Managing Multilingualism

My mother speaks four languages: Fukinese (a Chinese dialect) which she spoke at home, Tagalog (Filipino) which she spoke growing up in Manila, Mandarin which she learned in K-12 Chinese school, and English which she learned a little in school but mostly upon arrival in the US at age 21. She speaks all four well enough to have fluent conversations and even business dealings in any of these languages, but I can only really judge her English, which is very lightly accented.  Only when she writes do her minor gramatical errors become evident.

My father speaks three tongues:  he grew up speaking Cantonese (another Chinese dialect) at home, learned Mandarin in school K-5, and English in school and upon arrival in the US at age 11.  He doesn't really read and write in Chinese anymore, but he can have fluent conversations in Mandarin and Cantonese.  His English has no real accent and he has an excellent vocabulary due to his high education level.  Despite having lived and worked in the US for the last 50 years, they both have maintained their multilingualism quite well.

I am a native English speaker.  I started studying Mandarin at age 10, and 30 years later I can manage to travel in China but can't read a newspaper or understand broadcast news.  Of course I have never lived immersed in Mandarin, so I haven't had the need to. Twelve years ago, when my daughter was born, my husband started speaking to her exclusively in Spanish, so I learned to understand a lot of nouns and phrases, mostly relating to diapers, food, hand-washing, animals, and the like.  I understood what he was saying to her, but understanding and speaking are two very different skills. Two years ago we arrived in Barcelona and I realized that I couldn't form a grammatical sentence in Spanish, so I enrolled myself in class and now I can survive and make friends.  It is discouraging to me how in such a short time I have been able to reach the same level of Spanish as it has taken me 30 years to achieve in Mandarin, but that is because English and Spanish have quite a lot of overlap while English and Mandarin have absolutely none.

I tried speaking exclusively Mandarin to our kids, and I did pretty well for the first three years with the first one.  My Mandarin improved a lot just trying to stay one step ahead of the children. However as the story always goes, my first child spoke only English to my second child, and after he showed some speech delays I switched to English with him as well, and it was all downhill from there.

We put the kids in Mandarin bilingual preschools and elementary schools, and spent a summer in Taiwan, and another in Yunnan to reinforce their Mandarin.  We hired Chinese or Spanish-speaking babysitters, attended Spanish and Mandarin music classes, and watched TV and movies almost exclusively in Spanish or Mandarin.  It wasn't too difficult in the San Francisco bay area where we lived, but it was a concerted effort which required time and resources.

Telling a joke in Mandarin
Singing in Mandarin

After ten years of formal Mandarin education, we decided to move to Spain to cement the Spanish foundation my husband had laid.  Mark, to his credit, was quite steadfast in his commitment to being Mr. Spanish.  For many years he spoke with a Latin-American accent which is favored in the US, but switched on a continental TH once we realized we were moving to Spain.  However, we chose to live in Barcelona, the capital of Catalunya, an autonomous community with it's own language, Catalan. Everyone here is bilingual at a minimum.

When they arrived at ages 8 and 10, the kids had literally never heard Catalan before, but within months they were reading and writing in it, and after two and a half years of immersion, they are conversing fluently and reading novels at grade level.  They attend a local private school which teaches in Catalan and Spanish, with English as a foreign language.  It's really incredible.  Thanks to their learning these languages early, they have good accents in all of them.  Because they are accustomed to being in a multilingual environment, they don't get tense or discouraged when they don't understand everything right away.  They just relax and pickup words here and there naturally.  I was surprised and proud that this year my daughter volunteered to be an announcer for the Carnaval show, which entailed memorizing numerous introductions in Catalan and performing them in front of the entire school, including parents.

singing in spanish
Presenting in Catalan


Now at 12, my daughter is just starting to surpass me in Mandarin vocabulary and comprehension. My son, on the other hand, has forgotten a lot in the last 2.5 years, but I don't blame him.  Mandarin seems useless here. Now that the kids have realized how easy romance languages are to learn compared to Mandarin, it is a little harder to motivate them.

In California, my son refused to speak Spanish.  Now he refuses to speak Mandarin.  I feel like I have spent the last 12 years doing a juggling act, doing my best to keep three linguistic balls in the air.   It can be rather tiring always trying to keep their language skills in balance, always reinforcing their literacy and fluency in something.  I am an educator by training and by nature.  When I noticed their English vocabularies were a little weak and they were not reading for pleasure independently, I started reading aloud with them to build their confidence and get them hooked on reading.  I'm absolutely convinced that reading for pleasure is the best way to improve spelling, vocabulary and grammar in a natural way, without realizing it.  I see now that since they never got hooked on reading independently in Mandarin, they will perhaps never reach a native level of vocabulary or literacy.  However, if someday they spend a year living in a Mandarin-speaking country, they will become fluent conversationalists.  I assign mommy homework and they hate it.  We have vocabulary words on the wall next to the dining table.  Movies are always viewed after reading the book.  I strive to keep Mandarin alive one hour per week.  I can tell that living here my own Mandarin has gone to pot, and even my English has suffered!  Sometimes I can only think of the Spanish word for something, and I have started spelling words which end in -tion with a -cion.  The truth is that in order to maintain literacy and fluency, you have to keep speaking, reading, and practicing constantly. Juggling is difficult to learn at first, but I hope once we reach a certain aptitude, it will get easier.

Right now our daughter's English sounds quite native, but our 10-year-old son speaks with some Spanish-isms which are kind of cute or funny.  Sometimes he turns Spanish words into English, like when he said, "I think he was just dissimulating (lying)." or "We wore winter hats in plain summer. (pleno = in the middle of)"  Other times uses Spanish grammar which speaking English.  For example, he often puts THAT (que) at the beginning of his utterances, "That you need to sign my test,"  which is not something a native English speaker would do.  His sentences make perfect sense in Spanish.  Example:  "It already passed 10 minutes? (10 minutes have already passed?)" or "They always put us a salad, (they always serve us salad)."  English remains the most important language for them to master, but we have faith that when we return to California for middle school, within a year or so their slightly imperfect English will be refined and polished.

I know they are proud of themselves, and they know that being quadrilingual is an asset.  The jury is still out over whether and how it may serve them in the future, but for my husband, a certified linguistic geek, and for myself, it has been a life-enriching challenge for us all.  We will keep on juggling.