Many people think I am crazy that I have started my 18 month old daughter with Chinese lessons. She is learning to speak English and Polish as a native speaker. I am adding Chinese lessons to her life.
I think this will be a huge advantage to her in life. However, many people including English people say that I should only teach her Polish or she will be confused. Let the facts speak for themselves, bilingual children gain intelligence because of early brain plasticity. Their brains are stretch, instead of experiencing the normal rate of neuron death most toddlers experience. It is the time the brain is pruning cells away and half your brain cells have died by age two.
Why I teach my child Chinese
I really do not care if my daughter ever uses or learns Chinese. She might not like it, or have no interest in China. She does not have to go to the best school or be top of her class or be a very important person in life. She can be who she wants to be. However, if I exposure her to one Asian language at an early age, she will at least have the opportunity to choose this latter if she wants to.
My view is I do not care if my child lays on the beach and is a surf bum, I just want to make sure she has a good foundation for life. Parenting is stewardship not ownership. It is to set the base and let them do what they want with it.
Right now she has a great rapport with her Chinese tutor. Oudi her tutor, studies music and is from Peking so she speaks Mandarin. At this juncture her lessons are not different than having a Chinese babysitter. We also watch active Chinese videos on Youtube that she likes. But the most important is physical interaction. Kids need real concrete three dimensional one on one interaction for their lessons to be effective. This is better than any Chinese tutorial, but not as good as sending them to Hong Kong or Beijing.
In fact we joke than when our child is ten we can go to China and she can give us a tour as she is a native speaker. I think this would be funny. If you want to educate yourself more on Chinese culture you can go to the official website which has many interesting news, language and cultural items.
Why have I started her so early? Because now its all a game. Its all fun, not work. She craves mental stimulation, her biggest problem is her day gets boring sometimes. So I thought why not solve this with a Chinese babysitter? Further, only to about the age of three can a baby be a real native speaker. If you start lessons at five it will be really hard for them to be accent free. Some people say the age is eight or before adolescence, but the reality is the brain is design to absorb languages and that is the plural form before the age of three.
Chinese lesson and money
I am a teacher in Poland so I do not make a lot of money. However, I believe if my daughter is a trilingual native speaker in Chinese, English and Polish without an accent she could have a very interesting life.
If you give your child Chinese lessons there life might be more interesting
I do not know if I am good father or not. I spend way to much time working and wish I could be wiser. I am not a rich man. But I love her very much and would like this to be something she has in her life.
If you live in the rich USA, and it is a rich place, even if you are poor, I think you can afford to give your child language lessons in Chinese or any other language, it will change their life, statistically they will have a greater increase in future income then even getting an extra degree. But most important because it is fun for them.
This is why I highly recommend as a language teacher and a parent if you have ever considered to exposure to child to a language early do it. Chinese is the third most studied language in the USA after English and Spanish. Let me know your thoughts on my radical idea of having Chinese lessons for my baby.
9 responses to Chinese lessons for my child
I’m doing the same with my kids: English (from me), Japanese (from my wife), and Chinese (from caregivers and whatever other exposure we can drum up).
So I may not be the most objective person to say this is a great idea, but I certainly think it is!
It is a great, idea, there is only a limited window for native speaking children to absorb sounds so their brain organizes it in the native speaking area of the brain. If you wait until age ten to teach your child a second language they may approximate native speaking sounds but it goes in another part of the brain. I think Chinese is a good language for children for the next one hundred years… for some reason.
you’re not crazy at all, i started my kid on books as well, I really like the mandyandpandy series because it comes with audio, for Chinese.
Some relatives of mine had the idea to teach their child two languages, so the father was talking to him in Polish and the mother – in French. But at the age of 5, when the boy started to talk, he had problems in differentiating these languages, so he was taking some words from Polish, others from French and mixing them in one sentence. They were a bit scared about it, but fortunately after some time he has started to talk correctly. Now, he’s bilingual
So, I think you had a good idea!
Personally, I’m bilingual too and I’m “accent free” in French, but because I lived most time in Poland, I dont have a wide vocabulary at all and my “language intuition” is bigger in Polish than in French ^^
I guess that even a bilingual would always prefer one language to the other one
The bilingual children I know prefer one language to the other depending on where they live. For example, I know a girl lives in Poland, but when she was in the USA she only wanted to speak English now, only Polish, but if she went back I think English again would be her favorite language.
Thanks for your responses. I’ve also heard that during the first child’s years, his brain memorizes the sounds he will later use. It’s why it is hard for us to pronounce some sounds coming from other languages, or even impossible. So the possibilities of a bilingual child are wider, especially if you expose him or her to languages that are so different (Polish-Chinese for example)
Yes the first year is really the most important, but the second and third year is also. The first year the brain is really flexible in terms of languages and sounds.
For me I believe that Chinese is a growing language. Nearly 1/4 of the world’s population. Speakers of Chinese not only live in China, Singapore and Malaysia, but are also spread throughout southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. You could find a China town in majority of the cities. China is widely regarded as the potentially biggest global market in the twenty-first century. Proficient speakers of Mandarin Chinese will find jobs in various fields such as business, government, international relations, information technology, tourism, education, translation and much, much more.
I’m in China right now and have lived here for over 3 years (though now living in Paris). Amazing language and I’m sure that it changes the way a speaker sees the world.
I wonder what research there is regarding this type of approach and at what age it is a good to start planting these kinds of seeds. We’ve all heard that brain plasticity for language starts to go downhill after 10 or 12, but I also wonder to what extent.
I would be particularly interested to see what info there is on situations like Miocco is talking about… I’ve also discussed this issue with friends and there is an issue at certain ages with correct adoption of one language when there are multiple other language inputs.
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