Parenting - English vs not ignoraing native language - chime in.

[Zeze]

We're Korean Americans. I spoke Korean fluently and became very Americanized. Now, English became my primary language and my Korean deteriorated to a conversational level. I guess this is rather uncommon for someone who came here at 13.

Anyways, my daughter is almost 3. We live in northern NJ where it happens to have TONS of Koreans - many are working class fobby Koreans (meaning fresh-off-the-boat or still very much 'Korean'). They speak Korean at home, go to a Korean-centric daycare, and probably learn English full-on by the time they go to a public school (i.e. kindergarten).

I didn't like that Korean daycare. It was both pushing Christianity (they talk about praying, God, etc to toddlers). And it was too Korean-school-esque. They brought home workbooks to complete for 3 year olds, WTF? It's very Asian in that sense.

She ended up going to an American one in next town. It's more hands-on with crafts and I simply like dealing with Americans better & navigating in that space. I can easily talk comfortably and get my points across without having to worry about talking respectfully or customs. I guess that's just my fault for being too Americanized.

I'll get to the point.

I want my kids to speak much Korean as I at minimum. Now that's not easy. I just realized suddenly that my kids will never learn Korean at this rate. They'll just have awkward crappy Korean level which I disliked seeing in 2.0 generations.

This hit me hard because I was walking my dog with my girl and we walked over to the 'working class' apartment complex with tons of Koreans. These cute 8-10 Korean kids ranging from 4-9 all came over and petted my dog. It hit me hard that my girl might as well be white at this point. She barely new any words.

Then I also realized these kids will all go to my kids' same public school. As I said, there are tons of Koreans here, they actually make up 30-40% of public school.

I can already feel the reverse-racism my kids would face. The 30-40% of fobby Korean kids will have a hard time relating to my kids and vice versa. My kids will be that white-washed Americans that can't even speak their native heritage language while being Asian. I know how kids get. And I saw it myself growing up too.

Crap. I'm gonna start to talk in Korean and aggressively teach my kids the language.

Again, it's not just wanting to appease them. I agree that I want them to speak it. Today's revelation with the schooling is just forcing my hands now.

Just wanted to share.

 

[brianmanahan]

i was never in a situation like this, but had a couple great-grandparents who were born within a year of leaving their native countries (poland & germany). their parents taught them polish/german but as they went to school here and learned english, the whole family eventually dropped the original language (except for conversations just between great-great grandma/grandpa).

great-grandma from germany still knew german pretty well when she was older but hadn't really spoken it to anyone in decades. and my polish great-grandma had used it so infrequently for so long, she would wink and tell me all she could really remember was the swear words. she didn't really see a need to keep speaking it here and actually became an english teacher for her career.

i am friends with a guy who was born a decade after his parents came over from italy, and they never even bothered with teaching him italian.

on the other hand, most indians i know have taught hindi or telugu to their kids as a first language. as they went to school here though, they sort of dropped it. a coworker of mine complained that she speaks english all day and just wanted to go home and speak hindi with her son for a while, but after the age of 7 or 8 he didn't feel like it anymore because it was much easier for him to just speak english all the time.

 

[Zeze]

i was never in a situation like this, but had a couple great-grandparents who were born within a year of leaving their native countries (poland & germany). their parents taught them polish/german but as they went to school here and learned english, the whole family eventually dropped the original language (except for conversations just between great-great grandma/grandpa).

great-grandma from germany still knew german pretty well when she was older but hadn't really spoken it to anyone in decades. and my polish great-grandma had used it so infrequently for so long, she would wink and tell me all she could really remember was the swear words. she didn't really see a need to keep speaking it here and actually became an english teacher for her career.

i am friends with a guy who was born a decade after his parents came over from italy, and they never even bothered with teaching him italian.

on the other hand, most indians i know have taught hindi or telugu to their kids as a first language. as they went to school here though, they sort of dropped it. a coworker of mine complained that she speaks english all day and just wanted to go home and speak hindi with her son for a while, but after the age of 7 or 8 he didn't feel like it anymore because it was much easier for him to just speak english all the time.

Thanks for sharing. There are few stark differences between you and I. You're a 'general' white (you know what I mean). No one will give you crap for not speaking German or Polish in US - or even know you are German or Polish. This is bit different if you're Asian - i.e. you are yellow. People will expect my kids to speak a native language, including Asians themselves. And I do want them to be bilingual. I mean who doesn't want to learn an additional language?

If you had kids, you are also not living in some big German-community where your kids not being able to speak German play a factor in their adolescence experience.

 

[Dr. Detroit]

If your so concerned about it, stick your kid in the Fobby daycare so they can learn proper Korean..................

 

[Iron Woode]

My grand parents came to Canada from Ukraine. They didn't speak English and could't read or write. They got along and learned English by immersion.

My father could speak a little Ukrainian whereas I know nothing of it. I have no real interest in learning it either.

 

[brianmanahan]

yeah i imagine it is easier if you are white due to similarity to the majority. back in the early 1900's it certainly was.

i can't imagine there'd be any harm in learning multiple languages, and i've seen people say it's beneficial for memory and thinking development. actually i would've liked to know more than just english. my german grandma actually gave me some crap for not knowing any german, so i took a semester of it. i didn't like every freaking noun having a gender though so i didn't continue it.

 

[Brainonska511]

Thanks for sharing. There are few stark differences between you and I. You're a 'general' white (you know what I mean). No one will give you crap for not speaking German or Polish in US - or even know you are German or Polish. This is bit different if you're Asian - i.e. you are yellow. People will expect my kids to speak a native language, including Asians themselves. And I do want them to be bilingual. I mean who doesn't want to learn an additional language?

I agree on your point - white people that lost language could easily blend into the dominant landscape of whiteness. But if anyone ever gives you crap for this now with your kids, I hope you tell them to stuff it. Raise your kids how you want.

If its really important to you for your daughter to be bilingual, perhaps you could talk to her, at least conversationally in Korean or get her classes?

 

[Darwin333]

I agree on your point - white people that lost language could easily blend into the dominant landscape of whiteness. But if anyone ever gives you crap for this now with your kids, I hope you tell them to stuff it. Raise your kids how you want.

I think the bigger issue, or at least an issue, are other kids giving her kids shit in one of the millions of ways little devil spawn can do.

 

[DigDog]

i tried to avoid this thread ...


i'm half yugoslavian. today you would say i'm half croatian, but back when *i* was born, it was yugoslavia.

My mom's from there, my dad is italian. When i was a boy, my main language was Italian, and my second language was french. My dad spoke french because he had business with Antenne 2, and his family was reeeealy old-skoool and french was seen as the language of the aristocracy.
My mom wanted me to learn Srbo-Hrvatski Jesik, or croatian. I hated it. I hated it with every fiber of my body.

Then the world changed and English became the ruling power and i was already into it for some weird reason, and nowadays i just speak italian and english. I can read french at a middle-school level, with some great big gaps in it, and i can read and speak croatian at a very elementary level. (i also speak Spanish because spanish is a joke language, it's basically Italian when you are drunk)


A: you should whop yo children's ass and force them to learn Korean. They will hate you for it, and when they grow up, they won't know what great treasure it is to know a different language, but that's life.

Fluency is other languages is a very useful tool for work, my current position is primarily due to me being able to speak good english (which most native speakers don't do, because they just need conversational english and that's enough), and i've had others just because i could speak both italian and english at school level. But English *is* the main language on this planet at this time, so speaking is doens't make you special. Being able to speak English and, say, Farsi, or Armenian, or Maori, or Mandarin, that is an asset. I'm more useful to people as an English speaker who speaks Italian, than as an Italian who speaks english. There's nothing great today about speaking english. In the 80s, English was enough to get you a management job; today, you can flip burgers with it.
If you spoke Japanes in the 80s, you would be retired by now.

So, although nobody can predict the future, being able to speak Korean will be a great asset to your kids. And they might even come to appreciate it. You are Asian Dad(tm) so it should be no problem to you to belt-whip your kids into learning it, it's in your genes.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm French and always went to French school, so that was mostly the main language in the house. English was thought in school by default so I learned it then. When I went to college I went to an English one as it had a better program than the French one. That and in the real world everything is mostly in English so it's better to learn technical stuff in English. Funny enough at my job it's pretty much a 50/50 of English and French as we work with Quebec a lot. Shows the importance of being bilingual.

Whatever your primary language is though, English is probably the most important to also know even if it's a second language.

 

[dullard]

I'm not a parent and I don't come from a family with two languages. But I have worked closely with many people who have had that experience. I am always jealous of how they have such great language skills that are ingrained whereas I have to struggle for weeks to learn a simple phrase in another language. Once you know two languages, it is usually easy to learn a 3rd, 4th, or more. Someone with two languages tends to earn more money and have more interesting careers.

The downsides are that you actually need to do it correctly. Just because your daughter might learn to speak Korean, she probably won't be able to read or write it unless you teach her to read/write or hire tutors do teach it. Having the ability to read/write Korean and English could be quite helpful in business (especially with the increased globalization and importance of Asia), but unless your daughter is taught to read/write Korean, she never will have that skill. For example, I had a friend whose native language was non-English, they spoke entirely their native language at home, yet she failed the college entrance exams for that language at her preferred prestigious college since she didn't know the written grammar rules.

The other drawback, which is very hard to get around is that your daughter will learn last generation's slang. She will always sound out of place to the natives. That is, unless you yourself take the effort to learn the slang and culture of today's Korean teens.

 

[purbeast0]

I'm as white as they come and my wife is Nicaraguan and came to the states when she was 13. We have a 3 year old (just turned 3) and my wife talks to him in Spanish a lot, and my mother in law pretty much only speaks to him in Spanish and she watches him while we work. He definitely understands both Spanish and English, and he also knows who to speak it to. Like if my MIL asks him colors he'll (obviously) respond in Spanish, and if I ask him colors he'll answer in English.

He's been naming all of his toys and has a bunch of little balls like from a ball pit, and I picked up a red one and he asked me what it's name was and I said "rojo". He replied "No daddy, rojo is espanol, it's red" so he clearly gets the concept of 2 languages meaning the same thing, which is pretty cool to see. I'm gonna be jealous when he can speak fluently in Spanish while I'm too lazy to practice and learn it better.

 

[T_Yamamoto]

Born in Japan, moved to the US when I was under 5.

We always spoke Japanese at home, but to improve my English, I had a tutor. I also read the newspaper a lot, but what helped the most was talking to my brother in English.

To this day, my brother and I talk mostly in Japanese and talk to our parents in Japanese. I never had an identity crisis that most immigrants or first generation Asian Americans feel. It isn't weird or out of place to find AAs who don't speak their native language, but I do find that being able to speak it conversationally is better than not knowing at all (since a lot of my friends who didn't study it can speak it because that's how they communicate with their parents)

Edit: to further my Japanese, my parents put me into Saturday school (aka Japanese school on Saturdays). Also my pediatrician is Japanese; however, he can't speak the language (he was a second generation AA).

 

[NetWareHead]

I am first generation here in this country, parents came from Italy and I was born a few months later. My first language growing up was Italian and according to my family I spoke it beautifully. I had no exposure to English until I went to school and I remember in kindergarten and into first-second grades I struggled to learn. Then I would go home and i'd would be speaking italian again so I never got the chance to learn english rapidly like other students. I do remember my teachers wanting to place me in a special education class because of my shortcomings with english. My dad walked into the school and raised hell; told the teachers to do their jobs and teach his son english instead of taking the easy way out and putting me into a class that rides the short bus. Fast forward to my adult life and I can say with confidence that my italian is very conversational although not fluent. I've been to italy numerous times and can get by very well. I only start to feel my linguistic shortcomings when in a location that requires precise and proper grammer such as a workplace or in an academic setting.

This is all a choice you need to make for your children. As to how much korean you want them to learn and how "korean" you want them to be. I grew up differently from other kids and looking back, I wouldnt trade it for the world. I love my upbringing and how I have the ability to speak/understand Italian. Its not a language that will get me far in today's market like english but I feel culturally it enriched me.

Also, when kids learn a second language when young, it is easier for them to pick it up than learning it when older. I also beleive that making a child learn a second language when young opens pathways in the brain that led to better rationale thought and higher critical thinking. Think of the everyday expressions, words, sentence structure, verb formation etc... you might know in Korean and their equivalents in English. When a child understands that and can smoothly transition between multiple languages, that skill can be applied to other areas. I really believe it makes kids smarter. As for myself, it spurred an interest in languages and I was able to learn others with this skill and mindset from my youth.

In the usa, there is a tendency for immigrant children to eventually become "wonder bread". Kind of a saying I coined up looking back to my school days. My classmates would bring in lunch sandwiches on wonder bread, typically bologna/cheese or pb&j whereas my lunch would be pasta, a fritata or some very italian sandwich on fresh bread with non standard ingredients like broccoli rape, clams, fresh mozzarella, basil etc... and leave my breath smelling like garlic for the rest of the day. I loved growing up italian, having an italian community of friends and family I was close with, familiarity with customs, traditions and cuisine etc.... I didnt look down on my american friends, but I kinda felt like I had extra compared to my wonder bread friends.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Good luck.

Finding a day-care that's not a Christian Boot Camp is tough regardless. I remember cycling through a few of them when I was a kid, for similar reasons (my parents were trying to raise me Catholic, not Christofascist. My mom ended up getting licensed to run her own daycare.)

But keep looking; with an immigrant community that large, you shouldn't have too much trouble finding a secular Korean-immersion school.

"Good" schools are increasingly becoming more academics-oriented. Homework in preschool is a bit weird to me - I didn't have it until 4th grade and it was a BIG deal - but today, the neighbors' kids are getting take-home assignments in Kindergarten. In a generation or two maybe we'll be teaching calculus and astrophysics in gradeschool like in Star Trek.

I know a lot of immigrants who are in a similar situation with degrading language skills - your loss of fluency is actually pretty typical; use it or lose it.

Going back in my family history, though, assimilation was more the ideal. My great grandparents all refused to teach their kids German/Italian, beyond a few "choice phrases" that slipped out here and there.