One parent one language...

[Daddy_Yo]

Hi all,

can someone tell me if they've used the one parent one language method? My wife and I have started to use it - I'm doing the English which is fine as it's my first language, but I feel like I'm missing out on sharing the other language (French) with the my 3 and a half year old.

Any adivce? does it even work? 

[Baining]

Hi,
  I just read another blog about this from Big Boy and Xiao Chien!  I will add the link below.  She dosn't really like it.  I haven't heard of it till recently but it does not make a lot of sense to me either.  I think I also would feel I was missing out!  My husband and I have 2 boys 6 and 8 and we started learning Chinese as a family goal.  When you have something that you all work on together like that and all can share in the joys and frustrations together it is really a neat experience!  Also personally I have found that my boys retain the most when we are having fun.  My boys are pretty humorous and many times we will be out together and they will make up a joke that will use recent words or sentence structure they had just learned and then add in English for what they don't know.  We do the same back, English and Chinese.  They seem to really retain anything we joke about and can use it later the right way.  But most importantly I think is we are laughing together.  My boys really love Chinese and I think I don't know yet because they are not adults yet, but I think they will love it enough to keep learning it and using it.  That is the goal right!  If they master a language by 6 but don't use it anymore or can't because the only one who they can speak with is dad then it might seem limiting and not too fun and not worth continuing.  And we all know if we don't use it we lose it.

Well now you see how opinionated I am since I have never even tried it!!! 
I will keep following this thread to see if someone else has and it has worked, I am interested.
Here is my blog with lots of ideas on interactive learning http://mandarinkids.wordpress.com/


Here is Big Boy Blog about the subject  http://wenjonggal.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/one-person-one-language-and-other-theories-that-bug-me/

[shadah]

I speak German to our daughter and my husband speaks English. We would rather do ML@H ( main language at home), but my husband does not speak German. It works for us. I speak German when I speak to her. I speak English when I speak to him.
We've done it that way for almost two years. Although my husband doesn't speak German, he has been around it long enough to understand most of what we way.

[PY]

Ok I think children are really smart to be able to understand and learn as many language you want to teach them.
I speak spanish to my 24 months old baby girl and her dad speaks english to her since she was a baby, now she understands both languages really good and she speaks them really good.
The only advice I will give you is do not mix both language while you speak to her..if you speak german to her do it at 100% german. Other ways you will confused your children.
The youngest the children are the best to start!
Good luck and keep it up.

[aangeles]

My hubby and I have been using the OPOL method with our daughter since she was 6 months old. My husband speaks Filipino to her, I speak Mandarin, and she gets English from daycare. So far, it is working beautifully. At 18 months old, my daughter understands complex instructions and responds appropriately to questions whether spoken to her in Filipino by her father, in Mandarin by me, or in English by her daycare teachers. From our readings regarding multilingual children, we were expecting her to have relatively slower language development than monolinguals in the beginning, but even in this area, she surpassed our expectations. At 18 months old, she has a vocabulary of more than 100 words in all three languages combined (monolingual children are expected to have 5-20 words at this age.)

We had the same anxieties and questions as you when we first decided on this method. In our case, my husband did not know a word of Mandarin. I had the advantage since I am fluent in both Filipino and Chinese. In the first few months, when I spoke in Mandarin to the baby, I would quickly follow it up with a Filipino translation to my husband to make sure he did not feel left out. However, as time went by, I found out that I had to translate less and less, as my husband would usually get the gist of what I said to the baby with the help of nonverbal cues such as facial expressions, hand gestures, tone of voice, and context. It also helped a lot that we taught her sign language and we would use the same sign with her whatever the language we spoke. Although by no means perfect, this helped a lot in our family conversations. Also, just by daily exposure to the language (and watching Baby Learns Chinese and Chinese cartoons with my daughter), my husband is slowly learning Mandarin even without any conscious effort on his part. It was really important to us for my daughter to preserve both sides of her heritage so we persisted in spite of our anxieties.

If you are interested in reading more about this method and other alternatives in raising multilingual children (such as using the minority language at home – not a good option for us since we wanted her to be trilingual), I highly recommend the book Growing Up with Three Languages by Xiao Lei Wang. Also we found a lot of useful tips and resources on www.multilingualchildren.org.

Hope this helps and good luck! 

[wenjonggal]

Hi, it's me who wrote a blog entry about One Parent One Language.
http://wenjonggal.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/one-person-one-language-and-other-theories-that-bug-me/

Frankly, I said as a single parent who is bilingual with English my dominant language, and learning Mandarin, and wanting to do three languages with my son, One Parent One Language is just... impossible. I am not going to raise my son to be a monolingual anglophone because I am a single mom. My parents are thousands of miles away, and in any case, they don’t speak some interesting minority language: they are monolingual anglophones like most of North America. And I certainly don’t have the money for a nanny several days a week.

My son started daycare in French (the majority language here in Quebec, but I wouldn’t say the dominant language in that most of our friends are anglophone, english radio, tv, books and all other media are readily available, and most things like packaging are bilingual: French is present but so is English) when he was three years old, and goes now 2-3 times a week. So he gets French immersion there, but for the first year he only replied in English.

So, basically, I read books in English and in French. I put on French and Mandarin cds and dvds. I speak English to him but also French... more often French outside the home as people in the park, stores etc are majority francophone and I want to help contribute to the French atmosphere and not run around speaking English in public with my son.

There is no way I could speak “only one language: don’t mix the languages while talking” esp in Mandarin. I teach him French words while speaking English, and translate French while I’m speaking it into English if there is a word or ten he doesn’t know. And in Mandarin I integrate new words we are learning into games and everyday speech. Every language I know I learned that way... definitely almost all teaching materials and language classes are conducted in more than one language... adding in more and more of the second language into the mix as more vocab, sentence structure and understanding is accumulated.

I certainly haven’t found it has “mixed him up”... he has a noted preference for English since it is our home language, and it is so available in the outside world, but he can tell you what language any word or sentence is. Anyways, it is normal for anyone who is multilingual to “code mix” ie use words from another language if they don’t have the word for it in the language they are speaking: In Quebec even unilingual anglophones say “dépanneur”, “cafe au lait” and “croissant”.

So, while some parents might have two parents with two languages they are fluent in, OPOL might work as well as any other method, but for some of us it is just not a possibility and without it we are doing just fine.

Here is a great article on Raising Bilingual Children by the Linguistic Society of America:
http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-biling_child.cfm

[wenjonggal]

re aangeles: I too find sign language to be really helpful. (we have babysigningtime and signingtime) And I'll check out the trilingual book you suggest. thanks!

[Baining]

This thread has been fun to read!  Everyone feels really strongly about pro or con on this!  Even me who left the first response.  Sorry if I misquoted Big boy blog.  I think after reading all this that one thing is very clear!  This is a group of parents extremely, with good reason, dedicated to the daunting task of teaching their kids another language!  That is really an encouraging thing in this day in age!  This approach would not work for us either since we are just learning ourselves, but we have really enjoyed being welcome into the Chinese culture. I think that the old saying is true there is more than one way to skin a cat! Right!  Whatever you are using keep it up!  No one will care about your kids success as much as you and in the end I think this is what will make the difference! 

"Even good plans fail with a lack of dedicated commitment!"-unknown

Baining

[hypatia]

Parents using the OPOL method usually do NOT share the second language: for example mum and dad communicate in English but Mum's Italian. Then it makes sense for her to speak what is most natural to her. That is the whole point: you have to speak what you feel natural with. If you 'force' yourself, the child will feel it.

My dad speaks a variety of languages but is reluctant to use his first language with my daughter because he hasn't spoken it for 20odd years. That's OK. She 'misses' on this extra language but no-one feels forced to talk and be spoken too, and they are still ways of exposing the child via dvds for example.

So in Daddy Yo's case, we assume that are both all bilingual and share the same languages. But if French feels more natural to his wife, then it makes sense that she picks this as her 'mother tongue'. However, he can still participate by reading a daily book in French, for example.

[princessclem]

I am having a really hard time with how to do this I would love to do This with my kids but I DONT SPEAK FRENCH I am born and raised in an english only home and dont want my kids to have the same disadvantage. I am trying to teach them french and they are very good at sign language and I actually find it very helpful for translation of ideas as it helps them be more hands on and if they understand one thing in english and sign i can sign it when i say it in french and it seems to help comprehension. If anyone has helpful hinst on how to learn and teach a language at the same time PLEASE let me know!! thanks
my basic idea at this point is speak everything that I can in french only to my kids and they are doing really well with that but I wish that I had more conversational skills for talking to them.

[wenjonggal]

Princessclem, that is exactly what I am doing in Chinese. I am learning it along with my son, trying to stay a step ahead (though when he came from China at 22 mos he probably was miles ahead of me in comprehension... I think he's lost that advantage now though).

I just do like you are doing. When I learn something new I try to integrate it in our daily lives: naming body parts saying "I wash your leg, I wash your arm, I wash your face" etc and then same with drying. Playing hide and seek in the park: there is a popular chinese children's song that goes "looking for a friend, looking for a friend. I found a friend", so I use the same vocab hiding behind trees with him. We watch Dora dvds in Chinese together, me with a dictionary, and I repeat sentences and words to make it more concrete for him. We listen to chinese songs together and then I sing them when we are out with stroller. I ask him if he wants food (cheese, bread, "more", whatever) in chinese etc. We count in English, French and Chinese. We name colors in all three languages (here we speak English mostly at home, and French in the street since it is the dominant language).

And great for you for discovering how wonderful and practical sign language is when introducing another language! That is what I did with my son a lot, and still do for words he seems unsure of... it is much easier to incorporate the sign while vocalising a word, than by switching between two languages... you can do it simultaneously and it doesn't interfere, and I do think, like Baining says, that involving the body helps in learning.

Sounds like you're doing great! And whenever anyone says that it's not the right way, or not enough or whatever, I remind them I am now pretty bilingual in French and never had any parent speak it, and started learning it in Grade 7 at 11 yrs old. And knew NO ONE in my surroundings who spoke it til I was 19 and moved here. So I think that anything we do is great and an improvement on nothing! Keep it up and let us know how it goes. And btw you can check out my blog... we are learning Chinese not French as a language the parent and child are learning together, but a lot may be applicable.

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