Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Bilingual Households (esp. with different writing)

Hi all,
I'm wondering if any of you out there are in bilingual households, particularly those with different systems of writing the language.
My husband is Japanese and we generally practice one-person-one-language. If you're not familiar with the Japanese writing system, the hiragana system is the one that children are first taught. This is a phonetic alphabet. In later years, they move to the kanji, or pictorial characters.
We're homeschooling and I'm wondering how best to proceed with teaching reading. Should I do English and Japanese side-by-side? Focus on one over the other? Initially, I've been focusing on English, since that's my native language and my DS4.5 is stronger in that language. However, the Japanese system is easier to understand. Once you know all the "letters", you can read anything. There's no weird pronunciations like in English. We do have several children's books in Japanese and I'm starting to wonder if learning Japanese first will give DS more confidence.
He already knows the phonics of all the English letters, but hasn't yet grasped blending them together with comprehension. He's gaining a bigger sight word vocabulary, though, and I suspect he's one of the types of kids who will do better with sight words.
Any thoughts? What have you done?

My kids and I are not bilingual. My husband is and the town we live in is on the Mexico border. My daughter will want to watch her cartoons in Spanish sometimes, my son never does. Some families want to raise their children with Spanish as their primary language. They speak only Spanish in the home and watch only Spanish language tv and the kids learn English from cousins and at school. Most people in town use Spanglish, which is not very good English, and they say it's not very good Spanish either. I wouldn't know. So my household is on a different path to bilingualism than yours since no one speaks a lot of Spanish directly to my kids. My kids have heard a ton of Spanish every day of their lives but haven't absorbed it by osmosis.
I have an American Spanish grammer program. It's a third grade level. I seem to remember studying Spanish in third grade when I was in school. I guess that's when they teach your first foreign language. I plan to teach my kids two years of English grammer and then introduce Spanish when I teach the third year of English. My husband is fully bilingual and has lived here his whole life and can not read Spanish.
They do watch stuff sometimes like Pocoyo, Dora, and La Casa De Mickey (mouse). After they learn their Spanish grammer I also bought a region free dvd player and tons of Disney movies in Chinese. (for around the same price as the Rosetta Stone program would have cost). No one's here to teach them Chinese but I assume learning languages is like anything else and it gets easier the more you do it. So they'll at least have native-like exposure to Chinese and language arts lessons in English and Spanish. Since I live here I remember how the phrases sound so when I read Spanish I sound convincing, just with minimal comprehension.

DW is bilingual (Spanish/English), I am not. We are committed to raising DD bilingual, but not equally. English mastery takes priority, and conversational Spanish is good enough (though DD will be free to take it as far as she likes). DW began teaching DD Spanish once it was decided DD had a comfortable-enough grasp of English. She was around 3-4yo before they started.

All of DD's reading instruction so far has been in English, though if you know the basic phonics and are familiar with the language, reading in Spanish is shockingly easy by comparison. Like Japanese, it's entirely phonetic. I once read my DW her emails from Spanish family members when she couldn't come to the computer, and I was getting the pronunciations right, yet had no idea what I was saying. She thought that was hilarious, though reading it like an over-caffeinated soccer announcer may have played a part.

At certain parts of the day at home, DD and DW converse entirely in Spanish. They also visit family (here and in Mexico) and speak Spanish there. DD has even declined to switch to the English-language feeds of her favorite television shows while she's visiting in Mexico.

Shouldn't your friendly neighborhood Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Jewish household be able to answer these questions?

I would think that there are plenty of websites out there regarding how to do this.

Neither Hebrew nor Greek uses the Roman alphabet.

Hi lilmisssunshine,
My son is bilingual in German and English. So our languages do have the same letters - not quite what you are asking for but I thought I'd chime in. Like Japanese German is very easy for learning reading - once you know the letters and you get the idea of blending you can read almost anything. There are a few exceptions, specific rules but those are quickly learned.
It was my plan to teach my son to read in German before he'd learn to read in English (he knew the letter sounds in both languages very early). When he was 4 he suddenly spelled all kinds of German words to me. I was stunned. So I asked him to read and he could read. We waited a bit and then helped him learn English.
So from my limited experience I would suggest the following: Teach the easy language first. That way your child will learn the concept of blending and then can apply that to English and learn the different English phonemes.
I actually think it might be easier, btw, to have different letters! The trickiest thing with learning to read in German and English almost silmutaneously was that the exact same letter makes totally different sounds. That definitely held him back.
Good luck!
Stefanie

I speak three languages including English but can only read and write two fluently. I learnt them all through osmosis, except English, which was taught at school. Since we do not live in our native country, I have taken it upon myself to teach DD3.8 one of my native languages through immersion. I only talk to her in that language. She gets plenty of opportunity to talk in English and is very fluent with it. She has also recently started blending sounds to read phonetically spelt english words. She continues to talk to me in English but that's how I was growing up. My mom would talk to me in her native language but I would talk back in this other lanuage that I spoke with my friends. I ended up learning both languages. I am not planning to teach DD reading or writing in my native languages for a while. I remember the summer when I was 10 or 11, when I just picked up magazines at my grandparents' house and learnt to read without any effort. I am hoping it would be the same with DD. Even if she does not learn how to read/write, just knowing how to converse is fine by me.

Lilmisssunshine, you might want to look up Patricia Kuhl's research on bilingualism and native fluency.

I'm bilingual in English and French, and was at a near-bilingual fluency in Spanish a few years ago, but am currently out of practice. DH is uningual English.

The plan is to keep DS unilingual until he learns English reading, because that's our household language and both parents' mother tongue, then to phase in French (probably around 3-4) and a dramatically different language of his choice (e.g. Mandarin, Arabic) shortly thereafter while phonemic discrimination is still high. My paternal grandfather was Polish and spoke 7 languages fluently into adulthood, which isn't too far of of the norm of what many South Asian and European children learn. I'd love for DS to be multilingual if interests and abities allow because we have a family history on my side of being strong with languages.

Another perspective from languages with the same letters: From the time my DD was born, my DH (native spanish speaker) read to her in spanish and I in english. I speak english with her almost exclusively and I would say he is about 50/50 in what language he speaks with her. Based on some research I had read, I was prepared that her language would be delayed as her brain figured it out, but that wasn't our experience. When she began speaking, while she sometimes used a spanish word in an english sentence, it seemed clear that she was switching back and forth based on the situation and who she was talking to. She just turned 7, her spanish accent is indistinguishable from my DH. She is 3 grade levels ahead in reading english, and at grade level in spanish.

Thanks for all these responses.

He *is* on the cusp of reading. He's shown very little interest in books from the start, but I've recently found that he likes scary books, so we've done that. It's almost to where he'll have a story memorized and be able to "read" it that way. I've also been seeking out books for his baby sister that he can "read" her, ones like nursery rhymes where he already knows the words.

In all honesty he hasn't shown a whole lot of interest in learning to read Japanese, but DH feels a pressure/guilt/?? to improve his Japanese. The Japanese style of education is very top-down, "You must memorize this." and of course, that's the way that DH teaches him. I can see DS getting upset when he gets an answer wrong because DH is not pleased with him. I guess there's a part of me that thinks the more I can teach DS, the more we can avoid DH teaching him, because I don't think that style's so good for DS. DH seems to have a very difficult time reading people's non-verbal communication and knowing when to stop pushing.

My son is bilingual in English and Chinese. He is 2.5 years old. He knows all the letter sounds in English and recognizes many Chinese characters. He understands that he speaks 2 different languages, and is often capable of translating between them. He started learning both from the moment he was born.