Trilingual Parenting

‘Because It Has Sentimental Value For Me’

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A friend of mine P. sent me a link today from a BBC story, about a 20-year-old young man Alex Rawlings who won a national competition to find the UK’s most multi-lingual student. He speaks 11 languages fluently!

The story is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17107435, and there is a video where he uses all these languages to tell why and how he learnt these languages and what he found about the difference in languages, as well as his plan to learn more.

21 February 2012 Last updated at 06:33

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings has won a national competition to find the UK’s most multi-lingual student.

The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages – English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

Entrants in the competition run by the publishers Collins had to be aged between 16 and 22 and conversant in multiple languages.

Alex drew on all his skills to tell BBC News about his passion for learning languages and how he came to speak so many.

What strikes me most in this story is that he said, among all these 11 languages, his favorite is Greek, ‘because I’ve spoken it since childhood. It has sentimenal value for me’. I think this is a great point – if you link a language with all the sweet memories of childhoold and your parents/family, then the language is no longer just a language, but about who you are, where you are from, and what you are made of.

This is why I think any child deserves to be brought up with all the languages – and everything that goes with the languages – that hold value to her roots.

It’s A Piece Of Cake… Or Is It?

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It’s interesting to see people’s reaction on my plan of bringing up a trilingual child. Some expected, some not. Mostly positive encouragement, some suspicious. Some find me courageous, and some find me unrealistic.

What I thought quite fascinating is getting two opposite views from people: one that it must be just incredibly easy to teach your child your mother tongue – the child will pick up just like that; and the other that if you don’t live in the country where the language is spoken by the society, don’t even bother trying to teach the child speak  – she will eventually speak only the ‘majority’ language of where she lives.

Quite surprisingly, the latter view is most strongly shared by a few Chinese-mother friends,  who live outside of China, and who have tried with their own children, and found the experience either ‘difficult’, challenging, frustrating, or simply not worth it. One wished me ‘good luck’, and another told me ‘why not pamper yourself with a relaxing massage or facial instead of trying hard to teach your little baby how to speak’.

While these didn’t discourage me, it did get me to think, harder: what are the extra challenges along the way that I haven’t thought of? What I can learn from their experience? What can I do, better or differently? And perhaps we should be prepared to be more flexible with our expectations? After all these parents have been there and done that, and I trust they share their thoughts with me wholeheartedly and sincerely, so there is something to learn.

There is another friend – H.X. – who found it very difficult / unnatural to speak Chinese with her 2-year-old son due to the fact that she doesn’t really need to use Chinese in her daily life – find my blog quite encouraging though, and would like to give it a try with her soon-to-be 2nd child and even started to squeeze in a few words here and there with the 2-year-old. I will share more of her challenge/thoughts on this in a separate post (with her consent – quote from her ‘I think it’s as important to show difficulties, failures and frustrations as to show success stories’).

A comment left on this blog by a reader Deb is finding this blog a great resource for her with her plan of teaching her bilingual child a third language. I have to admit that I am very glad to see my blog becoming a source of inspiration for others, even just a few others 🙂

In return, comments like this from a total stranger also encourages me to further research, study, and practice on multilingual upbringing. It’s perhaps not a piece of cake bought from the shop, but definitely one that tastes particularly good after taking all the trouble to find the right recipe.

Officially Diversified

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Two days before Nina’s one-month birthday, she got her Australian passport.

Now we’re officially diversified – a household of three with three different passports 🙂 I never would have imagined it possible …

Australian immigration law grants the local-born child with the right of the Australian nationality even if only one of the parents is Permanent Resident (doesn’t have to be citizen, which we are not). So we decided Nina is going to be Australian.

And she is also already legally a French citizen although we haven’t started to apply for a passport for her yet (hey, Mr Sarkozi, do you know how fussy/complicated it is to apply for a French passport overseas when one of the child’s parents is non-French citizen??).

Well, she cannot legally be Chinese at the same time … unfortunately … I will just say this much for now … But I wish she will grow up feeling at least 33% Chinese at/in/with heart.

Now, for anyone who wants to know what it is like to take a young infant’s passport photo – be VERY patient, take LOTS and LOTS of shots, and pray that you will get one that fits the thousands of passport photo criteria.

Reading To Her – The Little Prince

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It just so happens that one of my all-time favorite books is ‘The Little Prince’, way before I had the knowledge that it was originally written in French as ‘Le Petit Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (who was from Lyon, a city that named its airport after him and has a main square in the city center with a very very lovely statue of the little prince, and of course a few painted walls dedicated to him). Many (many) years back when I was learning French in Shanghai, I bought this Chinese/French bilingual version of 小王子/Le Petit Prince, and have ever since always been keeping it with me (along with nearly 15 times of moving from country to country).

So what is a better book to read to Nina than this one? The bonus is that Nicolas and I are able to read Chinese and French version respectively from the same book. What a visionary I was back in time! ;p

I always knew that I would read to Nina from very early on, and I started within the first week of Nina’s birth. Of course I know that she wouldn’t understand a word, and she doesn’t care what I am reading, and she wouldn’t even know that this is called reading. I am not expecting any of these. The idea here – which is not mine but linguists and scientists’ – is to allow her build  the neural connections (or rather not to lose the capability of building them) that enables her to distinguish the tonality of the language(s) we wish her to speak, and to relate reading as something joyful and interesting part of daily routine.

Research shows that infants are tuned to all the tonalities and nuances in all languages at birth, IF given opportunites for stimulation and exposure. However by the age of 1-2 years or so (I have read different versions, and it’s apparent not hard science), if not given opportunities, they lose the ability to hear the differences.

Of course, Nina would get her normal dose of Chinese/French from the daily conversation (as any parent would be advised, talking to the child is one great way of bonding even it’s a one-way communication verbally to start with), reading from a book certainly expands the variety of tonalities and expression.

On top of it (or rather more importantly), it has always been a pleasure to read this timeless masterpiece. Every time I read this book, I felt peace. Now I’m sharing this with Nina. I hope you like it, 小南。

The Arrival of Nina B./ 俞凝南 & OPOL

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Nina B, aka 俞凝南, came to the world super on time on the 18th of January, 2012, 3:06pm local Sydney time. She’s a healthy 3.45kg / 51cm baby.

BTW, that made her one of the 5% babies who arrive on their due date (natural birth). One friend commented: ‘she’s already showing a talent of punctuality :)’. Indeed!

The first words spoken to her by her mum was: ‘你好 Nina’, and by her dad: ‘bonjours Nina’. Both mean ‘hello Nina’. With big smiles and amazement of the magical creature we spoke these words. And for me with enormous relief that the labour was F I N A L L Y over. I had a natural delivery using only gas – the official document says that the labour lasted only 5 hours 44 minutes. What the official document didn’t say was the one whole day of pre-labour I had gone through before that 5 hours 44 minutes, the last 9+ hours of which were already painful enough for me to head to hospital believing that labour already started. By the time I realized that gas would not be sufficient and it was getting way too much, I was told it’s too late to use any other drugs because the baby was coming. So I had to push it through, literally. Nothing, I mean really nothing, had prepared me for THAT level of pain and I think my mind had to detach from my body to remain somehow half-conscious, and Nicolas said that he never realized I had so much force that his arms were almost twisted broken by me, lol (he was such a fabulous supporter during whole process, merci palomito). It was an outer-body experience, to say the least.

Enough rambling, back to the serious staff 🙂 So by day 1, Nicolas and I started with the OPOL – one parent one language – approach. In this approach, each parent speaks respective language with the child, under all circumstances, so that the child gets enough exposure to all languages in the most natural way. I read that young children will have this natural ability to distinguish the languages and acknowledge the fact that mum and dad are each speaking a different language to them, and in return would establish a language-per-parent communication system. They would have no problem switching between/among languages depending on the audience.

My delivery doctor Dr. Seeho (who’s btw a fantastic doctor, I couldn’t ask for more) and quite a few midwives at the Mater (hospital where Nina was born) are interested in – positively – the fact that we speak different languages to Nina. This allows us to be confident and comfortable in speaking ‘minority’ languages (Chinese/French vs English as mainstream language in Australia) with Nina even when there are other English-speaking person present. This takes off one of the most common pressures that many bi/tri-lingual parents face – feeling awkward/misunderstood/un-acknolweged/rude/embarrassed in using a minority language in a social environment, as suggested by researches. It takes some determination, confidence, persistence, and sometimes a bit of luck to overcome this challenge.

I’m grateful that we are in a supportive environment to start with. Way to go.