i see your point, but i would be worried more from psychological side-effects of having 2 parents speaking 2 different languages. last thing i would be wishing for is when my child come to school and on a first essay about family would write something like "my father is ok, but he doesn't want to speak with me japanese, he is a bit different (understand psycho)".



you need one language on which you build up a healthy connection between child and both parents, equally

kids are very smart and you can learn even more than 2 languages in the early age. simply by taking hours of language, you know, sit together with your kid and say "come on we are going to learn a bit of english" and then talk english, but after that return back to your family language, but always talk together (you all 3) same language. for non-mixed language families it is recommended that kids come to contact with foreign language at around 4 years old (depends individually).

but i wouldn't take that route that one parent learning one language and other parent learning other language only. if both parents talk both languages kid gets a teachings from 2 sources about the same thing and that is much valuable.

But children do not see it that way. If the father has never spoken Japanese to the child, it is never an issue. It is more like "Mommy speaks this way, Daddy speaks that way." It is a given as the child has been raised in that environment and is accustomed to it.

Wrong. You need to build up a healthy connection between child and parents, with active and clear communication. It does NOT have to be in a single language. If a child is being raised bilingually, they are pretty much equal in both languages. They are NOT speaking a foreign language to one parent - they are speaking both of their *native* languages with their parents.

A child knowing a bit of a foreign language and being a native speaker of more than one language are very different things. Yes, you can teach a child quite a bit in a couple hours a day. But chances are they will never be a native speaker of that "foreign" language as it is and always will be presented as foreign. It will be a second language, not a native language. Not to mention that the sudden change of a parent into another language on a set time schedule tends to be stressful for the child and not give that language a good image.

But how does the child know which language is which? If parents mix languages when they speak, a child will mix the languages when they speak. Except in the case of the child, they will not know they are mixing two languages so will be unable to use one or the other. They will only know ONE language. This is called a creole language and is NOT what you want to happen when raising a bilingual child. When it does, both languages are "foreign" languages to the child so there will be no other native speakers of the language they have acquired.

But, who am I to tell you? :mtongue: I`m just a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and did a fairly large study on children in bilingual Japanese-English speaking homes...

I think you're underestimating the brain of a child. I was brought up speaking two different dialects of Berber, Arabic and French. I had no problems separating the languages. My parents as a baby started speaking to me in Berber and apparently the moment I started forming sentences and speaking (2 to 3? At what age do kids start forming coherent sentences?), they spoke to me in all three. To top it all off, at around 7, 8ish, we moved to England where I spoke ONLY English with my dad for about a year.

Now, I speak 2 dialects of Berber, even though I count it as just one. I speak an Algerian dialect of Arabic and Literary Arabic. My French was the worst of these languages, but it was still good enough to not be allowed to take French lessons in school because the teachers said I was too advanced. And of course, English!

I will say one thing though, for me I think it was too much! By the age of 8, I was jumping between 4 languages. This made my French very weak, whereas my brothers were extremely good at Arabic, Berber and French at the age of 8, 9, 10 etc because they didn't start English till they were at least 14! So I think you're right when it comes to mixing too many languages. But I think two, is perfectly ok.

Sorry to butt in, but I find this discussion really interesting. There's lots of kids in the world being raised with three or four languages, and they never have any trouble. I know several British Indians who speak the native dialect of their mother, the native dialect of their father, hindi or urdu AND english. It's pretty natural to them to swap between them depending on the situation. When it's just mum, they speak in mum's language, when dad comes home, they speak hindi/urdu; outside the house it's all English. But there's no way they could combine it because for starters, dad doesn't speak mum's dialect and visa versa, and dad's good at english but mum isn't so much, etc etc.

Actually, fluency must be a factor, right? I imagine for a lot of mixed Japanese families, both partners aren't going to be perfectly fluent in both languages. Plenty of couples out there where one side doesn't speak a lick of Japanese, or conversely, only middling english. The only time I can think of where it might be better if both parents were to constantly speak both languages to the child across the board is for languages where male and female speech are drastically different.

This is the important part. They didn`t mix while you were acquiring your first language. If they had been mixing from day one you would not have had the background to be able to figure out which bit belonged to one language and which belonged to another.
As an infant acquiring a language for the first time, without some rule to show that languages are separate, there is no way to distinguish between them. It isn`t underestimating at all. Even adults cannot do this.

As an example, let us say that you are dropped into a situation where you interact with people who do not speak a language you are familiar with in any way. If they speak to you mixing two or more unfamiliar languages together, you will have no way to know where one begins and the other ends. In fact, you will have no idea at all that they are mixing! And if you pick up the language, you will pick up this mixed form. This is what happens when an infant is exposed to mixed languages from day one with no indication of the lines between them.

On the other hand, let`s say that you go somewhere and are talking to people who use a mix of a language you may not be a good speaker of, but that know quite a bit of. You will probably be able to tell pretty easily which parts belong to language 1 and which belong to language 2 - even if you don`t know the language all that well, it will be fairly clear from the feel, word form, and grammar differences. This is what happens when a child has exposure to a single language long enough to acquire a great part of it. (What happened with you.)

ETA;
I`m not sure whether you wanted to support what I said or go against it...?
What you are saying supports it, if that is what you intended. :)

For a child in that sort of family, they are a native speaker of all of those languages. If the mother speaks to the children in her dialect, the child learns that "mommy speaks this way" and will speak that way with the mother. The same goes for the father... And the same also goes for "mommy and daddy speak to each other this way" for the third household language. There is a clear pattern that is easy for a child to learn and which will give a very good way to keep the languages separate.

I`m sure fluency is a huge factor in making the choice of who speaks what, what sort of pattern to stick to, etc. Obviously, it will be easy to have the mother speak her native language to the child and the father speak his if one of them isn`t very good with the native language of the other. There are cases where the parents themselves are natively bilingual but still do the one-person-one-language pattern, so it doesn`t have to be based on fluency.

The key just seems to be finding and sticking to a pattern. Consistency is what makes the big difference. I`ve even heard of a day rotation - English on Monday, Japanese on Tuesday, then English again on Wednesday, etc.
One thing that is pretty clear is that mixing by the parents with no rules to the exposure usually ends up with a monolingual child only speaking and being fluent in the outside language in the end. (Language of school and peers). The second mixed in language ends up being a second language at best, a sketchy "foreign" language at worst.

Apologies, I think I replied to your post without reading everything about this discussion. I assumed that you were saying to not mix languages until for example they are in school or something because of what you said about speaking only in Japanese to your child. I remember seeing a picture maybe a year ago and he was already in school, so I assumed!

But now, I think it's clearer! Yes, I guess there does need to be a degree of separation! For my niece, I've always spoken to her in Kabyle (one of the berber dialects), whereas her father and mother only speak to her in French. Now, she'll be 3 in a couple of months, so she's already speaking. With me, even though I only taught her vocabulary. Like, when she played with a toy car as a baby, I would say Car in Kabyle. Now, I still do the same thing... Hopefully I haven't confused her, lol.

When it comes to my son, there were several pretty large factors in deciding to go the monolingual route with him. For one, he has a disability and we were uncertain of whether he would be able to speak at all. (And actually ended up taking until 4 to speak his first word.)
Second, my husband does not speak English. Using English as a home language would have been impossible.
And third, me using only English with my son and my husband using only Japanese would still have shut my husband out of a great part of my son`s life because the time spent by my husband with my son is much much less than that I spend with him. Children tend to learn the primary caregiver`s language first, and that would have been English.

And, because of the disability issues, there was a chance my son would only be able to learn a very little bit of language at all. If that had been English there is no doubt it would have cut down on his quality of life.

Anyway, it was a case of sacrifice for us no matter what, so I chose not to make them. It`s a personal family choice, having nothing to do with my views on bilingualism and learning other languages. :)

If you are the only one speaking to her in that language, I am sure that she has noticed that and is not confused at all. :)

ok you are starting to convince me :) so what to do in situation when both parents need to speak with kid at one time?

which language should they speak? still each of theirs?

Yes. If that is how they have been doing it, when they both need to speak to the child at once they should follow the same pattern.
Remember, for the child BOTH of the languages is their native language so it should not be hard for them.
If it has to be a family discussion, then the parents should stick to the language they use to talk to each other when talking to one another, and stick to the language they use when speaking to the child when they are doing that. Or if one can`t understand the language of the other, stick with the language they use when speaking to between themselves even when speaking to the child.

Really, it`s all about making a rule and sticking to it. Mixing languages based on how you feel or the direction of the wind isn`t a rule.

For example;
Mother speaking language A to the child. Father speaking language B to the child. Mother and father speaking language B to each other, and the "outside world" speaking language A (or even C!). This is a fairly common pattern.

Or... Mother and father both speak language A in the home, but speak language B outside the home. The "outside world" language is B.

It`s all a matter of giving the child a structure to work from to distinguish the different languages.

Something that probably wouldn`t work is mother and father both speaking language A and B without any pattern. The child usually ends up speaking the language of "AB", which doesn`t really exist.

I believe one should have a solid grasp of whatever language they will be using most, before introducing additional ones. Unfortunately that is a bit at odds with my strong belief that bilingual education should start early.

Integrating British and American English may not seem a major difference, but at least in the '50s it had a significant impact on me. Everyone around me from age 4 spoke British, except my parents, so by the time we returned to the U.S., most American's could not understand me. My parents had expected the problems with the accent, but the surpise was most of my vocabulary was not understood either. Remembering how confused I was at 7 suddenly having to learn new names for things, I can imagine how much more difficult it would be for a child with to learn a completely different language, or have no distinction as to when they should use which of the multiple languages their parents speak.