How a Language Experiment Ruined My Childhood
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- #languagelearning #japanese #bilingual #languageskills #languages #multilingual #japaneselanguage
A little vignette of what it's like to grow up in an unusual language environment. Thanks so much for watching 🌹
![[UNCUT] ขยี้ "อลิส" ปม "คลิปลับแตงโม" เปิดชื่อคนพยายามแฮก "มือถือแตงโม" I คนดังนั่งเคลียร์I 10ก.พ.68](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_RPLEIi5Sz8/mqdefault.jpg)
It sounds to me like you were going through a kind of "language malnourishment". Instead of being raised as a multilingual speaker, you were raised as a monolingual Japanese speaker in a non-Japanese speaking country. But I think this is also a case of two different problems making the other worse. It is both true that you should not have been denied proper English skills, but likewise those students and especially those teachers should not have treated you so bad because of your learning difficulties. If they had treated you with more empathy and patience, rather than making fun of you, it might have made the eductional journey a lot easier.
I believe this is the most accurate comment, specifically the monolingual upbringing piece. Outside of the house, the OP was likely only exposed to English , causing a language “rift” of sorts. Domestically, this could’ve been prevented by introducing even small amounts of basic English into day-to-day interactions. And of course students and most certainly teachers should be more accepting of and accommodating toward English as a second language learners.
100% agree on everything you said. Especially with how the school treated her. When she described her experiences with school, it brought back my memories of school and how I feared being judged stupid (thus never asked questions and never wanted to read things out loud). My parents were not fluent in English so I was put into ESOL but even then, American public schools don't teach grammar so well anymore so I was still a little behind among my peers (who had native English-speaking parents to begin with). It took a HS English teacher to steer me to the general direction of what I was lacking and a college English professor to make a lot of stuff click.
My Filipino teacher did something similarly with her children. She spoke in pure Filipino because she knew her daughter would learn English in school. The difference is we live in a billingual country. So, in school many people speak Taglish or a mix of Filipino and English words in one sentence. Depending on your social class and your location of residence and schooling, Taglish is usually spoken by children of well-off parents due to to being raised by Filipino-speaking nannies, their English and Filipino-speaking parents, and English children's shows. Outside school, blue collar workers tend to speak in pure Filipino while white collar workers can speak fluent English or Taglish. Our local media is in Filipino or Taglish while our many other TV channels and international media like the internet is in English. Her daughter became more fluent in English than her mom because of all the outside influences but retained her fluency in Filipino too because of their language used at home. Because otherwise, she may not have retained her fluency in Filipino due to the popularity of Taglish in our country. So this experiment could have been successful only if she lived in a billingual country I think.
@@marieso2293 Your story reminded me of an experience. I attended a remote elementary school in the Philippines before moving out, and I had a classmate who was raised purely in Kapampangan + Filipino. He was very fluent and even used old terms because even my Filipino classmates were just as fascinated by what they meant: for example, he liked saying the word "awon" which meant yes or ok (if I remember correctly?). He even corrected or helped me complete my sentences when I struggled to find the right word. He's a great and patient friend, because similarly to OP's experience, schoolmates would mockingly copy my way of speaking and make fun of it in general. Even nicknamed Cachupoy because they found my broken Filipino hilarious.
However, he almost always failed English classes up until 6th grade (we were classmates since 1st). He was by no means dumb, but he was treated like one because of bad grades in one subject (since people linked English proficiency with status and intellect). He even had to stay overtime after dismissal to get 1 on 1 tutoring from different english teachers - high school entrance exams were imminent and he needed his English proficiency to be "up to standards". Even heard teachers gossiping about him/his family and upbringing. My guardian usually picked me up late, so I used to watch the tutoring. I wasn't particularly good in English either, but I tried to help him so I can repay the favor. We lost contact when my family moved out of the country, but I do wonder how he is after that.
Exactly! Blaming her parents for her mistreatment by American classmates.
The fact that they never spoke English but thought you had a learning disorder because you didn't know English 💀
A lot of Mexicans are in the special ed program.
Ikr, her parents should obviously know that she would not be able to speak English properly because her parents spoke Japanese with her
@@Naomiwy3970They probably thought that speaking English at school was enough. Not saying I agree with that but I know many immigrants who think like that.
@@leila_de_hautjardin can confirm. im an immigrant and my parents never spoke a lick of English when I was born, yet I still learned English along with my native language at a good pace. the teachers were the problem, not the parents.
@mechupaunhuevon7662it's not, if you lived with social media it maybe will and that's how I learned English and always had good marks in my exams despite my parents not teaching me the language, but I learned from my phone not school because on the other hand with french I've never learned the language and it effected my grades too much, I didn't learn it from school neither from the students even tho they were all good at it, I even studied outside the school and it didn't work, I ended up learning it in summer before my first year of high school, also for the girl in the video she entered elementary school with zero English, she couldn't even understand the teachers while they talked to her, it's a little crazy to think it's a disorder and it's only natural for her to learn English slower then the rest of the students
It just sounds like your teachers were mean to you for no reason. I don't think society should treat you as if you are stupid just because you don't speak English in your household, that's just prejudiced.
the teachers were being unnecessarily mean, but it’s possible that they didn’t know?
@@archonicmakes That was going to be something I was wondering to. Did they know that her parents were being weird and speaking any English at home despite the fact that the dad (and maybe the mom as well) were fully capable of it? The teacher making fun of her was being mean but in other scenarios where they suggest she take different schooling it's not wrong to think that would be best for her if the teachers interactions were with the dad speaking English.
The real stupidity is not teaching a child the local school language. It makes their lifes and futures more difficult for no legitimate reason.
@@archonicmakes Many teachers are unnecessarily mean and don't particularly like children. Not the majority, but education is a relatively easy degree and there's usually a mild shortage of teachers because the job is low pay and difficult, so all school districts end up with at least a few bad teachers who have zero passion and little expertise, and are just there to offload their bitterness onto the kids.
It is not. The US is American English as our language.
Not Japanese. Not Mexican. Not Chinese.
I've had friends how use English outside the home and the other language in the home - children become fluent in both - and are able to pick up other languages very quickly too
I was born in Italy to Italian parents, but moved to Ireland at the age of 4 and grew up there. My parents continued to talk to me in Italian, but since I was exposed to English at school and through TV shows, English became my native language, but I still speak Italian as a second language. I'm glad my parents continued to expose me to their beautiful language because knowing two languages has been nothing but good for me.
I try to teach my kids Italian and basic Latin, unfortunately they don't show any interest in learning another language.
Similar story but with Spanish🇲🇽 moving to the US. Dad was set on making sure I knew Spanish so he would make me read books on ancient Roman and Greek civilization 💀 I think he did it too because he noticed how I picked up English so fast and they needed to be able to communicate with me. And like you, I'm so happy I know both but tbh I still know English exponentially better 🥲. Recently I was trying to find a foreign film in English subs and I scoured the internet to no avail but I found one with Spanish sub and I was like FCKK yeahh
О это вселяет надежду. Мы тоже переехали в Ирландию из России когда дочери было 3,5 сейчас ей 8 лет, но русский всё равно намного лучше. Мы не говорим дома на английском языке тк не насители и она будет копировать наши ошибки. Прогресс в английском есть,но очень медленный и это нас беспокоит.
Exactly. This is the norm. I am a Greek language high school teacher with many students from different linguistic family backgrounds. All of them are culturally enriched and I consider them very lucky.
@@vincentrathbone26 You don't teach them. You speak to them and let them decide in which language they'll reply. Don't force them if they reply in their own native language.
your parents spoke ONLY japanese with you for 12 years, and had you rely on schooling to learn english, and he was surprised you didnt know what intersection means? gosh, i am so sorry kisara 😭
yeah the dad seems to be a little on the slow side. Either that or autistic.
Well too be fair, many immigrant families tend to do this, however were it all really went wrong is at school, which is where most foreign kids learn the language.
I had a similar experience growing up in the U.S. since my parents are immigrants and I don’t think I knew what an intersection was at that age I asked my sister (12) who grew up with more English at home thanks to me and she also didn’t know what it was called I just don’t think it’s a word that is needed for kids at that age, that vocab it typically used more by people who interact with roads more and for all the 12 year olds around me know about roads it’s what some one else drives on (or they just refer to the traffic lights and describe an intersection)
They were not an immigrant family.
@@beverlycrowell_ Honestly I don’t think that is a big distinction to make. I do think that the school was mainly at fault for not knowing how to help a language learner. I do think that her parents could have helped in having more English at home because that was available to them but considering actual immigrant families it definitely should not be a requirement 🤷♀️
Personally, I believe your father should’ve used English with you while your mother would use Japanese. This way, you’d get to learn both languages equally, but we can’t go back in time. What’s happened happened, and I totally understand where you’re coming from. I would like you to know that you’re not alone. 本当に素敵な英語を喋ると思いますよ！
agreed. i have an american English-only dad & a canadian bilingual French/English mom. Growing up, my mother would repeat her sentences in both languages so I would be able to learn both languages faster. At my dad's, I woukd generally speaking english, but at my mom's i would mostly speak french since my extended family & school at the time were francophone. Definitely helped a lot!
Same here. French (bi-lingual) mother, spoke French to our daughter when she was growing up, English Dad, so I spoke English to her.
For years she always replied to both of us in English, but now will respond to her Mum in either French or English (depending on how she's feeling ;) )
Her spoken French lags behind her French comprehension (fine as she spends 95% of her time in the UK) but is now improving all the time :)
Aw thank you for the sweet comment! I think my upbringing might have made more sense for someone moving to Japan, which was the case for most of my classmates at the local Japanese Saturday school (hoshūkō) I attended for ten years. It was nice that my Japanese was strong enough to keep up with my classmates (mostly Japanese nationals temporarily living in America) but in hindsight I’m not really sure what practical purpose it served for someone like me with long-term plans in America lol. What you suggested is the approach I would also probably take towards bilingual parenting if the plan is to stay in America.
@kisara_takahashi well, being bilingual actually helps your brain develop, so this is maybe where your parents were aiming to (you couldn't have seen it as a child of course), they wanted to give you a solid Japanese base and thought that the outside environment would suffice with English.
I agree with op that maybe this would have worked better with a one parent-one language approach, though, so you'd speak Japanese only with your mum and English only with your dad.
Btw, knowing a second language, even if you don't have plans to move there, always enriches you as a person ❤
All the best!
Parents should never underestimate kids abilities to learn my little girl picked three languages before turning six , my side Arabic/French and her dad side English ,her first phrases was Arabic cuz I mostly speak to her in Arabic but she still picked french as we were living in France, her English improved quicky after she turn three from watching many cartoons in English
as a teacher, not even a minute in and im noticing the school's mistake: how did nobody catch that it was a language barrier issue? i live in a city that is very multicultural so most kids here speak 2 or 3 languages, and are probably learning a new one in school. im also an ESL teacher so i teach these kiddos english. so, when a child shows difficulty, be it in a language class, math, science, ect, the first thing the school does is come to me and ask how their english is (for most kids, english is their first language, or the language taught at the same time they learned their first language), if they understand me, how they speak, ect. so it boggles my mind that language wasnt the first thing the school thought of.... sending you hugs!!
I put the blame for all of this on the dad, but I do wonder what was happening with the school. I have to assume they were communicating with the dad so they didn't realize the language barrier existed??? Very weird that this situation went on the way it did for so long.
@@AyeliaGDoren this is kinda what I'm thinking. Was the school ever made aware that English wasn't spoken at home? They had one parent who spoke fluent English (and presumably went to the parent/teacher conferences).
It's entirely possible that nobody other than parents knew it was a language barrier and not, say, a learning disability. It's a problem with the school system, yes, but in this particular situation it starts at home
@@jonahhex18According to the creator (since many had the same question as you) replying on a popular comment, her dad did ACTUALLY communicate with her school about this, aka the kind of language living environment they established, but in her words, she suspects they didn't really believe him which yk..... YIKES. I just facepalmed as soon as I read that. Poor girl, man. 🫤😅
@@artfex1289 See, that just makes the situation even worse. The parents did attempt to make up for the home situation, but the school dropped the ball.
I still think it's fucked that it took the parents 12 years to realize they were fucking up, but they clearly cared
@@jonahhex18 yea agreed, I was super disappointed reading that comment. The parents clearly dropped the ball with their weird decisions, but I was hoping they at least cared enough to communicate with her school about them which her dad did. But then the school had failed to acknowledge this and failed her too as a result. Really sad on both sides because that would drive me insane speaking as a multilingual.
This is 100% depending on the child and environment. As a child born to Korean immigrant parents in the US, I was only allowed to speak Korean in the house, english was not allowed. Thats a failure on the school's part. I never had these issues on learning English and I know many others that didn't either.
Yes!!! I'm so mad at this video for spreading this type of misinfotmation
보통은 가정에서 쓰는 언어와 주변 환경에서 쓰는 언어가 달라도 아무 문제 없는데, 이 영상 게시자가 본인의 주변 환경에서 쓰는 언어인 영어를 익히는 데에 어려움을 겪었다면, 이건 이 영상 게시자 개인의 개인적인 문제에 의한 것일 가능성이 큼. 가정에서 일본어만 썼어도 학교에서 영어만 썼으면 일반적으로 문제 없었을 터. 영상 게시자에게 외부 언어 자극이 부족했거나 실제로 언어 장애에 준할 정도로 언어 능력이 떨어졌을 수 있음.
Hahaha plot twist Kisara: You were actually retarded until age 12.
@@roundbunnythis isn’t misinformation, she’s literally just telling her life story which is of course going to be different from other people’s
@roundbunny this isn't misinformation. it's one possibility of what could happen if children aren't exposed to english growing up and then thrust into a class setting where they're expected to be fluent...
Me watching this from India where most people never speak in English at home, but learn English fluently just by speaking it in a school setting or professional setting 🤔.
I feel like your experience was more an unfortunate product of teachers being unreasonable and unempathetic, as opposed to my teachers who understood that it's okay for kids to pick up the language slow. And kids being mean, for kid reasons, ugh.
I'm glad you got over it and you're confident now :)
As you said in the second paragraph, it's the school environment and teachers' being unempathetic here. I suppose in India, the other kids and teachers themselves speak English as a 2nd language, so they'd readily understand if a child is not fluent in it.
@@molibdenum Yes, I agree.
I feel like I relate to this woman. English was my first language, but I forgot the second language I was taught due to lack of use. And that's how I ended up speaking English in my home.
There is kind of a big gap between speaking a language fluently and speaking it at native level. Kisara spoke English fluently but not at a native level. The same goes for most educated Indians (and Scandinavians and Dutchmen): they speak English very well but this isn't to be confused with native level.
That's interesting actually I didn't know that. Usually in languages they have proper and improper grammar but you just speak a different language. Wow.
As someone in college to be an ESL specialist, thats a failure of the school you went to. Schools are required to accommodate English language learners, and if they were not doing that or missed you somehow, that’s a failure on their part, not yours.
Insane that her parents were this bad
@@gwills9337 they should've noticed their daughter struggling but i wouldnt necessarily call them bad. I had practically the same experience except the horrible teachers part. I still have cute little booklets my teacher made when i was 4 and learning English, documenting my progress. And this was normal school, not some english learning programme. Never had someone shame me even though when i started school at 4 years old all I knew was how to ask to go to the toilet. I also think my parents could have prepared me better but I've almost never been made to feel insecure. Just once when i was 10 because i didn't know a lot of adjectives, the teacher was kinda a bitch. Fixed that when i was 12 by reading a lot.
@@gwills9337I mean what about families where the parents don’t speak much English? Are they bad parents too?
@@gwills9337 I don't know why so many of you think this household she lived in is unique in America. Lots of kids born in the USA have parents that don't speak any English. Most Chinese-American kids have parents that only speak Chinese in the house and they have to learn English outside of it. Their educational outcomes aren't considered worse than white kids.
Exactly! We have a monolingual Chinese speaking household, and our kids are proud to be bilingual. They fit right in with peers. She did not grow up in a place that celebrated diversity. Not all of the United States is like that. The parents were trying to give her an advantage, but perhaps should have chosen a more culturally diverse community. Can’t believe the school setting was this unsupportive.
i love how this vid is only 3min long. no running around the bush just immediately getting to the point. thank you🙏
Next time it will have a sponsor. 😂😂 This channel will blow up.
I think you mean "beating around the bush"
You must not have grown up in America 😏
@@Frosty_keys running around the bush seems more accurate tho😂😂
@@Frosty_keysYou *can't* have grown up in America
🤓
@@mrzukunft how was what they said incorrect
2:12 Zero hours outside of school? Were you dealing with severe social isolation on top of the lack of English in the home? Children of immigrants often have good skills in the local language from interacting with their friends (beyond age 5 or so this actually tends to be more important than interacting with parents), but as someone who self-isolated through half my childhood, I know that not everybody has much of a social life after school.
Well, considering the kids bullied her, I don’t imagine she got many opportunities for that… :/
Exactly, I wanna know
What about TV? As a migrant I learn a great deal from TV. Those kids Tv program are great exposure to English.
@@hansythekitty9564maybe they placed strict limits on screen time and/or only let her watch stuff in Japanese.
@@The1andonlyAbber Yea, I see how devastating that must be. Some of the fastest ways I learned English was through watching TH-cam videos on Minecraft and other topics then being able to communicate about those things with my peers.
I knew very basic English up until the age of 7, with "chopsticks" being the longest and complicated word I knew, but learning English became a breeze when I was dropped in public school in America when I made friends and stuff. I guess for me it was easier because I went to school in a pretty diverse place so it's not unusual to meet immigrants and ESL learners, so my friends were pretty accepting.
I was raised with both parents speaking only Russian to me as they only really spoke Russian fluently, and I was taught Mandarin since i was six months old, by both tutors and my school. I grew up in America, and upon entering English school in 4th grade was immediately placed in ESL I think that your school and friends could have been more accommodating.
I WISH I was brought up bilingual. Knowing only English is NOT what it used to be. America is much more diverse. Now it’s Spanish everywhere but where I grew up everyone knew English. I’ve been studying Japanese (proper and not colloquial) for over a decade. Now I am still learning that on top of Fulani which is my ancestral language from West Africa.
Actually, this kind of language environment is very common for kids who grow up second generation, and their parents are first generation immigrants. I don't speak to my parents in English unless, I just have to say it and I can't express it in Chinese, and they don't speak English to me, besides maybe saying a few words (because they cant). I did have a fear that this caused some differences academically as a child because I felt like I was behind in academic style English.
I studied linguistics, and there are studies showing that bilingual kids growing up may have a slower uptake in the two target languages compared to a monolingual because obviously there is more information to take in than if it was just one language. However it evens out the end, and basically there is not a noticeable difference in the final result.
I guess the effects may differ between individuals and their individual circumstances. It's a shame that the adults in your schooling environment weren't able to support you well and ostrasized you instead.
right but neither of your parents is a native speaker. Parents have a duty to their kid to ensure their educations go smoothly if they are able to provide that resource.
I think it depends a lot on language ability too. Some people can learn languages better than others.
I know many children who grow up that way in my country , there is not that much trouble as long as the parents are comitted and serious about school, but they are big problems if the parents don't have a positive attitude towards the host culture and don't follow their kids close enough, and also when the parents make no effort to learn the country's language, it sends a bad message to the children that they don't really belong, as if their stay was permanently temporary and if they did'nt have to commit to anything long term.
Funnily enough, I had the exact opposite situation growing up. My parents and my older siblings moved from Russia to Germany, and by the time I was born, they were set on fully raising me in German. So aside from a few random words that my mom didn't know in German, and exposure from my parents speaking Russian to one another, I wasn't taught any Russian as a kid. As a result, I'm the only person from my family who never learned to speak or understand Russian (aside from singular words).
Luckily, since I've always lived in Germany and my native language is German, this never caused me any major issues. I also don't feel like I have a huge connection to Russia, so I'm not exactly too bothered by never having learned the language. Still, it's kind of a bummer that I was robbed the opportunity of learning another language "for free" as a child. My parents probably only meant well by raising me this way, but I definitely feel like their considerations shot a bit past the target.
@@kriptionite8412mate, I have learning difficulties and autism but I still be able to pick up the local language. She has to have under 80 IQ to beat my situation.
is it weird that i partially 'did' this to myself? i was born in germany speaking german but have learned english, and while most germans are taught english and are often generally decent at it, i had a lot of exposure to it through the internet and voice chatting with friends, and became very fluent in it, but now i feel like i am more fluent in english than my own mother tongue! german is a weirdly complicated language and its hard to form grammatically correct sentences with the correct amount of formality, and i struggle a lot in school, where i bet id struggle at least a good chunk less, were my education in english instead of german.
That's what also happened with me, I'm from belgium, and I started learning english just from the internet, but also from school along with french. But because I almost always use english when I'm online, my dutch and french lvls are decreasing a bit
dude, I feel that. I feel like I can express myself better in English, but my German suffers from it.
wait i did the exact same thing... i used to be good at german but then i learned english and fixated on it so much that i cant really talk about certain things in german even though its my native language. Its really frustrating to forget basic german words around people who dont speak english :/
Yes I think I'm doing this to myself as well. I live in France and I don't speak french these days because I only talked in french at school. I know English more than my own mother tongue which is understandable since barely anyone speaks it in France. But french is spoken in France and I have no excuse as to why I suck and don't have a lot of vocabulary. I was thinking of consuming more french media to see if that'll help in any way.
Dutch, same situation. My bf and I speak English now despite both of us being native Dutch speakers
You did not fail. There was nothing wrong with you. You are beautifully spoken. Your teachers were uneducated, close minded, and poorly trained.
I experienced something similar on a much smaller scale simply by moving from the North USA to the South USA. The dialect differences between GAE and AAVE resulted in special speech classes, alienated me from my peers, and left me feeling like a bizarre pale creature no matter where I went. I had to be removed from school, in favor of homeschooling. In that time, I was able to study Latin, French, Spanish, and yes, Japanese. It was wonderful.
This is very interesting. I grew up in a Russian speaking household, and was essentially forbidden from speaking English with my parents unless it was something I specifically couldn’t communicate in Russian. I went through ESL until the 3rd grade, and I remember I had to go to a speech therapist a few times as I had difficulty pronouncing sounds in English that don’t exist in Russian (specifically the “th” sound). Today, I am perfectly fluent in both languages. Russians are often shocked to find out that I grew up here and have never lived in Russia as I don’t have an accent and can express myself comfortably (minus the lack of knowledge in certain slang terms). There are definitely moments I can’t think of a word in English, but know it in Russian (or vice versa). I’m sorry that you had such a negative experience. Honestly, it sounds like a combination of factors, including a failure of the educational system to accommodate native bilingual speakers led to your struggles. For what it’s worth, your English sounds perfect to me!
I love how you describe a situation that is so light as a "language experiment", when the majority of people from immigrant households only ever heard their home country's language at home, not the local one.
Yeah it was a weird story. Most of the immigrants I know including me, struggle more with the home language much more and not with the language we speak to friends, watch tv in, go to school and study in. Maybe she was also really sheltered? Weird experience
@@msbroomstick1 I mean, I can relate to the fact that when I was little and like upto 4th grade my education probably struggled because of my lack of language
@@Madamoizillionyeah but it's ultimately the same result as 2 parents who speak a different language, why woukd they speak the local language at home or with their kids? the local language is for the locals.
Exactly. Both me and my wife as well as the majority of our extended family grew up in immigrant households where both parents didn’t speak English. I have noticed some issues with English when first starting school, or some relatively late speech development. But I’ve heard this to be common in bilingual households as well. The majority of my family as well as my wife and brother in law actually excelled at school and some of us being “gifted.” So don’t think this is simply just an issue of the language her parents spoke to her, but a whole lot of things about her environment.
My thoughts exactly. Usually the child is learning the surrounding language way faster even if he speaks different one at home. I've met kids from fully Polish neighbourhoods who struggled to speak fluent Polish because it was not the language at their school, in TV, radio etc...
I grew up in Germany but my mother was japanese and I learned both the languages. As a kid I kind of mixed the languages so it was difficult for people to understand me. At some point I realized that not everyone could talk Japanese so I stopped speaking it and I only talked to my mother but it was very broken. As a teenager I started learning it again through anime and now I speak it almost fluently again. I’m grateful to my mother that she didn’t give up on it because I think it’s really cool to be able to talk Japanese and I think it’s a beautiful country and culture and I will always be proud to be Japanese and German.
EVANGELION REFERENCE
@_humor ?
@@galaxydave3807its bc asuka from evangelion is german but is in japan
I had the same as a kid, but instead my mother decided to stop speaking her mother tongue to me because my teachers didn't understand me.
And now you speak English too!! Well done ❤
Thank you for lending a new perspective to the not-so-sunny side of a bilingual upbringing! I really feel for young Kisara and wish people around you had been more understanding 🥺 Growing up speaking a different language than the norm can be tough on a child’s sense of identity. Meanwhile, it seems like the benefits are serving you well in adulthood 😙
Rather than bilingual, it seems she was raised monolingual in the household in a country that didn’t really speak the language.
The classmates and schools were definitely part of the issue, though. Instead of punishing her and bullying her, at least ONE person should have realised that she simply wasn’t understanding what was being communicated to her.
Not really a bilingual upbringing though! But the comment above explained it well enough.
An actual bilingual upbringing does leave both languages weaker than if parents focus on a single one... But it's like 90% and 90% the competence , and the benefits of having intuitive access to a "language switch" in your mind from childhood is well worth it. (though to be fair, exposure is rarely completely equal and competency usually just ends up being like 35% - 99%. Still a net positive over just one language.)
A lot of bilingual kids end up very weak in their second language, but I think the way to fix it is for the parents to just ignore the first language, lmao. Honestly one of the parents should focus on the second language up to the kid's teens, and from there on it's up to the kid if they want to keep up the second language or not. In any case it will have been of use to them, so in my opinion it's always worth it.
She grew up monolingual
This was not a bilingual household. Her parents exclusively spoke to her in a different language than the one spoken in the country they live in. She was denied the need to learn English from her parents. The parents failed to prepare her to assimilate into an English society.
@@SupremeDP literally how i was raised. Sadly when i was 9-10 we lived in a very bullying and racist place so i thought not speaking one of them would maybe help the bullying. Didn't ofc, only made me become less fluent and develop a foreign accent when i relearned it 💀
I’m an immigrant from Colombia and I only ever spoke Spanish with my family. I came to the US when I was 4 and struggled a lot in kindergarten because of the language barrier. My English caught up to like 95% of everyone else’s by the time I was 8, but there were often certain idioms and such more colloquial things that I had to pick up more slowly. My English is better than my Spanish now, but I do think that I was a bit isolated for the first few years in a way that affects me to this day. I was always really good at math, so I never felt dumb, but I just never communicated or picked up slang the way my friends did. I’m happy to be fully bilingual and it allows me to connect with my family in a much deeper way, but it was hard 😅
I can relate so much! Moved to the UK only speaking Spanish and Dutch, age 5. Years of not understanding what's going on around you and feeling isolated /misunderstood by kids and teachers alike shapes you as a person. English is also my most fluent language now :)
So have you forgotten your mother tongue Spanish ?
I grew up in a strict "only speak Spanish!" household and "only watch TV in Spanish!"... yet I've always done extremely well in the English language and have been a consistent top writer and speaker in my grade... I'm not sure what the difference is.
Spanish and English are not that different, bro. That's the difference.
@@Mezaph i think this is a whole lot of victimization. there's a lot more in the Spanish language than the cognates. Plus don't get me started on the tenses.. like it takes four damn words to say one in English at times.
@@Mezaphfor english speakers spanish is one of the hardest languages to learn. similarly for spanish speakers, english is really hard. they are very different languages that come from entirely different root languages. it's why it's easier for a spanish speaker to learn italian or portuguese (all romance languages), or for an english speaker to learn german (both germanic).
@@alpacagatono really Spanish and English are insanely close, not only cognate but also grammar and way of speaking. An English native can become fluent in Spanish in less than a year if in immersion, language like Japanese take around 7 years
@@SuperHappyNotMerrythat's just bollocks, Spanish is one of the easiest for English speakers, ask the diplomate language training program
Even German despite being a germanic language like English is harder for native English speakers....
I was born in the US to immigrant parents. My parents never spoke to me in English, but I learned English from my environment. I'm not even sure if I can pinpoint any particular source I learned it from, I don't even remember any time when I was a kid when I was confused by English or didn't understand anything in English. As far back as I remember, I always knew English, even though we never used it at home.
I'd encourage more multi-lingual parents to speak to their children in other languages. Children of immigrants failing to learn the language of their parents and losing that skill forever for subsequent generations is far too common. Knowing another language is a lifelong skill that children can easily pick up on as children, but people lose that chance when they grow older; learning as an adult is far more difficult than learning it as a kid.
Fr, you have to be extremely out of touch to not knowing the local language. The words are everywhere on the street and TV. Let’s say you have 0 knowledge of a language, you see an apple with the word apple printed on the price tag, few times later you brain will automatically link the word apple with 🍎. Especially when kids can pick up a language very quickly.
Agreed, I was born in Argentina but my parents are Russian immigrants that would only speak Russian to me because they barely even spoke Spanish yet because of school I literally never had trouble speaking or learning Spanish
the language rules of Japanese and English are so different that it’s quite hard just to pick up naturally
You wrote:
> I don't even remember any time when I was a kid when I was confused by English or didn't understand anything in English. As far back as I remember, I always knew English, even though we never used it at home.
THANK YOU. Children learn the local language from other kids. Parents don't really factor in as much as they think they do. It seems to me that there is more to Kisara's story than maybe even she realizes.
I was confused when I watched her video, I'm like, you grew up in the US, it's hard NOT to pick up the language, many immigrant families speak only 1 language in the house and they excel perfectly fine, but I think she just happened to be a little slower in languages lol
I am so familiar with this situation. I grew up in a republic in which it is normal to speak two languages: the official and the native language of the people. Usually these languages are mixed, but most often one dominates depending on how you were raised. in my family we spoke the official language, and when at school it turned out that some subjects were taught only in native language and some teachers spoke only in it, and it seemed to me that they were simply not educated. Moreover, over time even the older generation forgot how to speak it completely, without mixing it with the official language. Many of my classmates (mostly boys) spoke only their native language. Because I couldn't speak it properly, I had difficulty with certain subjects, and people asked where I and my family were from because it was strange to them that I only spoke the official language of the country. I hated subjects such as native literature and language, and had difficulty forcing myself to answering in class, because I sounded strange and funny to others, including myself. When some people found out that I actually understood my native language, they were surprised because I never spoke it properly.
I still don't like and don't want to learn and speak my native language, it's enough for me to just understand what others say and write. I just wanted to share it, because teachers always tried to force kids to love their native language, but instead they caused a rejection.
Sorry for mistakes english is my…third language?
P.S I was an A’s student and the only subject in which I was once given a non-A grade at the end of the year was my native language and it was bad for person with excellent student syndrome
Your English is fine, don’t worry! Out of curiosity, what is your native language?
Oh my God, the same thing happened to me 😭
Same thing here in Paraguay. Guaraní is hard, man
May I ask what republic? This sounds like a situation common to some of the central asian republics
my best bet is that op is either kazakh or kyrgyz
I think it is about your individual language learning skills rather than a general rule. I immigrated at the age of 10, started learning a new language. My parents and I continued to this day, 30 years later speaking with each other in our mother tongue, however it didn’t stop me from learning speaking and understanding the new language to a perfection. It took me about 1 years to start speaking like a native without any special classes. Writing took few years longer. English is a third language I picked along the way. Lots to f people of my age and situation had a very similar experience and results
Very true. It seems like she, for whatever reason, struggle to progress in English even though she spent a lot ot time at school. By the time we're at school we usually spend more time socializing there than with our parents. Seems a bit strange how she wasn't able to get better having friends. Or, the other theory is just that she fixates more on the negative, some people assimilate situations by focusing on the bad parts. Maybe she remebers rhe few times people didn't understand her and not on all the good part where she was doing well. As I learned I certainly had a few insidences of people not being nice but I didn't let thay stop me, au contraire. Maybe she's not the "assertive" type
Of course every child is different but I'm wondering if the differences in the languages played a role. Japanese and English are worlds apart, whereas if a child knows Spanish it's easy for them to also pick up Portuguese, Italian, French, even English when young. From what I have heard normally the opposite happens particularly with very different languages (i.e Japanese, Mandarin etc). Immigrant parents do not speak much of the native language with the child and so they cannot communicate as clearly in it- but because they do not live in the secondary language country it affects them less socially.
No, it is because she experienced cruelty and isolation in school. jfc.
In my case, my parents immigrated to Japan and I was born there. They only spoke Portuguese to me my whole life but like many ppl in my situation, I wasn't able to communicate in Portuguese very well.
were you also made fun of by your classmates and teachers for not knowing English well enough?
I mean for me, as a child of two Chinese parents that know nearly nothing about English, I still learned English pretty well. I was an esol kid in kindergarten but by the first grade my English was pretty decent. And even now, my parents only speak Chinese to me. I guess it just goes to show how different our minds can be, since I was able to become fluent while mostly only speaking English at school for the first few years
It's all decided in the head, as we say where I come from. Maybe the idea that "I aaam speciaru because I aaam Japaneeezu" was also included in her language package. And man, I know what a burden it can be, because I have spent about seven years in Japan, Japanese is my third language, my adult kids are bilingual, my husband is Japanese and we are both language teachers.
Your case is the case for lost of us foreign kids, we all learned english at school, where it all went wrong for her is the fact that she got bullied by her peers and teachers, otherwise she would've been fine from the beginning if she wasnt
Yup pretty much my ex and I are both Mexican, his parents speak no English so he only spoke Spanish at home and learned in English in school it was a pretty smooth process according to him.
yes, her situation is the way everybody does it here in asia. it’s a given that the kids are going to learn english in school so the parents deliberately speak only different languages to the child. sometimes both parents each different languages, and the child ends up knowing three languages spontaneously!
i’m surprised to hear from this video that it’s a bad thing.. i learn something new everyday
@@joy1ess as an (southeast) asian living in asia you're so right. kisara's problem is definitely very similar to what asian kids in asian countries faced; it's just strange phenomenon because she's biracial asian person with no parents speaking english to her despite one of them being not asian (white in this case).
Listening to this story sounds ridiculous to me because in Canada, that’s incredibly common. Most children of immigrant parents only speak their native tongues at home, but they certainly do just fine in school.
As a matter of fact, my Chinese wife whose parents also did not speak English to her, got the highest English mark in her 12th grade year.
That's kind of what I'm thinking too since both of my parents are immigrants but I learned English just fine. Granted I watched a shit of TV growing up and had a brother I could talk to, so maybe she was a much more isolated single child? It would be interesting to have a follow up video with more details.
@@bruhbruhbruh7330 Perhaps, but my wife is also an only child. She was born under the one child policy, so she didn’t have any siblings to talk to. Her dad speaks English now but her mom can’t speak much English. As far as cultural literacy goes, she grew up with Spongebob and Family Guy, so she learned a lot from those, haha. Especially from family guy.
My thoughts exactly, this to me does not sound like the father's fault at all but rather the environement and school. I'm a speech and language pathologist and the fact that they took her to a SPL and they failed to see that this was an exposure issue is insane to me. In my country we have thousands of children in our public schools that come from Morocco (mainly), but also other countries such as Pakistan, and the parents barely speak the language if at all, yet their children end up speaking our language perfectly or even better than their mother tongue. It wasn't her parent's fault, I'm sure of it.
@@tylorg7971 Learning English from Family Guy is awesome lol, and I guess surprisingly effective.
Most bilingual children of immigrants pick up languages quickly but that didn’t happen with me. I moved to Australia from China when I was three and I faced many communication difficulties in preschool. Many of my teachers thought I had speech impediment issues. My parents ended up having to sign me up for English tutoring when I was 5 because I was not learning any English at school and they didn’t speak decent English
I also somehow didn’t learn enough through tv shows because well I thought they were just speaking gibberish and didn’t listen.
Bring up your children with as many languages as you like, just make sure that the mother tongue spoken in your country is one of them.
My father is from the Czech Republic and my mother is from Australia. I was born and raised in a monolingual household, as both of them just spoke to me in English. I hated this, because, although I now speak Czech (after studying in my own time and in community classes that I enrolled myself in), I don't think I will ever be able to speak it like a background speaker. My whole childhood, I couldn't really communicate with my paternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather passed away in November last year and, at his funeral, I discovered so much that I never knew about him before, and it really saddened me, knowing I never got to know him in the way so many of my friends got to know their own grandparents. I feel like your parents should have done what I always wished my parents had done, where I could speak to my mother in English and my father in Czech. Growing up bilingual is particularly beneficial for the brain development of a child too, so I really wish I could have had that experience.
You unlocked a core memory of my childhood. When growing up in America, both my parents only spoke Bengali to me and did not had the fluency of English, so I pick up a strong sense bengali for most of my childhood until we moved away to a different state and the schooling there immediately placed me in ESOL classes and summer school to make up for my literacy skills till I reached highschool. I thought the majority of my life I was childhood i thought i was slow and had similar issues in facing adults and children either making fun at me or frustrated at me because I just could not understand what they mean in English , but hearing your story, I just wanna thank you and glad for you sharing. you're not alone 😭 ❤
I'm so sorry
What Esol?
@leafyishereisdumbnameakath4259 thank you! I appericate it but I'm grateful for growing up the person I am today and overcoming the challenges in my childhood ❤️
@ItsKadelyn abbreviated for English for speakers of other languages. So, I would have additional classes outside my regular classes in the USA to teach me English and catch up to my peers at the time.
@@cerivmarahgaming oh ths for explaining 🫶🫂❤️
my parents only spoke to me in a foreign language at home, but by 3rd grade my english was on par with my peers. i really think this is an issue with your teachers being rude/ignorant and maybe a lack of english speaking friends at school rather than an issue with your parents... and as you've said, you're now completely fluent in both languages now, so indeed, it all worked out in the end.
but you're correct in the fact that theres always the option to whitewash your future child's cultural identity by refusing to teach him/her anything but english in an attempt to "shelter" them from what you experienced. its a free country afterall.
My thoughts exactly.
Her teachers were extremely rude. We had multiple kids in my schools where their parents didn’t speak English at all or just a little and they were put in ESL classes to catch them up in pre-k to middle school.
It's more like "not learning English made me dumb".
um no? she just learnt it later than others
@@sarah12232i think they're referring to the thumbnail
@@aliceliddell8413 ah ok
I think this is more of the school/teacher’s problems. I’m a first generation immigrant with many cousins who are second generation immigrants. Their parents are not fluent in English at all and have to speak Vietnamese at home, and now they are more fluent in English than Vietnamese
I promise u aren't alone!! I went through a mild version of this because I'm also billingual. I only spoke greek until I started preschool, so I too got in trouble a lot because the teachers thought I was ignoring their instructions. I also learned what the word 'melon' was in middle school, which kinda shocked me. For me, my preschool teachers told my parents that I needed to be in a special ed program if i didn't pick up english, so that's when my parents made the effort to only speak english with me, and it worked pretty quick. The only sad thing is that we don't speak greek in the same way to each other anymore. They speak it with me sometimes but my ability to speak greek has actually faded a lot, and I just reply to them in english. It kind of hurts to see old videos of me where I'm fluent and realizing that I cant talk like that anymore
I'm a bilingual kid and I have a weaker language. It's normal, and it's very fixable (if you care to fix it): Read books in greek, watch TV or movies in greek, try to meet some greek people or make an effort to speak in greek once in a while. Maybe tell your parents you want to only speak in greek while with them
The language is in you, and will be forever, and you'll probably realize you understand way more than you'd expect when reading books or watching TV (relative to your speaking ability). You just need to wake the language up a bit. It takes a few months at the most, and it's nowhere near as difficult as picking up a new language.
It's just a question of finding a reason and motivation to do it.
@@SupremeDP aw thx for this reply :) and actually recently ive been trying to build my greek back up and am kinda pleased to realize im at a point where the only way i can improve is by speaking with other people. I'm shy to ask my parents to practice because it feels weird, but i do care about this a lot so i might 💗
And it's crazy how far motivation can get you, and i was pretty unmotivated when i was younger just because i live in a small town in the US where everyone is monolingual. its so easy to just want to settle and blend in
@@SupremeDP I've lost the ability to converse in my mother tongue. It does hurt when you remember that you could speak the language well in the past. Assimilation sucks
@@notanexploreranimations1218 hi, I'm a French mum with 2 bilingual kids. Their dad is Greek and we live in Greece. We both speak our own mother tongue to our children. My eldest has assimilated both languages very naturally. My youngest is more at ease with French, but she's getting more and more comfortable with Greek by going to school and talking with other kids. Maybe you could join a Greek community and do some activities with members, there are many celebrations in Greek culture that are followed by Greeks living abroad. And I agree, watching movies or series can help too with the understanding. My kids are big fans of the series "Το σόι σου", it's very funny and has lots of archetypal Greek family traits. Its enjoyable to watch as an adult too.
@@Raphstav That is so cool!! I don't usually hear about people immigrating to Greece. And yes I've definetely heard of that series and it's actually my favorite thing to watch when I visit. :) I'm glad your kids are so connected to both cultures!
I kind of recognise this experience from immigrant kids in the Netherlands. When I was in primary school, I had a Turkish boy in my class who could talk to us in Dutch fine, but he was really behind in class because he probably lacked the Dutch skills to learn everything we could learn with ease at it made him fit in less than others. At the time, I thought he was just less smart than us because he got help from a special support teacher, but looking back it was probably his background of not speaking Dutch at home that made him "less smart" than us. In his case, it wasn't that his parents had decided not to teach him Dutch, but more likely that his parents did not speak Dutch well themselves and weren't able to teach him and I only realise that now that I'm an adult.
I'm sorry your parents made a conscious choice not to teach you English from a young age and I'm glad your dad decided to change his mind eventually to teach you after all. I hope this video sends a message to all parents that want to raise a child bilingual that it is important for their child to also teach them the language of the country they are living in. It is important for a child's education to be able to understand the teacher's instructions, it can prevent the bullying they could get for not being fluent, and being able to communicate with others well is just very important for one's self-esteem
Regarding the bullying. Learning a language so you don't get bullies is wild. The kids and teachers should learn to be empathetic
In the Netherlands we have the additional problem of there being several different levels of high school, only the highest of which gives access to university, which means that at the end of primary school it is basically already decided if you will be able to go to university. In my time it was pretty much a given that the Turkish and Moroccan kids were going to go to the lower levels of high school, and as a consequence, had their chances of going to uni ruined.
This doesn't sound like a "language experiment". It sounds like how many immigrants' children are raised. It is also common knowledge within the study of bilingual children's development that they may struggle with both languages while young, but then they will get to a point as older children when they are able to properly distinguish their languages and then will progress faster and often be more intelligent than their peers. It sounds like your difficulties came from the lack of support from your teachers rather than your parents only speaking Japanese to you. This is the same that my father went through with his Spanish & English. His parents only spoke Spanish, & then students were punished for speaking Spanish in school, and not given support and understanding from teachers knowing that most children in his area were in Spanish only households. As a result of his treatment, he refused to teach us, his children, Spanish, and this happened with many of my peers. Thus we grew up unable to communicate with our grandparents and relatives in Spanish speaking countries. This lack of knowledge of our heritage language left us feeling completely isolated, cut off, as well as, not feeling Latino enough. Now as an adult, I am decent in Spanish, but still am not proficient enough, & feel inadequate and cast out because of not being able to speak Spanish at an advanced level. Due to my experiences, when my niece was born, I refused to have her grow up like my siblings & I did. She is being raised bilingual in English & Spanish, as well as learning some French & Japanese (because I lived in both of those countries & thus learned those languages to some extent too). My little niece is only ten and her language & vocab skills are far beyond her peers, even as a preschooler her teacher noted how advanced her vocab was. She comprehends languages so easily, even being able to translate French to Spanish or English without ever having heard the French word before.
I am also getting a degree in psych with a focus on children never being taught their heritage language & how the loss of their heritage language affects them. The overwhelming majority have a negative feeling about their language inadequacies in their minority heritage language.
This sounds like you may be experiencing the same, but with your community majority language instead. Learning Japanese didn't make you dumb. Your teachers just treated you like you were because of their ignorance in bilingual development. You were never dumb, just not properly supported in your second language like, unfortunately, many bilingual children are in the USA.
Note: For those raising or wanting to raise their children multilingual, check out the TH-cam channel & website Multilingual.family by Andrea. Andrea is a linguist raising her children multilingual, & her channel & website are a fantastic resource for helping you raise your children to be multilingual. I highly recommend it.
This is completely true! Fortunately I grow up in California so there are ELD program for migrant kids which help students with their English progress. Though my parents do not speak English I have exposure to English in school, tv, the Internet and books
This!!! I genuinely don’t understand how this video- her experience was a language experiment. As a person from an immigrant family, I only spoke in Chinese with my family- because simply, they couldn’t speak English. Even to this day, I can hold a conversation in English with my dad, but he’s still not very fluent. For my mom, she’s learning, but I can’t hold a proper conversation with her in English. I personally never had any problems learning English; to the point that I don’t even remember how I learned English. It just suddenly happened. But, I also never had any memories of being bullied or a horrible education experience, so I think that’s the common denominator. Though, because my parents were busy, I was never able to properly learn Chinese, so my skills in Chinese is not the best, and that did make me feel disconnected to my heritage. My younger self felt so disconnected that I felt that I wasn’t “truly Chinese,” and that even made me reject my heritage at one point. Now though, I’m trying my best to learn more Chinese
Well maybe because she's not actually an immigrant genius, it's just her parents chose to neglect her?
@@namiip yeah I think thats what really held her back from learning english, the kids and teachers were literally bullying her, bc the classroom is where most foreign kids learn the language through talking with their peers
Her father was not an immigrant. Both he and the daughter were born in the US.
Hi! Love your video❤, i really appreciate when people share their experience on this kind of topics!
I think that maybe this depends not only on the child but also on how different are the two (or more) languages you are learning.
For example I was born and raised in Italy but in my house I only spoke Spanish because my mother is from Venezuela and my father (who was born in Italy) grew up in Venezuela too. My father being a bilingual himself already knew italian while my mother took three years to start speaking fluently.
I don't know how but I don't remember a time when I didn't know how to speak one of the two languages..I think I picked both at the same time because even if at home I was taught only Spanish, I spent 7/8 hours at the kindergarten everyday and there I learned Italian.
At 4 years old I could easily switch between the two languages and translate for my family members when they came to visit.
On the other hand I have two younger sisters and for them it was more difficult...which is strange because they've always been better than me in English and French at school.
BUT, my point is that English and japanese are languages that are totally different from each other..from sentence composition and structure to the alphabet and handwriting, and that probabably the reason of you having such a bad experience.
I think this really depends on the child. Cuz my parents did that with me , mind you they themselves didn’t know English well either. I learned English purely as soon as I started school. Yes I had to take extra English learner classes and attend summer school for a year even but by middle school I became quite fluent and didn’t even need the courses anymore. I read lots of books and learned more difficult English words there and googled their meanings. I’m glad my parents did this with me and didn’t speak English to me. My native language is Ukrainian but I also learned Russian through Sunday school and tv. Sure my Russian is worser in conversing but I understand it 100%. This really depends on the child this method cuz for me it worked wonderfully. My brother on the other hand mixes up words and pronounciation in our native language. And yes we both went to speech therapy also. As an adult I can speak well in English and Ukrainian tho.
Same situation here, native language Russian though
If you had bilingual peers, this would not have been an issue. The peers and teachers were the ignorant ones.
Thats so mean (the people around you). I spoke only in non-English at home, and didnt speak English till I was 9. Was totally fine thanks to the support from school and extra ESL classes. I ended getting top 10% in the state in English and even tutored English.
Specifically multi-ethnic communities, before the establishment of nation states: It was common to be raised in 3-6 languages.
I'm from Spain, where there are 2 official languages in some regions. I literally only ever spoke Catalan with everyone around me until I was around 16. Then I had to start speaking Spanish sometimes with some new classmates who didn't speak Catalan. I did have some minor issues I guess, like some words I didn't know, but generally the transition was smooth and easy. It's weird that it was such a big issue for you and your classmates/teachers.
Right ? I am from Barcelona and growing up there it was very normal for kids to speak two or more languages.
That sounds genuinely horrific. I can't imagine going into school and being unable to express your thoughts and feelings. I'm glad that your story has a relatively happy ending!
It actually happens all the time. Growing up in Italy, I had new students fresh from different contries coming to school. It was enriching for us and we learned how to connect with them even if we were not able to communicate by language
this is very odd. Maybe it's something you experienced but there's a lot of second generation children of immigrant parents who don't speak a word of english at home but they excel in English at school....
Also, there are many households in different countries where English isn't a first language but the kids are in English/British schools and excel in the English language.
I grew up in the Middle-East in Kuwait. I attended a British school but spoke to my parents in Arabic at home. I always excelled in English and won top prizes at my school for English and got A* in GCSEs and A-levels for English and Literature and even did better than some of my actual American/British peers who were in school with me.
It's not your parent's fault, sounds like the school's fault.
I find this really interesting, because I went through similar experiences but I still consider English my first language. Neither parents would speak English to me
Fr, the same happened to 100% of my friends and relatives. Kids pick up the local language naturally via the environment and school. And it’s not totally the teachers’ fault. They aren’t trained to teach children who don’t speak and understand the local language.
@@user-bi8ko7kc6h There has to be something else she’s omitting. Unless she was exclusively raised in a Japanese environment with Japanese school (which she wasn’t) or something else, there’s no way her English is going to be that bad
I grew up in a country that doesn’t speak English, but English is a mandatory subject in school. I was able to speak both my native language and English fine. My English wasn’t as good as now, but I could still communicate with native English speakers and teachers. As long as you have a reason to study the language either for school or communication with someone, it’s not that hard to be bilingual.
same
Same, my Russian parents would strictly only speak Russian to me even though I was born in Argentina, yet I consider Spanish my first language and I’d even say it’s slightly better than my Russian even tho I’m basically a native speaker in both
As a child of immigrants raised in a bilingual household (Cantonese and Vietnamese) English is my native language despite not having any parent speak to me in English. How? Because I had many opportunities to speak English outside the household (we went to the community pool all the time) and I had TELEVISION with English shows. Also having a sibling and cousins around my age meant that we naturally gravitated towards English.
So unless you were legit deprived of English social interactions, I don't understand WHY the father should've switched into English according to everyone's comments.
I know so many households where one parent does all the LABOUR of speaking and teaching the mother tongue but it doesn't work out if English is the commun tongue between both parents. Your dad is the reason you are lucky to still have Japanese in your life.
Agree 100%. Having both parents speak a non English language is so common and the kids always end up having stronger English (when the community language is englsih)
They should have literally used both languages. That would have never made it a problem
I grew up bilingual as well, and I relate a lot to your experience. From moving countries, I spent my childhood learning and speaking English 99% of the time despite being a native Spanish speaker, when I was suddenly forced to start using Spanish all the time it was like whiplash and I was really behind everyone else in Spanish for many years. When I had to be thrown back into Spanish language schooling I struggled a lot because I COULD NOT read Spanish in the 6th grade, it was a huge struggle, and it left me with an identity crisis. I refused to learn Spanish for many years and my progress was slow, it took for me to make the decision to start reading and listening to more Spanish that it really started to improve. Nowadays my Spanish is closer to my English, it took me more than TEN years to really close the gap and even to this day my English remains my dominant language. I would not wish for my children to go through something similar, but at the same time society can be unnecessarily cruel.
There's nothing wrong with people like us we are just people who grow up in between cultures, I think what your parents did was a similar mistake to what my parents did, they did not expose us enough to both languages. My guess is that they didn't want you to miss out on the Japanese side of your heritage and lose out on Japanese (lots of second generation immigrants lose their heritage language completely) because you lived in America, and assumed since you lived in America that you would speak English fine. It's a tricky balance, I don't want to blame your parents either for the experiment because of it, we as a society simply don't have a consensus with how to deal with raising multilingual children.
This story seems really similar to mine. I also had to learn a language from scratch in 7th grade and I also refused to learn it- which didnt have the best outcome for me academically lol. Thanks for sharing this... it feels good to know I am not the only one who has been through these stuff
I'm honestly confused why it was such a big deal that a kid didn't know the word "intersection".
Exactly
Why should a little kid know that
But people use the word intersection every day! _I personally_ say intersection once every 1/15th of an hour, just to remind myself of how great it is as a word and how to pronounce it!!
_In-ter-sec-shun._ Such a beautiful word. 😊
Intersection.
Intersection.
Intersection.
/s, but you knew that already. 😂😂😂
@@Ixarus6713
Nope not everybody. People around me just used street light or 'at the light'
Carmerica where cars are the only topic
A 12 year old should know the word "intersection," if they ever plan to leave the house by themselves whether in a car or on foot.
In my experience, Im really glad my parents spoke in their native language all of the time. Well that is because they didn’t know how to speak English, but because of that I am bilingual, and I hear constantly of these kids who can’t even communicate with their parents and tried to get tutors that didn’t work.
In minority regions in Europe, there are living millions of people, whose mother tongue, that means, the language, they use to communicate with their parents, is not the national language of their country. My own daughter speaks the language of her mother, which I can understand, but not speak. I never saw it as a problem, but as a win for my daughter. And she has a better grammatical understanding of the official national language, than many monolinguals.
No English for 12 years? That's mental, and I'm sorry for your past experience... I born and raised in South east Asia I'm naturally exposed by 2 languages, my native language and my national language since I was a child. Then I was started to pickup some other dialects when I grew up, even if understand them, I still cannot spell them. because it's all messed up. I failed multiple test, my own native language, my main language, I never passed my English and Japanese. Even if I understand them, still I failed on the test. Nothing is wrong with my accent. It's just the blody test, I might have dyslexia but I never really went and check with a doctor. It's just too many now, I feel like a weirdo when talking to people because my mixed grammar. And yes, I feel stupid too.
Growing up I had many peers whose parents didn't speak the language of my country and therefore only spoke in their native language to their kids at home. I believe the crucial thing in their success was going to Kindergarden (which is very different from America kindergarden, more a daycare focused on playing) for three years before starting school. This gave them the time to pick up the language from teachers and peers before being expected to be able to learn anything new in that language.
Very cool that your dad speaks Japanese!! My mom spoke to me in English and my dad in Spanish. There were countless times where people told me that I should speak one language and not mix or others would tell my parents that they were gonna confuse me.
In the end I just think we’re privileged people!
I have a similar experience. I had to enroll in ESL despite being born in America and having an American father. My mom only spoke to me in Spanish and she was a stay at home mom while my dad worked full time, so I got exposed to Spanish much more than English before school. They still put me in ESL for 4 years though.
I’m actually glad about it because we learned a ton of geography and learned about different cultures in ESL, when I was in high school I noticed I knew so much more geography than most of my peers.
I'm a South Korean. But my daughter couldn't speak Korean. My daughter speaks English and Vietnamese only! Because I didn't teach her Korean. I tried to teach her Korean when she was little, but she refused to learn, so I gave up teaching her Korean! I think language is just a tool to express yourself and understand others! I believe that good interpersonal relationships can only be created under sufficient expression and understanding. If she is able to express her opinions well enough in the place where she lives and read the other person's expressions well, the origin purpose of language would be achieved. When she refused to learn Korean, I realized that it might be more valuable for her life to have fun with her friends with a language than just to gain a ability to speak bilingual or trilingual languages. That's why, I gave up teaching my daughter Korean.
Every single teacher needs to watch this video. Thank you for sharing your story.
I noticed this as well. Kids who grow up in households who do not speak the language of the country they are in have harder times in school on average, because of the language barrier. The solution, I think, is more exposure to the language of the country. Whether that be in daycare, extracurricular activities, tutoring, babysitters, or extra classes.
Absolutely. Bilingualism / multilingualism is an interesting lifestyle, you can gain a lot from it, but those gains don't come easily and effortlessly. And you need to take negative feedback as constructive (although unsolicited) criticism, without seeing it as a personal attack, meltdowns and playing the traumatized victim.
The solution is putting extra effort into language development. All the methods listed by noah1502 above, first co-ordinated by the parents, then (and I can't emphasize it enough) by the youngsters themselves. Come on, if nothing else seems to work, you always have a school library with lots of books in the target language and a librarian who is happy to see a kid in the library!
When kids are no longer babies, they need to work on their own knowlewdge actively. Pre-teens should be old enough to understand that their skills are theirs to develop and use. They can't just sit in the corner waiting for some miracle to happen, they should seek out ways and opportunities to hone their skills.
not true, the parents HAVE to put their children in the other languagw daycare and the household language will never be an issue. when you are sitting at home in isolation and don't have any activity outside, of course you'll have problems, lol
I find this bizarre. I only spoke with my parents in a different language in the US growing up (and all my life) and this was never an issue. It was my superpower! It's either you viewed your native language as a weakness (a matter of your personal perspective) or you truly have a learning disability and needed the extra study to bring yourself up to the level of your peers.
Kids learn incredibly quickly. I learned English in 1st grade at age 7 when my family moved the US. I went to an American school where no one spoke my native language and only knew the English alphabet prior to starting. I was speaking fluent English in 3-4 months without an issue. I wouldn't say I'm out of the norm because my sister who was 2 years older had the same experience of being able to pick up the language just as quickly without any problems.
Sounds like she also picked it up really fast once she started getting just a bit more exposure from her dad. The question is, did you other exposure to english in those 4 months as well? TV, peers outside of school, extended family members, reading, internet, video games, movies, technology set in English mode, etc.
I've seen many bilingual kids have no issues, my parents are trilingual, etc. So her story is an interesting case study of somehow having too little english exposure (maybe zero outside school?)
Yeah lots of my friends and neighbors learned English within months of entering school
This, this video is just going to unnecessarily scare parents into not teaching them their native tongue. I was raised this way too, it’s a perfectly fine and normal situation, not a language experiment. America is one of the only western countries where monolingualism is prevalent
it differs from person to person : for example my friend was born in country A, her family speaks B and although she went to kindergarten, had tons of friends speaking A, lots of activities in A language, tv in A language, her level of of A language was pretty low, so low in fact that her parents (not native speakers of A) decided to partially switch to A as their family language to help her. Her siblings had no problems and are fluent in both languages
I literally have this experience too,
I grew up from asia, and i was only spoke to in english by my parents. Their reasons were because it gave more opportunities which i get, but I had the experience of being called dumb, daydreamed during lessons and didnt had any friends at school. I was so sad and frustrated that i wanted to go overseas to have "english stuff". I only manged to get out of my local schools during covid when i convinced my parents to have english online school at 14 years old at the end of that year.
And the thing i did before coming home and get told the news, I was crying quietly in class because the class made a joke that i didnt understand and everyone was just having fun while I realized that I will never understand any of them.
Just the last year, I came to canada and have school here and I learnt way more and did so much more then I ever did, and now 18. I still wished I came here earlier, because i am very much still confused on life and wished that i had more time to learn.
Edit. Also want to add, I was also told that if I didn’t stopped daydreaming, people would think im "special". And i had siblings have a similar experience but they managed to learn the other languages, which made me feel worse as being "the dumb one".
It seems like parents have good intentions, but literally did no research on raising a multilingual kid. There are multiple psychology techniques to help kids learn multiple languages better, and parents are responsible to know the possible negative affects and a responsibility to explain to their kids that if they feel picked on at school because of language, if they're not understanding everything at school to tell the parents because it can be fixed and helped , and that the parents make sure their kids are at a sufficient language level to succeed in 1st 2nd 3rd grade , like look out for your kids??? Don't treat them like a science experiment or a fun cool toy ??
By any chance are you Filipino
@@joebidenofficialpotus nope. Close guess tho
Repeat after me guys EQUAL EXPOSURE. This literally wouldn’t have happened if she’d been equally exposed to English and Japanese as a kid. Literally that’s how the European and Asian countries do it and they can speak 2-3 languages just fine
There are a lot of people who wished that their parents taught them their language when they were young. This problem was with the teachers and students who never experienced an ESL learner before.
2:38 Yes. Your English is up to speed and, indeed, beyond the standard of most. Excellent video with a fascinating premise.
Many of my immigrant classmates only spoke the language of their parents at home and only got exposed to the local language in school. So their were really bad at school.
i grew up with a single immigrant mom who's third language was english and a secondary family who was mexican, and I think we had a pretty good system. I'm not sure how it started, but its how I've talked to them my entire life. when I was little, my mother would mostly speak to me in farsi, my godmother and her family Spanish, and my best friend (godmother's daughter) and our shared babysitters in English. when we started school, my mother would alternate between speaking English and farsi with me while I would speak the opposite language as a way to keep me up to speed on both languages, help her improve her english, and help us both with translating between languages. my godmother's family still spoke to me mostly in spanish while she switched to mostly english with me. i went to an international school where I took french, English, and farsi, and before I knew it I was fully fluent in three languages and conversationally fluent in a fourth. this "style" of upbringing, where multiple languages were used and encouraged, did give me a little bit of trouble in the long run with my brain thinking in a different language than I was trying to speak, but it also gave me incredible linguistic skills and an overall love for languages. I'm now working on my fifth language and I'm always so grateful to my family for making sure I grew up culturally diverse instead of limiting me just to one language.
This doesn’t make sense. My cousins came to the US in their teen years and were perfectly fluent in English within a few years. The cousins who came as elementary aged kids were fluent in even less time and have no trace of an accent. There’s more to this story…or less.
縁もゆかりもない日本語に興味を持って流暢に会話してるお父様すごいです...
Being multilingual is the norm in many parts of the world, and exposure doesn't come exclusively from parents. I think it's always a bad idea to talk to your kid in a language that's not your first language (unless absolutely necessary) because there's always nuance that's being lost or cultural tidbits you don't know no matter how fluent you are. But multilingualism isn't bad per se and doesn't make kids insecure under normal circumstances so ffs stop fearmongering , people raising their kid bilingually are getting enough flak already as is. Especially if the minority language isn't one that's seen as prestigious.
She isn’t fearmongering, just sharing her experience. Her experience is that while she should have been raise bilingually from the start, she was only spoken to in the non-native language of the country she lived in. It was basically the same experience as a kid with two English parents who know little to no Japanese moving to Japan. The kid may understand a majority of what’s being said in a social setting BUT in an academic setting, it’s a whole different environment
But those people didn't raise their kid bilingually. There was only one language. They didn't teach her English at all.
Here in my country I see parents who speak to their toddlers exclusively in English so they grow up bilingual... Is that necessary? They'll have all the time in the world to learn English when they're older, like the rest of us did. Also the parents aren't native speakers so I wonder if their children will copy their mistakes and mispronunciation
Seems to be something really emotional and hard to share. But like others have said we can't turn back time but make the best with what we had.
Am pretty sure this "unique" experience has influenced greatly and made you a better person today. A lovely one.
Shows how you endured and overcame a though and confusing situation.
As a bilingual person I can totally relate is hard when growing up. But you look back today and end up grateful of being able to communicate with different cultures and even teach it to others.
Thanks so much for sharing ❤
That's wild that you experienced such unprofessional teachers. I speak English at home but for 7 hours a day, I went to a French-language school. My speaking and listening proficiency was very good in both of the languages but my writing in English (obviously because I never officially learned grammar rules and how to write) REALLY suffered. Is there ever going to be an efficient way to raise a bilingual child?
Wow! I grew up in the same boat. I still have a slight accent that comes up occasionally. Your folks meant well and it’s common to think that “they’ll just learn English in school.” I also was bullied in school. Hell I hated school until my last year of high school. Anyway, in the long run, your parents gave you the gift of Japanese that you would have had a very difficult time with later in life. As a kid you’re a language sponge. That’s how I view it and I’m thankful to my parents.
A lot of crying for somebody who had the luck to learn 2 languages from a early age.
Hello I am a career teacher with two degrees in applied linguistics and 12 years of experience.Your teachers and your educational system failed you, not your parents. You should have been reading English books where you would have increased your vocabulary significantly. Studies show by 4th grade children with parents who do not speak English perform on average the same as other kids. Of course this is subject to variation, there are many factors. Now, as a trained teacher who knows standardised tests are subjective and pseudoscientific measures I would like to say for you and for other younger people growing up in the US that they should not let these tests define how smart they are or how good their language skills are. Finally, I think it is very important to listen to you and validate your experience, because its your life and you lived it and lived the consequences of your dad's decision. However, immigrant children may look at your video and think they are doomed to be dumb and bad at English, so some sort of disclaimer or note or something would have been appropriate in my opinion. Academics in the 80s often pushed the idea that being bilingual was a sort of disability, and it took many years to change the narrative.
And how is it not the fault of the parents that they have not provided her with English books? Howis everybody excusing the parents from literally parenting?
I agree, I know many immigrant kids whose parents don't speak a lick of English and they do amazing at all grades reading and writing. It was the school, especially given teachers were teasing her. But, where I think she was disadvantaged is that whereas her mother was fluent, her father wasn't - lots of studies say first language literacy impacts second language acquisition. So if the parents have low levels of literacy, it's harder for a child to pick up a second language in a literate way. Her father really set her up for a fail in his experiment, by thinking he was equipped for a whole Japanese household. Its good that he knew to fixed it as he's a lot of the blame. And really, the fact her mom, living in the US, never attempted English ie just....odd. Secretly speaking English (as she said they did that when mom wasn't around) couldn't have been good for knowledge acquisition either. Every kid I know whose parents didn't speak English constantly tried English, which gave the kids opportunities to teach them.
From what I've heard and seen, the best way is to both parents speak their own language to the child consistently, and the child becomes bilingual. There might be a bit of "mix up" periods there, but children are very much capable to have more than one mother tongue.
But there hasn't always been much knowledge of the best way, and your parents might have gotten some bad advice younger. I'm sure it was a big revelation and a save in your journey, what happened when you were twelve. I'm glad you're ok now.
Hey, I've done all my schooling in English while English was forbidden to be spoken at home. I'm thankful I retained my cultural language to this day. I think that your schools weren't supportive of multilingual learners and I don't want you to put too much blame on your parents. Things would have been better if they knew how to better support you at home using both languages, but school also plays a big role to be honest.
Sorry that the school system made you feel dumb.
This is sad, it’s like when parents take their children out of school. Or don’t teach them anything besides what they learn in school. The fact that it’s a ‘trend’ more than ever is disgusting.
Not to mention think of all those immigrants parents who don’t speak a word of English. Think of those kids who struggled and wish that they could speak English at home too.
It’s not really thoughtful or intelligent to oppress children like that. But that doesn’t mean your parents don’t love you, they just don’t have the emotional intelligence and regulation to raise a child properly. Accepting that is extremely difficult. I’m so glad you got through it! ❤
i mean, my parents only speak chinese to me, since, well, they don't exactly _know_ english. grew up in america too, but a major difference was that i had an older brother. while my english is still pretty iffy sometimes, i think having a sibling definitely helped with the whole not-enough-english-outside-of-school thing.
funnily enough, the main thing dragging my english grade down now is missed homework assignments---i grew up with everyone telling me i was smart all the time and never really got challenged in elementary to middle school. then high school hit, along with the homework assignments and difficult-er subjects that came with it, and i learned that i was supposed to be spending time learning outside of school too, haha. i'll definitely be teaching my future children (if i have any) that hard work is A Cool Thing and to not freak out like a cat seeing a cucumber any time there's a chance that failure may exist :')
I have immigrant parents. My sister and I were raised at home speaking our parents' language only. By second grade we were reading English beyond grade level. We both scored over 750 on the English section of the SAT. I am so grateful for the fact that my parents raised me in their language because my English has not suffered, and I am fluent in my parents' language.
I feel like this highlighted more problems with the teachers and students at the schools more than anything lol.
For real. People is mean
You’re very brave to share your story. I too have learning difficulties
My parents are Romanian spoke Romanian and English but mainly I learned Romanian from my grandparents but also by ear. Normally your case sounds quite rare because most people in your case will have a bilingual parent speak the language and then an English speaking parent speaking English . I knew a couple who had kids one parent spoke German to the kid and the other Syrian and their kids learned English at school.
I grew up not speaking english with my parents at all because they are not fluent in english, but I feel like I picked up the language very quickly from school, especially since i talk to my younger siblings in english too, so it wasn't a problem for me even though my parents don't speak to me english, and to be honest right now my english is definitely better than my first language, so I guess different people have different experiences even with the same situation. However I must admit I am 19 now and I still don't know what intersection means lol, but being bilingual I always feel like I have a gap in both languages, even in my first language there are many words I don't know, in fact even more than english. I don't think you are dumb if there are many words you don't know, because we literally have to juggle two languages at once. i used to feel insecure about it, but now I see people who only speak english still struggle with it and lack in vocabulary and spelling, even more than me sometimes even though it's their first language. Honestly I even got bettter grades in english language than some native english speakers even with the gaps in my language. I now study english language in college.
This is just the experience that every child with immigrants parents go through. I went through the same thing and in my opinion the teacher should have just been more understanding. I know what you mean by "gaps" in your language but those gaps were filled because I watched a lot of English content on my free time, is this something you did? Also, because I went into school not knowing English, I was enrolled in an ESL class until I was able to fully understand English. Did your school try to enroll you in one?
I think there is too many variables that could have had an impact on your an English that I think it's unfair to point at your parents (or dad in this case) as the sole cause for this because it isn't. I went through this, some of my friends went through this, and some of my cousins went through this and we all turned out fine. This isn't a "my parents didn't teach me English" issue this is a "my peers and mentors made me feel inferior because English wasn't my 1st language AND my learning environment doesn't account for ESL Learners" issue.
I have a somewhat similar background but with entirely different outcomes. My mom is Japanese too and I speak to her exclusively in Japanese while I spoke English at school. And technically English is my second language. 🫡
Growing up bilingual is a balancing act and I have no idea how I managed it on top of being autistic (formally PDD-NOS so not full on stereotypical autism). And it’s not like my mom carried around a book about raising bilingual children when I was growing up. My brain does things for me and while I hated talking during class and a teacher or two got nitpicky on me about class participation and being “socially functional”, I still learned and retained a lot from listening and analyzing.
She isn't an immigrant. That's the problem. Everyone expected her to understand English. But her dad decided to only speak Japanese with her.
Hey, grew up as a bilingual here! And I have a similar story.
I'm from the Philippines and when I was younger I only ever spoke in Tagalog until I was 5. Once I turned 6 however, My dad would teach me English every now and then. It still wasn't the best but it did give me a boost in my English subject. When I visited my cousins (who only spoke English), my dad realized I had to learn English more, so I sorta went through a transition phase where I would switch my everyday language from Tagalog to English instead. This is the time where I also only watched English shows rather than Tagalog ones as well (my choice, completely).
While it was good for my English grades, I started suffering in my Filipino and A.P. (PH History) subject instead.
I was still able to speak Tagalog, but I wasn't really fluent anymore. I was still able to talk to classmates but they still noticed how "weird" I spoke.
To the point where they think I'm a foreigner or a "half-Filipino" and often times they wouldn't expect me to understand the language. It also didn't help that I had really pale skin.
I also have trouble reading in Tagalog, since I'm not as fast reading Filipino books than English books (An English novel would take me 3-4 hours to finish, while a Tagalog novel would probably take me 5-6 hours + I'll need a dictionary for some of the words that'll appear ever now and then.)
Fast forward to now, I'm 18 and homeschooled ever since the start of the pandemic (when I was 14). And, even though I'm still not quite good in my Filipino subjects, I speak better Tagalog now. My family would talk to me in "Taglish", mostly my dad. While my mom talks to me mostly in Tagalog. And while, I still have a small accent. I can converse with other people better than before.
(Also, since the jobs I apply for, only really need you to understand English, it still helped in the long run.) The only downside is that I couldn't communicate properly with my fellow Filipinos.
My little brother however, has a case much more similar to this video. Because unlike me, who was able to go to school for 10 years, (and forced to talk to other people for 10 years). He's been homeschooled ever since he was 9, and he only speaks English now. He can understand our language, but now he's too shy to speak it.
bro my first language is english and i tried transitioning to tagalog only when i was 10 but now im stuck speaking broken tagalog and i forgot how to verbally communicate in english 😭😭😭
isn't tagalog just 60% English and 30% Spanish now ?
@@belstar1128 sorta, but I'd say it's more 50% spanish and 20% english
@@belstar1128 lol no.
Filipinos are the ones who are going to kill their own languages no thanks to colonial mentality, it's absurd, as if being bilingual is detestable.
I've been working for almost a decade now, and almost all communication with colleagues were done in Tagalog. In my line of work, even some interviews (especially technical interviews) are in Tagalog. English is mostly reserved for emails and documents, the usual formal stuff, but at least in my experience we barely do it.
English is important, but knowing the vernacular still outweighs that, whether light-hearted jokes or serious conversations, nobody wants to be left out. It's a good way to develop rapport with the people you meet.
I’m sorry you went through this but it was a failure of the school not your parents. Raising a child to speak another language and then depending on the school to teach them English is very common in American society. It’s not an experiment. Your parents didn’t want the Japanese culture to die with you and I respect that.
I cannot agree. It is totally the job of the parent to watch how the child does in school. They should have intervened, considering dad is a native speaker. Also, are schools funded for this influx of immigrant kids who need to learn English? Is this part of the school system or just something that schools have to somehow tackle because so many kids are struggling with English? Additionally, it's never an advantage to have to learn school materials while not being proficient yet at English. It's for a big part on the parents as well.
It would’ve been much more ethical for her mother to speak to her in Japanese and her father to speak to her in English, that’s how bilingual children become so. A child’s brain is fully capable of acquiring two languages as long as they are both spoken in the home.
@@KatieT97 I'm trilingual but only 2 languages have ever been spoken to me at home. Picked up English at school and through movies, TV shows etc.
@@KatieT97 I think a good example would be Joey of The Anime Man/Trash Taste. His mother only spoke to him in Japanese and would send him back to her hometown for the summer. He's known to have a higher than average vocabulary of kanji as well.
I mean her parents literally refused to speak two different languages to her. Which is perfectly fine. You can learn two simultaneously. Her parents had strange approach
doesn't sound like a ruined childhood to me, this is what people that come to a new country go thru basically
I was born and raised in Korea, but my parents(also both Korean) wanted their child to speak fluent English, so they made sure I only watched American media growing up.
When I was five, other kids called me 'foreigner'. In elementary school, I often didn't get what the other kids were talking about, since I wasn't up to date with Korean celebrities or trends etc. I had an emo phase and a theatre-kid phase which absolutely no one around me understood. Nobody was able to converse in English with me, so I developed a habit of talking to myself very frequently.
But honestly, I wouldn't change it if I could. I loved learning languages since I was four and being bilingual has been a huge merit. I'm thankful for my parents for raising me this way, though it would've been a bit nicer if I had someone whom I could connect with better.
The famous academic book "How Languages are Learned" (Lightbrown & Spada) describes cases exactly like yours. Bilingualism in kids is not always the best thing: there are cases in which children will lag behind at school, that will affect their self-esteem, inclusion, social life, etc. It's safer to mostly use at home the language that the child is going to need to be successful at school and social life, and expose fewer hours of a second language. A second language is beneficial to kids, but parents should do it with caution. The same thing happened to a friend of mine: she was being raised bilingual English-Portuguese... But was having a hard time at school because her English was worse compared to her peers. The school strongly advised her parents to speak mainly in English... and her problem was solved.
I dunno man, here in India, children are born with 2-3 languages to converse in by default
@@NutBuster99 It depends on each case. Another famous book "Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching" (Oxford Press) shows how communities and learners in postcolonial nations can struggle in the dilemma of keeping their native languages or giving more attention to English for academic success.
It's not a good idea if the parents are not native speakers. That is a must or you will not have a rich language foundation. (In her case, the dad is a native speaker,s o...)
@@professorsilva9388 fair enough. But the language curriculum here is kinda intense. For eg- one has to learn their state/province language, the national language hindi and the international language as kids. I myself learnt Marathi, Hindi, English in my primary education, as well as an additional choice German that we had to pick. Parents are South Indians, so they taught me Malayalam as well.... So I am literate in 5 languages, with spoken Tamil as well. Keep in mind that I didn't attend the best school nor the best curriculum. It's just the state curriculum of Maharashtra (SSC). The CBSE or the ICSE probably learn more languages here in India than I do.
So true. Im a myself perent in a bilingual couple and i understood that from the start. I speak a little of my french to my children, but without overloading the boat. They have all thir lives to their second language.
I was kind of the opposite lol. My mom was born in Poland and my dad was born in China, yet they still communicated to me in English, even though their English was very broken, so I ended up speaking broken English when I was a kid, and still have a small accent, so I’ve always felt so insecure that I didn’t know my parents mother tongue, even though I had a non-American accent, which made me wish I grew up in a multilingual household 😭
It is such a shame that parents don't read up on this. A mothertongue is so important and makes learning another language so much more easy. :/ But cheer up, one can always learn a language! :D
Sorry, I just have to put my 2 bits in. Speaking another language in the home doesn't make you dumb. I took ESL in elementary and we weren't allowed to speak English in our home, but I still scored high throughout primary school and college as well, even though now, at age 40, I still have some gaps in my language and expression. I think even native speakers have words they learn throughout life, and until I started driving I didn't know the word intersection. It's completely OK to say "turn off the fire" instead of "turn off the stove". It's OK to pronounce the "T" in "Mountain" while your peers swallow the T. It's OK to have an accent, and it's okay to take accountability of learning on your own. And for those native to the States in both culture and language, it's OK to move to a new area where they use different words, slangs, accents, and learn along the way or choose to stay the way you are!!! It wasn't abuse, as some comments indicate. You're not a victim, as long as you were afforded an education, books, and an outlet to practice at some part of your day (as in school or playtime). The education system did fail in some ways. However, kids and people will pick on each other , that's just how that goes. If not about your English it would have been for something else. It comes down to perspective and whether you choose to see your bilingual experience as something ultimately enriching, albeit challenging at times, or something permanently crippling.
I am sorry that you had such a hard time with this. I don't think your parents meant any harm or even to perform an "experiment" (of course clever title wording for the algo, I get it), but simply just lived as they always did before you were born. I grew up in Switzerland and I almost only spoke Finnish at first as my mom and our nannies only spoke Finnish and in kindergarten, the guy I hung out with also only spoke Finnish. I noticed that my Swiss German had a few little quirks, but luckily I always had a sharp tongue and I was inherently pretty fearless when it came to social interactions, so I never got bullied. Or they only tried once... But now, as an adult, I realize the perks this situation gave me. Apart from now being fully bilingual, I also had way fewer issues learning other languages, such as English, French and even my Japanese is decent (surely not like your dad's, but very fluent in most situations). And this is all thanks to having had to deal with switching between two VERY different languages from very early on. Sure, someone who grew up monolingual and only ever used that one language will most likely have superior vacabulary and general skills in that language, but to me that is not interesting. I'd much rather speak a few languages fluently and comfortably, as for me it's just a tool to communitcate, convey my ideas and emotions and receive them from others. And to me, I am able to do this at sufficient capacity, even in foreign languages, such as English. I am an engineer, not a poet. よろしくお願いします。😅
if you do choose to raise a child, i hope you raise them bilingual with the one parent one language system that you described at the end. bilingualism is great for kids’ brains if it is done properly, not to mention the connection to culture and heritage
0:59 this part is SO real as an immigrant. I only knew my mother tongue and this teacher kept accusing me of ignoring her and told my parents about it🤦♀️ my parents were also the ones who never even let me know that we live in a country where people speak a different language and they blamed me for not knowing a language I never heard of??😭
As a former ESL teacher, the school failed you.
I'm so sorry you were made fun by you're peers!😟
Also great video for people who had the same experience!
And I honestly relate to this,I didn't have the same EXPERIENCE,but I did go through the same idea so I understand this.
If you want to leave this comment,you can,because after this is just going to be my OWN experience,h(so basically like my life story,or a part of it,also have a nice day/night/morning,evening,love ya)
Hello,my name is Reem Alshehri,Im from Saudi Arabia,and this is gonne be talking about my OWN experience,so lets begin:
When I was about 4-5(years old),my mom has gone out to study like cancer cells or something like that(something related to cancer,and she wanted to become a doctor,idk alot,correct me if im wrong though,also me,my 2 brothers and my dad have gone with her).So me and my family gone out with my mom too(also we've gone to UK,birmingham specifically,and she took us to learn and study englsih,go somewhere new,e.c.).So when we got there i barely speaked Arabic,I was getting the hang of it,but,of course my mom and dad had to put me in a school,so I started learning English there,but I was STILL learning Arabic,so I didn't know what and what to focus at,so my talking was englsih and Arabic together.
Example:Mom شوفتي وين Doll حقتي؟
Another Example:بابا did you see وين الايسكريم and drink is?
It was to the point my mom and dad had a hard time understanding me,and sometimes wouldn't even understand me.We stayed for on year then gone back,then I started to learn Arabic,and the same time I was forgetting my englsih,so my only gone back to have a break,but no we've gone back totally the UK,so now I had to learn English all over again!(I forget to include my mom and dad didn't know englsih well themselves,so they talked Arabic mostly,but even though,it's wasn't enough to keep up my Arabic).So now I started to learn englsih AGAIN,and started to forgot my Arabic now,instead of my English,and my Arabic started to get weak,so we stayed in the UK for 2 and a half,then when the pandemic came,we had to go back to Saudi Arabia.After we've gone there I won't say my Arabic got alot better,because we were on screens,and I barely focused.So now my Englsih started to get a bit weak,but my Arabic was weak,my mom actually started to notice that by me always asking her what an Arabic word meant,she told me to start reading more books,i did,didn't help that much tho,so after a year in Saudi Arabia,WE'VE GONE BACK TO UK,AGAINNN,AND MY ARABIC WAS ONLY GETTING WORSE!,so we stayed in the UK for half a year,then came back to Saudi Arabia,when I only spent 1 week in Saudi Arabia,my mom had to go back to continue her studying,becaus she cant take s long break(we only came as a break),So I had to go with my mom because unfortunately,nobody wanted to come with her from my family,since they've already gone to school and started their life's there,and my mom didn't want to go alone since she didn't feel comfortable with that.We stayed there for half a year,then we came back to Saudi Arabia,and when I started to go to school,my Arabic teacher started to realize I'm fantastic at Englsih,but not that good at Arabic,my reading was good,but other skills,no,I wasn't good,so she started to focus on me,now I'm good at Arabic and Englsih.I know it was good at the end,but for my future kids,I wouldn't do that to them.I know my mom didn't do this at purpose,so I won't do the same mistake.
Thank you for reading this if you did,or if you read a little bit,hope you had a great time and enjoyed it,have a great day/morning,night,evening.Always remember that you're an amazing person!And you're unique and one of a kind,also really beautiful!Don't forget to drink you're water,and eat ,if you're doing it on purpose please don't,it's not healthy,be kind to you're self,I care about you and I'm sure alot of other people do!If you're going through some hard times,it'll pass,don't worry,I'm here and we're all here for you!
If you have any questions or something to say,please do put it in the comments below!
Annnnndddddd...
السلام عليكم/Assalamu Alikum 😁👋
As someone who is also half Japanese, and Polish, I completely understand how you feel! my dad was also fluent in Japanese, so in my household we also only spoke in that language. Due to my lack of places to speak/learn english I was very behind and was put in those special ED classes. My english vocabulary was smaller than a grain of rice, and I got made fun of a lot for my grammatical errors as a child. If I were to become a mother, I think I would speak in both languages for my child to learn. Sure, first it might be a little hard, and they may mix up some words, but at the end of the day they can learn two languages at the same time/level.
I learned both English and Spanish at the same time, I also had adhd and was selectively mute as a kid and suspect I have autism now as an adult. Getting accommodations was tough and they helped but it was a struggle when you couldn’t vocalize it to anyone and no one understood it. I also spent a lot of time after school tutoring and summer time reading in both languages because I was behind my reading level. My mom mostly spoke Spanish to me and my father spoke mostly English to me but he was absent for many early years due to being in the military I still think I rounded out well being in school and surprisingly I do better with English than Spanish despite being surrounded by family friends that speak Spanish and going to Spain and mainly speaking Spanish at home. It sucked because communicating to my mom was really difficult especially with teachers and trying to translate especially because of just her nature and how she treated us at times. I definitely had lot of Spanglish going on and while it went mostly unnoticed because I did well in school and had to try even harder I used to space out many times because I couldn’t recall words in a language or didn’t know how to express myself. Sometimes teachers or kids would pick up on it and call me dumb or slow and say I didn’t know either language well enough. I’m better at both now but That mixed with the adhd and such made it difficult for me to find my voice and even now as an adult I struggle talking at all with people and get overwhelmed easy and am still mostly mute. Felt it was important to mention both because they interconnected sometimes but I also noticed both and how they impacted me. We also had a complicated household with abuse involved which kind of makes even more of a mess of things.
Your dad is awesome, I struggle a lot to learn japanese and he did it on his own, かっこいい...
I don’t see anything wrong with the approach your parents took. Tons of bilingual kids all over the country grew up this way, including myself. What’s messed up is that in your case you had so many people around you putting you down and making you doubt yourself instead of helping you. Your peers and teachers were the ones responsible for that, not your parents.