Grammar and Tones

When we were expecting our first child, I read, like many parents-to-be, lots of books on how to raise kids. Most of them largely agreed with what I thought was common sense, but one book that I particularly liked was Raising A Bilingual Child by Barbara Zurer Pearson. It explained the science of what we know about how children language learn language, and in particular about how children learn multiple languages.

My wife is a native Chinese speaker, I’m a native German speaker, both of us speak English to each other, and we were living in China at the time (though not planning to stay there long-term). Hence, the question about multilingualism was very relevant to us.

The 20% rule

The book was a very interesting read with lots of background knowledge about language acquisition, but the one fact that I boiled it down to in the end was: A child needs to be exposed to a language at least 20% of its waking hours in order to become a native speaker. Children are really surrounded by language most of their waking time: When we play with them, we talk directly to them, and when we don’t play with them, we typically talk to someone else. Only rarely will the child be in silence. Hence, there is plenty of room to raise a bilingual child, or a trilingual child, or possibly even a quadrilingual child.

Which languages to pick?

Two questions need to be decided: First, which languages do you want your child to learn? And second, who is gonna speak which language with him?

In my opinion, these languages can be important for a child:

1. Mom’s mother tongue: Even if mom is fluent in another language that she speaks to dad, she might want the kid to learn her native tongue so the kid can speak to their grandparents.
2. Dad’s mother tongue: for the same reason as mom’s.
3. The language that mom and dad speak to each other (which may or may not be one of their mother tongues).
4. The local language of the place the kid lives in.
5. English: because sooner or later they will need to learn English anyways.

That’s potentially 5 different languages: imagine a German dad and a Spanish mum that met in France and hence got used to speaking French to each other. Later they moved to Portugal. The kid would potentially benefit from learning German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English. But 5 languages is probably too much according to the 20% rule. In our case, the five languages were really just 3: Chinese was mom’s and the local language, English was the “international” and “intermarital” language, and German was my language. So that was our choice.

Who speaks what language?

The other question is who the kid is gonna learn which language from. If the kid learns two languages, then the split should really be at least 70/30: if the kid hears the minority language less than a third of the time – given that there are also some quiet times, it will be difficult for them to achieve full native proficiency. The split could of course be 50/50, like mom speaks one language and dad another (assuming that both spend equally much time with the kid). If a kid grows up with 3 languages, then they should really be exposed to a roughly even split, otherwise they might not learn the weakest language well.

The three primary sources of language are: mom, dad, and the environment. The environment will typically be the nursery and school when the kids are old enough, but are also relatives that visit frequently, or random strangers in the parks or shops or cafés that might talk to the baby. When Leo was little we had my parents-in-law spend a lot of time with him, so he was certainly exposed to Chinese. We therefore decided that I’d speak German to Leo, and my wife had the difficult job of speaking English to him.

It was a bit odd to let her speak English to him. For her as a native Chinese-speaker, English is a harder language than for me. She didn’t know any nursery rhymes and had to learn them. She had to get used to speaking a foreign language as a Chinese mother to a Chinese baby in China. This raised eyebrows. But there was a strategy behind this: Since Leo would be exposed to Chinese anyways, and I was clearly the only one who could teach him German, my wife was the only one left to teach him English, and we thought this would be important for him, both because English is spoken everywhere in the world, but more importantly so that he could understand what my wife and I were talking about when he was overhearing our conversations.

Mix and match

This went on for 10 months, until we left China and moved to Germany. There, we swapped our roles: my parents (and everyone else in the country) would speak German to him, my wife would speak Chinese to him, and I would speak English to him.

This was a weird change, for both me and my wife (and probably for Leo, too). I had become so used to speaking German to him, and all of a sudden I had to speak English to him. I had to speak English to him while I was visiting my family who I’d be speaking German with. Though, I followed this rule rather flexibly, some deviation for common-sense, politeness and etiquette is totally allowed. Leo’s first word was “Bagger” (German for digger). A bit similar to “Papa” (German for daddy), but he clearly said Bagger. This was while I was reading his favourite book to him (Mein erstes Buch vom Bagger, “my first digger book”).

And then we moved to England: again, we swapped our role, and this time into what is probably the most natural arrangement: I speak German, my wife Chinese, and everyone in the nursery speaks English – as do my wife and I to each other. Now Leo is 3 years and he talks a lot (just like his mom). He speaks German to me, and seamlessly switches to English to talk to the kids on the playground, and then turns round to mom to explain her what he just said in Chinese. He translates a lot: when we went to China the first time after Covid, there was a tv in the restaurant and he wanted to watch Peppa Pig. I told him in German that you had to pay to watch. When someone else tried to switch on the tv, he told her in Chinese: “that’s not gonna work, you have to pay to watch”. It’s a great way to check if he really understood something: say, if I ask him to wait her till I come back, I’ll ask him to repeat in English (or Chinese) so I know he doesn’t just parrot the words I just said, but actually understood the meaning.

Three is not enough (really?)

We’ve got a Spanish children’s book at home. Sometimes, Leo picks this book and asks me to read it to him. I don’t know why he likes it so much, if it’s the pictures, or the story (which I suspect he doesn’t really understand), or the fact that it just sounds funny to him because it’s neither German nor English nor Chinese. After having read it many times, he identified a few of the things in there: the oranges (Spanish: naranja), and the watermelons (Spanish: sandía), for example. He told me a few times correctly (in Spanish) which ones were oranges and which ones were watermelons. Then he realised that it was much more fun to call the watermelons oranges and the oranges watermelons: I would shout out “noooooo”, and he would burst out in laughter. Then he’d point to the next fruit and give it the wrong name again, full of expectation for the next “noooooo”. I guess this is why he likes this book.