Struggles of a bi-lingual child

One of the advantages of having a euro-asian child, as I see it, is the opportunity for the child to learn two languages from a  very young age, and possibly optimising the child’s intellectual capacity at a time when the child has capacity to spare.

Because of my mother-in-law, my child learned to speak Mandarin in parallel with his English from the start.

This may or may not explain why my son experienced speech delay problems when he reached about 12 months old, but I suspect not.

These delay problems eventually required about 4 years of speech pathology treatment. I suspect however that maybe my son had an inherent weakness with language to begin with, rather than any complications arising out of his bi-lingual environment.

Despite my son making remarkable progress with his English speech once he entered speech pathology, he still struggles with learning Mandarin.

At this stage my son has a genuine appreciation of the English language. He is an excellent speller and he has developed a very broad and impressive vocabulary.

But his Mandarin, despite being given every opportunity to learn, is quite woeful.

He attends Chinese lessons once a week, and I am wondering whether more lessons will help him gain some traction in this language.

It would be a terrible shame if my son does not master this language, given the importance of this language to my son’s heritage, and the ever growing role this language will play on the world scene.

Talking & hearing Chinese

I was always quite good at school.

I excelled in maths and physics, biology and chemistry, but always did exceptionally well in English.

When I went to University I also studied French as an aside, foolishly believing at the stage that French was still an important language to learn.

To my credit I picked it up rather quickly, and can still speak it well today.

So you may think that I have an aptitude for languages, given that history, and I would have agreed with you before I was confronted with a language that I can hardly “hear”, and one that simply does not follow any of the language structures that I am familiar with.

I realised that my ability to learn French, as well as some self-taught conversational German, was less to do with my exceptional prowess at absorbing language, and more to do with paralleling similar language structures.

German for instance is effectively the mother tongue of English, and is very similar to English in its structures. French, although less so, is still a related language with similar sounds and language rules.

Chinese Mandarin however is a completely different beast. Although I have become very familiar with so many words, given that I hear them every single day, I am still at a loss when I try and repeat these words.

Even my son laughs at me when he hears my Chinese.

“No daddy” he laughs. “It doesn’t sound like that at all.”

The problem is not simply in the pronunciation of course. It starts off in the hearing, and there are so many nuances in the Chinese language, that once you get to a particular age, you will forever struggle to hear.

So I struggle, although I wish it wasn’t so.

If only I could learn Chinese, I sometimes think, it would open up an incredible new world for me, one where I would directly engage with so many people that I am surrounded by, people that otherwise are off limits to me because of the language barrier.

Learning to speak Chinese

Yes, Chinese is a remarkably difficult language to learn.

I have not however attempted to formally learn Chinese at any point, but given that Mandarin is the principle language spoken in my home, it was innevitable that I would come to grips with it to some degree.

I am at a point now where I understand many words that I over-hear in conversations, and in some cases I can understand the complete gist of the conversation. I also have many Chinese patients and I even surprise myself sometimes as to the extent of what I understand, when they speak Manadrin in front of me.

But it still a remarkably difficult language, especially given that I don't "hear" many of the nuances of tone that is part and parcel of Chinese.

Just like many Chinese not being able to hear the letter "R", I too am tone deaf when it comes to many pronunciations in Chinese.

Recently I have been speaking more and more often to my son in Mandarin. This has been my playful way of practising my Chinese.

My son always corrects me, and laughs in the process.

Only yesterday he said: "Daddy, your Chinese is so funny.You have an English accent when you speak Chinese."

He would then try and help me to pronounce the word properly. He is such a cute little boy.

Learning Mandarin

One thing that Ms B and I agreed to off the bat was the benefit in our child learning to read and write in Mandarin.

Ms B, like many Chinese, more commonly speaks a dialect of Chinese, but she and her mother have made an effort to speak only Mandarin in front of the child, so that he could pick up official Chinese without getting confused with the dialect.

As it stands, Master A, who is almost 7 years old, can read and write exceptionally well in English, and he can also speak moderately well in Mandarin. He goes to Chinese school twice a week and is slowly learning the numerous characters that comprise the Chinese language.