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Family involvement in language studies | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6456 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 17 of 24 11 January 2011 at 3:01am | IP Logged |
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Only one of my younger brothers speaks nothing but English; the rest of us are multilingual to one degree or another.
The rest of us speak French to one degree or another. One of my younger sisters lives in Montreal and has married a French Canadian. Their children speak reasonably good English as a second language. My sister teaches English and her French is very fluent. When we all get together in Montreal, we speak mostly French. My older brother's four children all speak French and use it with their cousins. My younger sister's children all speak English and use it with their cousins. Most of us speak at least some Spanish. My older brother knows some German and restaurant Chinese. Every so often, we've walked through Chinatown and he has told me what a sign says or interpreted something he has heard. I have a younger brother and sister who are twins; they were born in Korea as babies and adopted into our family; they are native speakers of English. My brother studied Korean as a young adult and spent some time in Korea. His twin sister has never had any curiosity about or desire to learn Korean. Her Spanish is also the worst in the family. Sometimes my other younger brother and I will switch back and forth among English and French and Spanish when it's just the two of us and nobody else is around. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Li Fei Pro Member United States Joined 4920 days ago 147 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 24 11 January 2011 at 3:56am | IP Logged |
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My nine year old daughter and I have fun with Mandarin. She can ask for foods and drinks, count, ask what
time it is, etc. It's a fun game to her and she occasionally shows off her skills at school. For instance, some kids challenged her and another Chinese boy (she's adopted from China) to a "Chinese contest" and she spouted a couple of sentences. I was glad to have given her a little ammunition! We have a cool shower curtain with mandarin vocabulary on it, and a poster with more, and we use it to goof around. I have no illusions that I am able to teach her to speak Chinese, since I'm just a beginner, but I am really pleased with her interest. Not to mention that it's great practice for me. We plan to travel to China this summer--first time back-- and I'm guessing that will only increase our interest. A side note: when she was younger I tried enrolling her in a couple of kids' Chinese classes, but she hated them. Only when I got obsessed did she decide the language was sort of cool. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| dragonfly Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 6276 days ago 204 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: German, Italian, Mandarin | Message 19 of 24 11 January 2011 at 8:27pm | IP Logged |
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Though my kids are very little, I try to surround them with languages. When I listen to some stuff washing up or cleaning, they have no other choice but to hear it, too. They are used to pieces of paper with hanzi stuck everywhere in the house. They know I earn my living teaching English. The cartoons and some books I read to them are in English. When we play games such as Memory, Dominoes, Bingo, I call out in English. Sometimes the elder watches movies like Harry Potter in Spanish with me.
I don't aim at bringing my children up multilingual. I just want to make them realise that learning languages is a natural and interesting process. If they pick up some stuff - better for us all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5563 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 20 of 24 12 January 2011 at 11:01am | IP Logged |
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Although a lot of my family don't really have that much interest in languages as a hobby, most of us speak one or two anyway.
My mother is a native Welsh speaker and so speaks both Welsh and English - she messes up a couple of bits and pieces in English but who doesn't - I tease her with some of her mistakes, for instance she says "I wander whether you could do X for me" - I then explain that "wandering" means "walking around aimlessly" or something similar and give her the proper word. She had to do French in school on top of English and Welsh but remembers nothing of it whatsoever. My father speaks Italian and English (he is Italian so obviously we have an Italian surname). He can get by in French quite well since we always used to take our holidays somewhere in France when I was younger for whatever reason. He seems to be genuinely interested in French but he doesn't do anything about it to my knowledge. My brother can speak nothing but English (and that only in theory). He has never shown any signs of being interested in languages but has shown some kind of aptitude for French and Spanish. He gave them both up at the earliest opportunity though, for which I was really annoyed at him for quite some time. My adopted sister spoke English and when she came to us learnt Welsh from our mother. She was very interested in languages and used to love speaking Welsh to me at every opportunity. After she learnt Welsh, I don't remember ever speaking English with her again and that was the way she liked it :] My half-brother shows a probably unnatural interest in languages considering the mere nearly 6 years he has been walking around. When I go to visit (usually for 3 or 4 days a week every fortnight) he speaks English to his mother (she's English as far as I know) Italian to my father and German with me. He is absolutely fascinated by them all and always asks me what I was saying to my friends when I come off the phone to them in another language. After I reply, he wants to know where the countries are on the "Landkarte" - the very existence of which he was very surprised - and why I wanted to learn whatever language he's heard me speak on the phone. He seems to like the more gutteral-sounding ones, like when I speak Welsh to my mum. I thought that when he met my girlfriend - who's Belgian - a couple of months back he'd be interested in learning French - but he has only just begun to show any significant interest in it. In so far as actually using the languages goes, there's a great deal of variation even among the ones who can speak languages. My dad speaks English to his girlfriend and the older of my two brothers and used to speak English to my mother (because there is no other option and I doubt there ever will be with any of them). He speaks Italian to my half-brother when they are on their own or when it's just us three and we speak English as a family. My active Italian is quite bad and they both acknowledge that and encourage me to reply as best I can. I understand most of what they say but my brother gets a kick when he realises I don't understand something he does - which is fantastic :] I even have my brother correct me when he knows what I've attempted to say - although obviously until he's a bit older I'll treat his corrections very carefully :D My mum spoke Welsh to me as a child - unfortunately my brother refused to speak it almost ever and so he can't understand anything but the most basic of phrases and can't read it for toffee. When my sister "arrived" - which has always been our term for when she was adopted at age 2 - my mum set to work on speaking Welsh to her and was ecstatic when I wanted to do the same (I was 5). My sister was like a shiny new toy to me when she "arrived", and in terms of languages that solidified my wanting to use Welsh as much as possible. My mum spoke English to my dad and other brother - neither of my parents learnt the other's language and just spoke English instead which I find infuriating. My brother speaks English to everyone, and despite opportunities to learn Welsh and Italian from native speakers, he wasn't interested which drives me insane. /end of mini rant. My half brother speaks whatever foreign (Foreign here means "not English") language that he can with almost anyone. Italian with dad, German with me (I was going to speak Welsh to him but thought German would be more useful) and now the most recent development is attempting French with my girlfriend. It doesn't happen very often, and I won't pretend to understand the mind of a child properly but I imagine his brain is too confused attempting four. My sister spoke English with our father, brother and her friends and Welsh with me, our mother and our mother's side of the family. Our Welsh relatives were ecstatic when we first came to visit our grandparents (when my sister was 5) and she had never met or spoken to them before, and our grandmother spoke to Anna in English - "hello Anna" to which she replied in Welsh - "Neis cwrdd â ti" - "It's nice to meet you". Which none of us were expecting and it blew our grandmother's mind :D As so often happens here, I've posted something much longer and more rambly than I expected to. Apologies! Jack Edited by LanguageSponge on 12 January 2011 at 11:02am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4919 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 21 of 24 12 January 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
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Haha yeah, my dad speaks many languages to varying degrees of proficiency. And he is teaching me German now with his old German textbooks. His French is definitely stronger than his German though and we communicate in French, unless we're having a conversation with which my French vocabulary would not suffice.
My brother speaks Mandarin and we imitate the Beijing accent when we're bored. And plus right now, he and I are working on creating a language. It's meant to be very grave and ominous :) I don't know if we succeeded. It's called Syimo Eimdreix, which is Sino English in our language :) My dad has helped us with it too, so now we go around the house shouting things like "Dyoer lvaty syoevsyeim zyox kxizy!" My aunt in Taiwan likes learning English so when I visit Taiwan I help her practice some. When I was younger, my father would play music on cultural radio channels and he'd make me guess which language was being sung and what country it was from. My mom absolutely hated it though, she thought some of the songs were real weird. Edited by CheeseInsider on 12 January 2011 at 7:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5132 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 22 of 24 27 February 2011 at 6:54pm | IP Logged |
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I loved all the long detailed posts in this thread and I hope you’ll forgive me for writing one myself;
The two sides of my family are from very different social backgrounds which is reflected in the languages they (don’t) speak. My paternal grandparents were decidedly blue-collar and they never spoke any language but Dutch. My grandfather knew some German as a result of having been deported to Germany during the war but he was a devout follower of the “We will never forgive Germany”-movement so of course he refused to speak it. ;) My aunt and uncle speak passable English because they travel a lot and my great-aunt lives in France so I assume she speaks French. Apart from those, I’m unaware of anyone in my family (and it’s a huge one) speaking anything besides Dutch to any degree of fluency. My step-grandmother was the odd one out in the family because she had attended grammar school and she was particularly enamoured with the Romance languages. She was ecstatic about her granddaughter learning Latin in school and always wanted to see my schoolbooks and talk with me about my lessons whenever she came to visit. In hindsight, I probably refused to give up Latin, even though I hated it, as least partly for fear of disappointing her. My maternal grandparents were upper-middle class and more linguistically inclined. My grandmother grew up in the Dutch Indies and though she left at a young age, I’m told her Dutch was always peppered with Malay words and phrases. She also spoke English and French and probably knew some German as well. My grandfather knew English, French, German, Latin and Ancient Greek and was very firmly of the opinion that you should always try to read literature in the original language. I never knew him but I know this for a fact because my parents once “accused” me of being just like him after expressing the same opinion, an accusation I still fail to see as anything but a compliment. ;) As for my immediate family, I am the only one with a real interest in learning languages. My father once took an evening course to learn French because we always went on holiday to France but it didn’t really work out because my mother and I still tease him for not knowing the difference between “être” and “avoir”. He does speak conversational English and he and I sometimes amuse ourselves by speaking atrocious Dutchified German together. My mother was famously good at French in her youth (or so she would have me believe) but she hasn’t really maintained it so she can barely speak it anymore. Apart from that she speaks conversational English and German and knows some Hebrew, Turkish and Greek as a result of having lived in Israel for a while and having sung in a few foreign operas. Even though neither of them are interested in learning languages, they do occasionally show an interest in my studies and linguistics in general. My brother has yet to show any interest in languages whatsoever. He has of course been obliged to learn English, French and German in school but he seems to be equally bad at all of them. He sometimes ask my help when he’s got some kind of test or assignment coming up in English class, which is very flattering to my vanity, but that’s where the interest ends. Case in point; he’s going to Greece this summer and has assured me that the only Greek he’ll be learning is “One beer, please” and “What’s your phone number?”. *sighs* Edited by ReneeMona on 04 March 2011 at 8:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6500 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 24 01 March 2011 at 12:37pm | IP Logged |
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I have a small family so my mother and sister are the only ones who are relevant in this context. Both speak English and German (they live in Southern Jutland, I live around 100 kms away). My sister also speaks some French since she once had a French boyfriend - and she was unstoppable when we all three visited the Loire valley a few years ago. On the other hand she simply hates Swedish.
The funny thing is that we never speak anything but Danish between ourselves. I doubt that any of them know that I write here at HTLAL or that I have made videos at Youtube, and I haven't told them. I have of course been caught with papers in strange languages, and my mother is happy that I can help out with Latin and Greek words in her crosswords. Though it probably was slightly unexpected for her that I once produced a Greek dictionary directly from my small shoulder bag to check something - most people here don't run around with Greek dictionaries in their luggage. She also glanced somewhat sceptically when I was looking through a Russian textbook this weekend. But it is common and accepted knowledge in our family that my interests are somewhat weird. Though not weirder than my sister's line dance. Edited by Iversen on 01 March 2011 at 12:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 5921 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 24 of 24 02 March 2011 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
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Although I'm the only person in my family that studies a foreign language, it's accepted as a not unnatural thing to do. We were brought up to be "busy" ie to find things to amuse ourselves, not spend our time slumped in front of television, so we all have hobbies, Italian just happens to be mine. I will use Italian expressions around my family ie my niece is "principessa" and I tell my children "ti voglio bene". Especially after studying, I will spout quite a bit of Italian at my husband, and he has a small but expanding understanding of the language, which pleases him, but he is far too lazy to expend the effort to learn for himself.
My daughter, while she wasted the language learning opportunity of 3 years spent working in a Hispanic-dominated laboratory in Arizona, plays Spanish language DVDs such as Little Pim and Muzzi for her daughter, and music CDs of various languages, and my Vietnamese daughter-in-law intends for her future children to be bilingual, so the language-learning addiction may take off in the 3rd generation... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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