All things educational.
This is a wonderful piece and a brutal reminder of all the opportunities I have let slip by in the past. (I should be fluent in Turkish, Danish, Italian and Spanish by now!)
My favorite quote in the article:
His final preparation consisted of watching Hindi soap operas, which have become a bonus pleasure, he said. “I get to feel less guilty about watching trash TV,” he said. “To watch ‘The Bachelor’ in English is one thing, but in Hindi it’s O.K.”
Hope you enjoy and are inspired!
Having just celebrated her first anniversary at Kids Space, a fantastic little local pre-school on Pasir Panjang in Singapore, we moved our family 13 degrees north to Bangkok. Still tropical, still roughly the same number of daylight hours and still a minority, P would now have radically different schooling experience.
She went from being accompanied to a small traditional Singaporean black and white house with a total of 25-35 students splitting their days between English and Mandarin to taking a school bus alone to a ‘campus’ housing hundreds of students complete with pool, track and other amenities. But these pale in comparison to the biggest change, that her days would now be entirely in French.
To any newcomers to the blog, P definitely understands everything I say in French but has for the most part been extremely resistant —read she always answers in English— to speaking French to me with a brief exception during month we spent alone together upon our arrival to Singapore. She had only really just started speaking and our entire condo was empty. This left me as her sole companion and quickly translated in to her switching from English to French. Seven weeks later, our English-speaking helper started and it has been English-only ever since with only the odd word or expression thrown in here and there to tease me.
Getting my parenting neuroses out-of-the-way: I was extremely worried she would feel isolated, confused, frustrated and turn to independent play vs. mingling with other kids as I’ve witnessed so many times in the past.
Apparently I don’t know my kid at all! Week one came to a close and I received an email from her teacher which among other things said:
“La semaine a été encourageante pour Pacifique qui se montre très motivée en classe, participe beaucoup et s’applique dans son travail! Elle s’est très bien intégrée aux autres et s’est déjà fait des copains.”
Roughly translated: Great week, P is very motivated, participates and works hard. She is integrating well and has already made friends.
I nearly cried, mostly of relief but with a splash of pride. So why haven’t I cracked open the Champagne? Despite coming home uttering new french words here and there like calling me ‘la cuisiniere’ or ‘the cook’ – a word I’ve NEVER used, she is so far refusing to answer in French to anyone.
Holding my glass half full, I am not too worried. I already feel that she is using more french and willing to repeat more french words in passing in just one week and it is only a matter of time before my little girl will start frogging it with the rest of them.
Now my glass half empty thinks that short of some major intervention, she is never going to make the switch. So far all her experience has shown her time and again that every ‘french speaker’ around her understands english so she doesn’t need to make the effort and that I should start refusing to respond to her unless her requests are in French.
Just to be clear, there is no way I could do this for a number of reasons, so I am holding tight and hoping for the best.
Let’s see what week 2 brings!
I should probably start by acknowledging that Thai characters are not glyphs. Thai has forty-four consonants (Thai: พยัญชนะ, phayanchaná), fifteen vowel symbols (Thai: สระ, sàrà) that combine into at least twenty-eight vowel forms, and four tone marks. (Pilfered from Wikipedia)
It turns out it isn’t exactly an alphabet but an abugida or a system in which ‘a consonant-vowel sequence are written as a unit.’ And I am not entirely sure what that means.
Now back to the point of this post.
Desperate not to use too much of my kids’ extortionate fragrance-free shampoo, and in desperate need of conditioner, I thought picking up a couple of bottles at our local Tesco Lotus would be relatively easy. Silly me.
I get to the hair care aisle only to face hundreds of bottles of different products, all in Thai. Had there only been two options, I could have just grabbed a bottle of each and figured it out through trial and error; sadly a variety of different hair treatments were added into the mix.
Twenty minutes later, after carefully studying a large section of bottles -and wandering through a few alternative aisles in the hopes of finding an expat-friendly section with things in English- I found pieces of my Rosetta Stone and I was able to figure out that the bottle on the left with the shorter text and letter resembling a ‘W’ at the end is the shampoo while the one on the right is the conditioner.
This is the hardest I’ve ever had to work for clean hair and apart from an immense sense of satisfaction at locating what I needed, it dawned on me that there are different types of reading. Of course, if you take it out of context such as letters printed on a white piece of paper, I probably could not pick out ‘shampoo’ or ‘conditioner’. Well maybe after the time spent tweaking the pictures I could make an educated guess but that is neither here nor there. However, if I had to run into a shop and quickly grab a bottle of one or the other, I’d have no trouble now that I have a block image of what each word looks like.
How ever tenuous the strand (pun intended), I am going to believe that I’m one step closer to reading Thai.
P.S. I am going to ignore the fact that if I plug both shampoo and conditioner into google translate, it gives me an entirely different set of characters… Boo.
Every month, a group of dedicated bloggers comes together to publish a carnival devoted to multilingualism. Click here for more information or to host a carnival on your site.
As always I am grateful to be a part of this group. This month has a spectacular selection of posts. It seems like the new year has inspired many to take stock of the tools that help us keep the languages flowing. I hope you will enjoy this carnival as much as I did pulling it together. A big thanks to Letizia at Bilingue per Gioco, the founder of the carnival and the person who really helps keep it all running smoothly.
Tools of the Trade
Amanda from An Educator’s Spin on it shares her craftiness and resourcefulness in her journey to raise her children bilingual. An incredible feat given that she isn’t bilingual but is herself learning Russian as she goes along. A truly inspiring post.
Mummy do that talks about the challenges of being responsible for the minority language and her discovery of a wonderful local resource. Her post on “The Language Hub” includes a wonderful interview with the Hub’s director, hopefully inspiring some budding entrepreneurs out there to open their own versions?
Jen from Perogies & Gyoza also stresses using what is around you to help reinforce the language in her post on Environmental Print. I am realizing how little I know about other languages – like how Japanese school children learn three different sets of characters also known as syllabaries. (and yes I DID have to look it up).
Maria from Busy as a Bee in Paris shares how families who eat and read together stay trilingual together!
And following tips for reinforcing languages at home, Sarah from Bilingual Baby gives us Auto-Immersion, a post full of fabulous suggestions on how to reinforce language during car trips (or other travel),which also doubles as a great suggestions just to keep the kids busy!
Wrapping up the tools section, Bonne Maman from Our Non-Native Bilingual Adventure shares her latest creation a non-native language crib-sheet. It is ready-made for Franglais users or a good template for anyone else wishing to set one up in their tongues.
On Culture
Babel Kid reminds us that learning a language is more than just knowing words. In her post Tataouine-les-Bains, Babel Mum shares an adorable anecdote reminding us how much culture plays into our understanding of language.
Annabelle from Gato & Canard ponders multilingual identities and how where you are born is not automatically where you are from.
In her post Code Switching and Sign Language, Giovanna from Italobimbi tells us about code-blending or speaking two languages simultaneously, one of which is a recognized sign language such as ASL.
Keeping Faith and Letting Go
In Help Me: My Child is too Darn Stubborn, Intrepidly Bilingual tells us how they have tried to work around their eldest’s refusal to read and write in German and puts out a call for advice: Push, Resign, Persuade…do you hold the answer?
Roxana from Spanglish Baby shares her concerns in Will My Grandchildren Speak Spanish after reading a recent Pew report with surprising numbers illustrating the decline in language proficiency for later generations. Right now, I am still focused on how this question applies to my kids vs my grandkids. No doubt I will eventually worry about that too.
Lynn’s post entitled Bilingual Parenting without a Recipe is a joy to read especially for those of us who struggle with consistency or have chosen a more hap hazard approach to our bilingual parenting. It is incredibly refreshing to see someone who doesn’t appear to obsess about language acquisition but is going with the flow and pleased with the results. I can definitely learn from this post.
In the Binky Fairy, Tamara from Non Native Bilingualism tells us of the story of how the schnulli (possibly the best word for pacifier ever!) fairy helped their daughter give up her pacifier. No matter the language, this is always an emotional challenge for everyone involved.
Finally we spend so much time worrying about how our kids will learn/maintain/embrace languages and do this often as an outsider since many of us have long ago acquired ours. In When Relocation Adds a New Language to the Mix, I ponder the impact of imposing all these languages and look forward to putting myself in the hot-seat as I try to acquire a new language as well.
Happy Lunar New Year: May the Dragon bring us all strength.
Multilingual Mama 