Bilingualism

Hi, Straggler.I don't think there is anything wrong with teaching a kid to be bilingual. I've tried to teach my son a little bit of Chinese, but I haven't been consistent enough to make it stick.Still, I've always felt rather uncomfortable about this kind of thing: it reminds me too much of parents who try to influence their children's career and lifestyle choices by inundating them with things that will nudge them in that direction.All the same, I'd still like to be able to speak Chinese with my son.Oh well.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Dronester. There was a time when I would have said, "yes, fluently." Unfortunately, I'm not that good anymore. Though, when I was interviewing for a PhD, I did help translate for a lady from Beijing during a layover at the Cincinnati airport (the northern accent is extremely hard to understand though: it sounds like Irish people speaking Chinese, and many sounds get turned into "r" for some reason).I'm a Mormon: we serve two-year missions around the world, and I was sent to Taiwan. They have one of the best language training facilities in the world in Utah, where dozens of languages are taught. We had about 2 months of 8-to-10-hours-a-day training, then we got dumped in the deep end (i.e. the streets of Taiwan).I took some classes during my undergrad, but I ran out of the extra time for fun classes when I got married and suddenly became a father.-----I used to speak Spanish as a teenager, when I worked with a bunch of Mexicans, but I was never all that good at it. Learning Chinese follows a completely different path from learning Spanish: with Spanish, you can start with simple concepts, learn a bunch of vocabulary, and gradually get into the harder stuff later on, all the while still communicating passably. The learning curve gets steeper as you get in deeper.With Chinese, it's actually a fairly simple, straightforward language, but you have to start with all the hard concepts first (because, on a fundamental level, it's entirely different from English). Once you've mastered that, it gets easier as you go. So, the learning curve is steepest at the beginning, then drops off (until you start trying to learn to write: then all bets are off).The result is that people who only speak a little Spanish can get by, but people who only speak a little Chinese don't really know any Chinese at all.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Onifre. I can't imagine what you could possibly be referring to here.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Caffeine. When you say "here," you're referring to the Czech Republic? I thought you were just another boring American.Actually, my brother-in-law was a missionary in the Czech Republic, but I think they taught him Slovakian.Other than him, I can't remember having ever met another Czech-speaking Mormon.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.

Hi, Caffeine.I've always been somewhat jealous of Europeans because y'all have so many opportunities to learn foreign languages. All we get here is Spanish and English: you have to try hard to find anything else, and you don't get many opportunities to practice even if you can learn it.When I started college, I was a linguistics major. I wanted to be able to speak several languages. I then tempered my passion and settled for mastering my Chinese. Then, I took a biology class and fell in love immediately, so linguistics had to take a back seat.I keep hoping that another opportunity will come up, but it will surely have to wait until grad school is over.

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-Bluejay (a.k.a. Mantis, Thylacosmilus)Darwin loves you.