Anyway, I have now bookmarked this site not to loose it!
Thank you guys and talk to you again!
Megumi

My other concern is which Citizenship my child will choose when s/he turns 18. Hopefully with Japan’s declining population the laws may relax on this issue. Hopefully s/he will be able to retain all 3 citizenships. I read where efforts are being made to allow Nikeijin more opportunities to reintegrate back to Japan. Hopefully similar efforts will be made for dual citizens.

Jeff have you thought about this issue for your child? It seems like such a hard choice to make if once is forced to choose. I could never part with either of my passports, both nationalities are such an important part of me.

So in their case, the trips to Korea are pretty important. Eventually they will put Korean into a secondary position permanently, and be unable to communicate in depth in Korean, unless they choose to study it.

Bi-lingual is defined differently by different people. Some pe0ple make a “truely bilingual” classification that means that the ability is equal in all spheres of usage (speaking, reading and writing and both professionally and casually). In truth, most people with 2-4 languages use them at various levels of ability. For example I communicate in spoken German pretty well and can pick up forgotten vocabulary quickly. But my written German is poor, though I am able to write to a degree that can be deciphered. My parents gave up trying to get us to write well, after we hit the “tweenager” years. And by then they were pushing Spanish instead of German anyway, since we were growing up in the USA, and it was fairly certain that we were going to stay there.

The beauty of living in the US is that there are so many people who speak English imperfectly that people are quite patient with a foreign accent and creative ways of trying to get a point across. There is a high tolerance for butchered English. Japanese need not be afraid of appearing foolish when trying to use their school English in the USA.

Now that I’ve been in Japan for 15 years I really appreciate this flexibility in the USA. My own daughter sometimes tells me to please stop talking, because my “Japanese” is hurting her ears. My own parents both spoke English very well after moving to the USA. I have not been able to emulate them with my Japanese in my adopted new home.

About the videos, and other multi-media interaction … yes, it is very great, very useful, and so on. But in my own case with my daughter, who is almost too American after watching all the Disney and Pixar movies as well as too many taped TV shows, reading ended up taking a back seat. She was slow off the mark. Partly personality, but also partly more enticed by the easier entertainment I had provided her to keep her English going when she was full time in Japanese “hoikuen” (daycare). Something to watch out for. She is now 10, and is catching up on the reading, but I am afraid that she may never learn to love reading and a neat turn of words the way that I did. She’s also going through the usual denial stuff, about not wanting to learn her kanji, blah, blah.

Anyway, the multilingual experience will vary from family to family but there will be much in common. Forming friendships with other families that are multi-lingual is a big bonus in keeping the kids from rejecting the multilingual model. If other kids are also multi-lingual, it will make it acceptable to be different in “that way” at school. Traveling whenever finances allow is also a big boost to keeping the kids’ attititude positive. My daughter is quite clear on the fact that she’s better off with English in some of the countries we visit, then with the Japanese! And of course parents setting the example… (though my sister and I were not all that impressed that our parents spoke German to each other, we cared enough about being able to evesdrop that we managed to hang on to our German in spite of ourselves!)

Good luck everyone!

My wife Taek-Ryun is Korean nationality and I am German Nationality.

Our first daughter Carina was born in Dec 2001 and our second daughter Hannah was born in June 2003.
At the time of the birth of Carina my wife and me just returned to Germany to settle our lifes. (I’ve been living and working in Korea for almost 3,5 years.) At this time we did communicate in English and my wife’s ability of the German language was very poor, of course.
We decided, that Carina will be taught in my wife’s native language (Korean) during daytime, when I am at the office. In the evening I will try as much as I can to talk to her in German (basically to both of them in German … to support Taek-Ryun as well in learning a foreign language). Intentionally we decided for Taek-Ryun not talk to Carina in German language, since at this time her knowledge was pretty poor … of course.

1.5 years later Hannah, our second daughter was born. We felt, we are on the right track, we continued that way … now for both of them.

At the time when Carina was almost 3 years old we noticed that Carina’s knowledge of the Korean language was maybe 90% and of the German language 10%. This was caused by the fact that I was in the office all day long and had to travel to/back from the office more than 2 hours. Which means I usually returned home when Carina was sleeping and I missed the chance to talk to her very often.

We felt, we made a wrong decision and are on the wrong way now. We decided to change our way of training/language education for Hannah because it is not too late. At this time my wife graduated several good and professional language institutes (Goethe Institut) and her knowledge of the German language became (and still is … though she does not believe me) very good. For Hannah we would like to grow her up with 50%/50% bilingual.
Now, today we have to revise our opinion again.

Carina, who was fluent in Korean and just a poor beginner in German language, got a very strong influence from the Kindergarten, her friends, the TV, etc that it turned very soon to the total opposite!! Nowadays she is really bilingual, is fluent in listening and talking in both languages, no matters who talks to her in whatever language.

Hannah of course is getting the same strong influence and almost forgot all her 50% knowledge of the Korean language. If she really wants and Mama forces her a lot, she can understand a bit of the Korean language. But German is her native language.

The kids never use the Korean language to talk to each other. Most of the time they are talking in German language to Mama, and Mama mostly responds in German as well.

Once in a year we go to Korea to visit my wife’s family. At this time the kids needs only a few days to adopt the Korean language again, the transition period is very short. Must be in their genes …

After coming back home to Germany it lasts for a few weeks … then it’s almost gone again.

(Well, I have to mention that my ability to talk in Korean language is very poor. It has never been an option to live bilingual in the family, I would be the loser all the time and sooner or later the kids would know this and will play with this fact.)

I also received a similar email, and I’m fine with receiving it, but thought I’d post some comments here. I don’t see any points where I disagree with Jeffrey, so consider all of that advice seconded.

My six year old son Kai knows Japanese and English pretty much as well as any six-year old of the respective culture. Probably his Japanese is slightly better, even though he was raised here.

Basically, we took the approach of starting exclusively with Japanese, and then phasing in English starting at around 3 and a half or so. It seems to have worked fairly well.

Mom used Japanese with him exclusively before he was 3, and still uses it with him most of the time. I use it with him somewhat (more so when he was younger). He’s visited Japan each summer since he was 2 for between 6 and 8 weeks. The past two summers, he’s gone to a local yochien that was happy to have him. He went to a Japanese day care in America for a couple of hours a day between 2 and 4 years of age, and currently goes to a Saturday Japanese school. He also has a significant number of Japanese and half-Japanese friends. Probably the most obvious gains in his ability have come with his trips to Japan. Still, I don’t know that any particular activity was more important than any other, so long as it gave him exposure to Japanese.

I’ve supported this completely, and Jeffrey’s certainly right about the need for both parents to be on the same page. I never had any worries about his learning English, and I was right; last year when he started kindergarten the ESL evaluator indicated he didn’t need any ESL classes. He could have, though, and it would not have concerned me if he had. In fact, if we’d decided to support three languages, it still wouldn’t have concerned me and the necessity of ESL classes would not have caused us to drop the third language.

My three and a half year old son Lui is following the same model, and currently really only speaks Japanese. He’s just started to pick up English. This causes my parents some concern, and my mother is still convinced he’s non-verbal.

Keep in mind that children are all different, and your son will be following his own linguistic path. It could potentially affect kindergarten or first grade for him, but probably not too severely. Be ready to be flexible in what you expect or your approach, but don’t abandon a strategy only because your son is following a different linguistic progression than other children.

Being hesitant to make Japanese friends is probably something you can ill afford, and is probably based off of worry more than anything. The bar for making friends with Japanese mothers (when you yourself have a reasonable grasp of Japanese and are also a mother) is not very high. Consider: the intra-company transferee mothers usually have a limited or nonexistent confidence speaking English, which means they’re often cut off from much of society. The wives of Americans are usually more confident in their English, but sometimes hesitate to befriend intra-company transferees because they know they might be leaving in 2-3 years. Also, a lot of them have done some sort of transition themselves, and may be worried about how “Japanese” they still are, and how much they themselves have been Westernized. Any differences you display may actually reassure them.

Jeffrey, I find Kai really enjoys the “Little Bear” books (Sendak-illustrated). It’s pretty much the first thing he’s wanted to read enough to read himself.

Isn’t your son a bit young to learn to read? Toys are more a priority at his age, aren’t they?

Anyway getting two languages is a godsend, and I wish you good luck with the endeavour.