Raising a Multi-lingual Child the Bailey way

This title is actually inspired by the Montessori book I’m currently reading and reflects much of what we as a family have been working on since our arrival back from Beijing.

I must preface this post with some background on my husband: a passionate learner of language he has (at one time or another) been proficient in six languages simultaneously, although more recently has dedicated all of his language-learning capacity to Mandarin for the last 6 years or so. He never travels to a country without picking up a phrase book and working hard to bridge the language barrier between him and the locals; and lets just face it, he just has a gift for language acquisition. The structure of language and learning language simply fascinates him and it has been one of his core passions since he started sneaking to the workers’ shed just to listen in on them speaking Shona when growing up in Zim.

It is because of this passion that one of Kyle’s main goals for our children is for them to be fluent in Chinese from a young age. His aim is to provide them with both opportunity and grounding in the language in the hope that this will give them an advantage in their future workplace. He feels passionate about them learning an African language too, and so we already have schedules in place that allow them sufficient Mandarin and Zulu interaction on a weekly basis and our children are all of 2 years and 4 months! We do this because the benefits of raising multilingual children are enormous (developmentally, emotionally, culturally etc). As a family we also have very close ties to both Africa and China – both our children were born in Beijing and it was the very first language they heard around them after all – and so Zulu and Mandarin made sense to us. But it’s the principal of multilingualism that we feel is so important and so we make A LOT of effort in order to achieve this goal. Or shall we say, Kyle makes the effort to plan how much time our children need to spend immersed in Chinese/Zulu environments and I have to make it happen!

Our Chinese commitments currently comprise of two 2 hour sessions per week for our 2 year old Zipporah with a lovely lady who plays with her and interacts with her solely in Chinese. We were fortunate in that Zipporah has understood Mandarin from birth as our nanny in China spoke to her only in Chinese up till the time we left. When we started taking her to these Chinese classes her interaction with the language was very passive; she understood everything that was said but always responded in English if at all. This was especially the case if I was around and no matter how much I encouraged her Chinese interaction, she felt that the dominant language around me and in our home was English and battled to make the switch. She also originally struggled to understand that the same thing could have more than one name. On one occasion, while her Chinese teacher was building blocks with her and reinforcing the names of different colours, she stopped after her teacher said the Chinese word for green and told her in no uncertain terms - “No, Mama says this is GREEN!”

Thankfully we have a very persistent and patient teacher working with her (who happens to be quite strict too) and she is very good about forcing Xiao Ying (Zipporah’s Chinese name) to repeat things in Chinese and respond only in Chinese. We have also got smarter about the lessons and they only take place at her teacher’s home (a completely Chinese environment) and I am never present. It seems Zipporah is more comfortable with this deliberate shift and now, after only a month, she is saying more Chinese words than I have ever heard her, using words appropriately and interchangeably, and with perfect tone. We are so proud!

Her Zulu lessons currently take on less structure as we have our maid Gladys 3 days a week and she only talks to her in Zulu. And although their time together is not as deliberate, Zipporah is picking up a lot of what she says and knows the appropriate way to greet any black person she sees without being asked. Sometimes our quest for multilingual geniuses gets us in quite a pickle though especially when we are not as proficient in all the languages. One such occasion was when we heard Zipporah interacting with her cousin and saying something to him that sounded a lot like a swear word! Kyle immediately assumed she’d learnt it from me, and I denied ever having used such language in front of my kids (not too regularly anyway). We worried for about a week as this became a prominent word in her vocabulary, until one morning I heard Gladys tell Zipporah to put the cereal in the bowl. The Zulu word for “put in” is “fagga” and in 2 year old speech this sounds a lot like… well you get the picture. Needless to say we were quite relieved and I was finally off the hook!

While Zipporah got a lot of Chinese input in her first 2 years we believe our son Titus is going to have a similar foundation in Zulu. He and Gladys share a very special bond and she is constantly chatting away to him. We are so thrilled at the start they are both getting in these languages, and although it’s quite a lot of deliberate effort on our part, we are committed to seeing this through for all our children and believe it to be well worth any sacrifices, financial and other.

I will close with one last anecdote that happened just today. Kyle took Zipporah to one of the Chinese churches in Johannesburg this morning, and despite being quite the spectacle as the only foreign child in the Sunday school class, our daughter was able to follow and participate in a lesson on the 5 loaves and 2 fish. She was counting away in Chinese and felt more at home in that class of Chinese children than I have seen her be in a while. One day we know she will thank us for our determination to see her submerged in the language, and we so appreciate that she enjoys it too. Because it’s been all she knew from birth it is effortless for her. Kids are amazing little sponges and so I suppose the lesson therein is to be deliberate about the ‘water’ you choose for them to soak up and watch in amazement when they do it with such ease.