Trilingual Parenting

桃子/Tao Zi, or Tao Zu

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41mRjN7NvRL__SL500_AA300_At the moment, Nina is a big fan of 小桃子, the main character – a baby named Tao Zi – in a cartoon book series, translated from Japanese to Chinese. There are about 10 books in the series – all with 小桃子 doing something very simple but cute in each of them, such as seek-and-hike with a boat/car/plane, share lunch with a lion dad and lion baby, bath with her 3 best friends (gold fish, cactus, angel – I can’t help but add here that only a Japanese/Asia children’s book would have such beings as best friends for a baby – cactus for goodness sake!), going for a walk and then fall, swing at midnight. Simple stories, simple drawing, each with some very simple words (in Chinese) on each page. Perfect book for Nina’s age. Even I fell in love with 小桃子。

Nina has started to say 桃子 when we read the books together. The interesting thing is the way she pronounces 桃子 – she pronounces it as Tao Zu, instead of Tao Zi the correct pronunciation. It just occurred to me this morning that Tao Zu actually sounds really like how when a non-Chinese adult would try to pronounce the word!

I don’t know if it’s just a natural phase for any child to not have perfect pronunciation at the beginning, in any language regardless whether she’s monolingual or multilingual. Or it’s actually already an evidence that multilingual children would – at some stage – mix languages, even at pronunciation level (note: the mixing itself doesn’t worry me because it would disappear after a while – it’s just a phase, not the end result. I will have a separate post on the  mixing issue).

I’m very curious to see her progress with the pronunciation of 桃子, which hopefully will give some idea as to the real reason behind.

Dilemma on Reading

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maclaryWe have books for Nina in all three languages that she’s growing up with. So far, Nicolas and I stick to OPOL (One Parent One Language) quite religiously, which also applies to the book reading time. It means that when I read a book with Nina I read in Chinese, and when Nicolas reads a book with Nina he reads in French.

So here is the dilemma. When we read a book that’s not written in ‘our language’ basically what we do is speaking ‘our language’ (by live translating or simply improvising) while looking at the written language of the book. One of Nina’s favorite books at the moment is ‘Hairy MacLary from Donaldson’s Dairy’, a picture book in English about the little hairy black dog Maclary going out and about running into other dogs. It’s a beautiful book both in drawing and in text. The text rhymes, but of course it rhymes in English only! So when I read – meaning Speaking by half translating half improvising the story in Chinese – the rhyme is totally gone!

While it serves the purpose – from linguistic point of view – on providing Chinese language input in this case, it loses the beauty of its original language (in English in this case).

So I wonder if there are times, such as reading books, when it’s better to just follow the language that the book is written in?

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<update on Oct 19th>

I shared my dilemma with ‘Raising Multilingual Children’ group on facebook, and got some fantastic insights from the members there! It’s relieving to read that I am certainly not the only person with the dilemma – there are many others out there facing the similar challenge and come up with their own solution with trials and errors. A more popular practice through these comments is to eventually read the book in  the language that the book is written in. However there is one practice that I particularly like, which is to make sure at least certain amount of time every day (20 minutes in that case) to read the ‘minority language’ books. I like this practice because: 1) it ensures the quantity of the exposure of the minority language (in reading/speaking/hearing)  on regular basis; 2) it respects all the languages that the books are written in, hence ensures the quality of exposure of all languages by helping the children to build the connection between the written form and the spoken form of these languages.

So I decided to give a try this morning – not live translating non-Chinese books into Chinese, and read only Chinese books in Chinese. Nina picked up one of her favorite French books (Tchoupi Part En Vacances), and came sitting next to me signaling me to read the book to her. I have read this book many times with her in Chinese, but this time I started to read … in FRENCH! After I read the first phrase or so, I saw Nina literally turning her head from the book to me, looking at me … puzzled/surprised. Did she realize that I was not using the ‘normal’ language? Did she notice something different? Was she saying ‘why are you reading this book like papa’?

It’s absolutely fascinating to see how much a child at her age (merely 21 months, who has only less than 2 dozens of vocabularies) is aware of what’s going on around her, from linguistic perspective. She knows what mama is talking about in which language, and picks up immediately when mama starts to do things differently. They are exquisite observers, which make them the most exquisite learners.

Now what’s left to do is to make sure we build a good collection of books in Chinese and French (the more difficult ones being in Australia), and read English books in English.

31 Signs You’re A Third Culture Kid (TCK)

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During the lunch with my lovely friend P recently, she mentioned her experience as a TCK. It reminds me that I should dedicate at least one post on TCK.

TCKThat’s the definition from Dr. Ruth Van Reken, who coined the term TCK which has become a movement since 1960s. See more from the website: http://www.tckworld.com

Lately I have come across this popular article ’31 Signs You’re A Third Culture Kid’ here. I bookmarked it for Nina’s future reference. Some personal favourites are:
8. You have a love-hate relationship with the question “Where are you from?”
17. You get nervous whenever a form needs you to enter a “permanent address.”
21. You don’t call it “home.” You call it “passport country.” (a note for Nina, she would call ‘passport countries’)

My stand-in dentist that I saw 2 weeks ago (as my dentist was on holiday) is an Australian with Thai mother and Greek father. She said she loves the confusion on the face of people when she explaines the origin of her name (first name Thai-sounding and last name Greek-sounding). It’s almost like my accent, a weird mixture of Chinese, French, and (now slightly) Australian accents. If I have to give it a name, it’s called ‘messed-up’. But I have always preferred slightly unconventional things anyway, so that works for me quite ok.

Nina is no doubt a TCK – a textbook TCK by definition. While sometimes I consider myself as a global citizen of some sort and can certainly relate to some TCK symptoms, I have become one by choice. Yet Nina was born as TCK. I wonder, when she grows up, would she wish that she would have been given the choice of not being a TCK?

’40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World’ + The 41st Map

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I found this list hilariously informative – 40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World.

Below is just an example of the maps (Map of Europe Showing Literal Chinese Translations for Country Names), which is probably one of the most intellectually challenging ones to understand – as an English and Chinese bilingual, I have to think hard to translate the names back to Chinese, sometimes in vein, to make sense. But still, it’s a refreshing perspective.
literal-map-of-europe-by-chinese-name
(Map of Europe Showing Literal Chinese Translations for Country Names)

These maps explained quite a lot of things, in such a visually easy way. I love maps. I could stare at maps/street directories/globe forever and let my imagination wonder, which sometimes leads to some disastrous results (hint hint something is coming up :)).

Nevertheless, to tie this list back to my blog, I would have loved to see one more map: countries where there are more multilinguals than monolinguals. When you think about it, there are many countries (including China, and a friend suggested Liechtenstein) where naturally people grow up with more than one language. And I would love to know how many.

Strictly speaking, my first language is not even Mandarin Chinese. It’s Fenghua dialect, which sounds distinctly different from Mandarin, and uses very often different ‘logic’ in structuring the sentences (I use the word ‘logic’ instead of ‘grammar’ on purpose because there is no written form of Fenghua dialect nor formal grammar). Mandarin Chinese is a language I learnt when I started school (at the age of six). Even then, some older teachers used the dialect to teach as their Mandarin is not far from a disaster.

In Australia there are approximately 240 languages spoken and 16% of the population speak a language other than English at home – that means among 6 friends of ours, there is at least one who speaks a non-English language at home! I’m sure in Sydney that percentage is much higher than that.

If there is the 41st map of countries where there are more multilinguals than monolinguals indicated by the colour of green, I wouldn’t be surprised if it will turn out to be a quite green world. Can anyone validate this?!

Tough Moments

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tulip purple blueSpeaking a language that is not the mainstream language with your child is difficult. Speaking that language with your child when there are only mainstream-language-speakers around is even more difficult.

Today Nina and I went to a local cafe for our afternoon tea. It was about 4pm, which is exactly the time when school finishes and some parents bring their children to the cafe for their afternoon tea too.

There were this mother and two school-age children sitting next to our table. The mother was extremely nice to Nina and started to have small ‘chat’ with Nina, in English obviously. Then inevitably I would try to prompt Nina to say hello (by waving hands) or say thank you (when the lady helped to pick up her hat) – in Chinese. It’s the moments like this that I felt a bit awkward. What I was saying to NIna apparently was something that socially I wanted the lady to understand as well (that I am educating my daughter to be polite and social), however by choosing to speak Chinese with Nina (by sticking to OPOL – One Parent One Language) the lady was not going to understand anything I said. I just hoped that she would somehow deduct what I was trying to say.

But What if she didn’t? Would she think that I was rude to her? Would she expect me to switch to English (she knew that I speak English, as when I was only talking to her I used English)? Would she think I am simply bizarre?

Situations like this are tough. It’s a test to how strongly I believe in OPOL, and how strongly I feel about my mother tongue, and how strongly I believe in myself ultimately. There have been many occassions when I felt so attempted to switch to English, and there have been a few occassions when I did. Life is so much easier when you don’t have to make conscious efforts and prove yourselt constantly.

But most of time, I resisted the temptation, and carried on with Chinese with Nina. I reckon if I cannot resist the temptation, how can I ever expect Nina to resist the tempatation one day? After all, she will pick up the cues from me and likely follow my example, good or bad. She will certainly have tough moments and doubts, and hopefully we’ll go through moments like that together, being a team of proud daughter and mother.