excuse, which is that spoken Cantonese is significantly different from written Chinese. Cantonese uses a lot of colloquial vocabulary that has long since fallen out of use in writing. The characters for these words still exist, but you will rarely ever see them written or printed in contexts outside of people intentionally notating spoken language.
You guys are Chinese too?
The funny thing is that I've had east Asian friends say that I don't look east Asian.
Yep. I remember that I used to not bring it up that much on the Net because I was sick of people treating it as if it was something odd in real life (in retrospect, overt racism was almost entirely in junior high, but it stuck in my subconscious memory for many years afterward).
On topic, my excuse is that I grew up in small towns which tend not to have much racial diversity (this combined with junior high school kids being terrible results in the above paragraph). Not a very good excuse, of course.
Glenn's Chinese too?
No, I'm a Liechtensteinerin.
No way! I grew up in Switzerland! We made fun of you filthy Liechtensteinites all the time!
The funny thing is when I was younger I was totally fluent in Cantonese, in old videos I would actually be speaking complete sentences. Then come Elementary school I was put into an English as a Second Language and taught English, so I started to speak that so much it actually pushed out most of what I know about Cantonese. For some reason, I can't know more than one language at a time. It's my secret shame.
Do you hang around many people who speak Cantonese at least? That might bring some of your knowledge back.
I hang around so many I can still at least speak basic 5-6 syllable sentences. Though I can't tell you the EMBARRASSMENT I feel at giant family reunions or charity meetings when I need my brother or parents to translate things for me.
Yeah, it becomes much more difficult to learn a language after around puberty. It's a missed opportunity, but at least you have English. There should probably be some campaigns to educate parents in such a situation how feasible and useful it is to expose their children to their language.
And, y'know, it it was absolutely necessary for you to pick up a second language, it would have happened. Not to understate the advantages of being bilingual, but there are plenty of people who get along without it.
The first language I spoke was actually Bengali and I learned English pretty much by watching English TV shows in India, but when my family moved to the US I pretty much dropped Begali due to lack of real need.
Now, I can understand Bengali fine but I can't speak or write it.
Well I'm from the Philippines and can speak English and Tagalog (although my vocabulary of either is rather limited and can only speak short casual sentences...) just fine, but my local dialect... not so much. My parents only seem to speak it with the neighbors and when they don't want us to understand what they're talking about. I know a few words and can understand a little bit, but I can't speak the language. My sisters are better than I am at it.
"Yeah, it becomes much more difficult to learn a language after around puberty. It's a missed opportunity, but at least you have English. There should probably be some campaigns to educate parents in such a situation how feasible and useful it is to expose their children to their language.
And, y'know, it it was absolutely necessary for you to pick up a second language, it would have happened. Not to understate the advantages of being bilingual, but there are plenty of people who get along without it."
It's a cultural thing. (comment removed for unfortunate implications)
If we're tying languages to ethnicity, plenty of white people don't know their familial native languages.
I need to get better at German.
i don't understand how you people can't speak and practice two languages at once
i just can't
White privelege ftw.
The idea that you should learn your ancestral language even if you don't have any family records in that language or living relatives that speak it strikes me as a little arbitrary. What are multiracials supposed to do?
That said, I have heard of some relatives in Italy that share my last name. I could probably contact them if I was in Italy, but I already don't even feel especially close to my closer relatives in New York that speak English.
^^^I concur with this statement. I'm pretty sure the only reason anyone would think that it isn't possible to speak two languages at the same time, is that they haven't seriously tried. Sure if, you learn one language first and then completely stop using it after learning a second language, you might forget it. However, it has nothing to do with not being able to remember two languages at once and everything to do with not using said first language. For example, my German kind of sucks right now, though to be fair it was never that great. Why? Because I haven't used it much since I finished high school. Not because I'm learning Japanese right now. I still understand a lot of German, though that is mostly thanks to so many words being fairly similar to Danish words, however this only translates into passive vocabulary. Anyway, as of right now I speak and remember 2 languages. Speak a third one (Japanese) on a simple conversational basis (and can read simple texts) and kind of understand, maybe half of what is meant in a movie, in a fourth one (German). It's really not that hard.
One thing though, trying to learn two languages at once, if studying one of them intensively can fuck with your head. I've tried recalling a bit of German lately, and all that wants to come to me is Japanese. I guess once I get home from Japan, a few years later, once my Japanese has hopefully solidified, I might try to pick up the pieces of my German education, so it can actually become useful. ; )
"The idea that you should learn your ancestral language even if you don't have any family records in that language or living relatives that speak it strikes me as a little arbitrary. What are multiracials supposed to do?"
Um...because it allows you to talk to people of your own ethnicity in the language they're most comfortable with? Including your own parents?
Your posts smack of white privilege. If language was so unimportant, then why do people get so concerned with the idea of it dying out?
>or living relatives that speak it
That counts for parents.
Otherwise, the motivation to learn to speak a language with people that share your ethnicity strikes me as, well, racially motivated. Shouldn't you want to speak a language that's either common in your community or in a place you want to travel to, or one that has media you want to consume in its original form?
Don't hate me because I'm master race.
What makes you think that I think language is unimportant? Language is extremely important. What kind of language being spoken is less relevant to me, but I understand that there is value in preserving languages. It's just that I don't think that this cultural value is lessened if you weren't born into it.
"or one that has media you want to consume in its original form?"
...that's an integral part of culture, you know. Not to mention poetic language in particular tends to lose something in translation.
"It's just that I don't think that this cultural value is lessened if you weren't born into it."
Indeed. There is always merit in learning languages to aid communication. Heck, that's why the Prime Minister over here has to know both French and English.
Yes, I know media is part of culture.
Maybe it would have been more clear if I had said "should learn your ancestral language as opposed to others".
Honestly, I'm not sure where exactly or if you're disagreeing with me at this point.
> The idea that you should learn your ancestral language even if you don't have any family records in that language or living relatives that speak it strikes me as a little arbitrary. What are multiracials supposed to do?
Learn all the languages, and go into international relations or something. :P
Learn ALL the languages? :C
I meant the language of their place of residence as well as all the languages corresponding to their ethnic backgrounds.
I was just being silly.
And that could entail quite a lot, depending.
@nikiten
You're a pnai? I'm pnoi I don't speak Tagalog or Illocano. For some reason my parents didn't teach those dialects to me. At best I only know susmariosep, putanamo, and oo.
Is Oo what they speak in Ooo?