Big Son and Daughter had school today, although apparently their school usually closes on Veterans Day. None of the other moms could figure it out -- the public schools were closed, and Hub is home from work. So Hub, Little Son and I went on an exciting outing to Trader Joe`s this morning.
Little Son is perfectly bilingual, at his three-year old level. He speaks Japanese to his father, and then turns to me and speaks English. It always amazes me to hear this.
"Buy this, Mama! I love this!
Papa, kore katte ne! Boku, dai suki!"
Our other kids` skills are less even.
Both Big Son and Daughter were born in Los Angeles, but we moved back to Tokyo when Big Son was three and a half, and Daughter was 22 months.
Big Son was an early talker, and was home with me most of the time when he was small, so English was his first language. Hub was supposed to be the one teaching him Japanese, but usually ended up taking the lazy way out and speaking English, which was Big Son`s default comprehension language. Subsequently, Big Son entered Japanese public daycare in Tokyo unable to converse in the langauge in which he was immersed. Of course, he picked it up quickly, but English remained his stronger language for several years.
Daughter, on the other hand, was a late talker. She entered fulltime Japanese daycare right around her second birthday, and her main language switched to Japanese. I remember how appalled I was when all of her cute English baby talk began to fade away, replaced by cute Japanese baby talk. I fought it, but Japanese took over as her stronger langauge.
So for years our household consisted of two children with different primary languages, even though they`re close in age and had lived together since birth. Life can be funny that way.
Now our household consists of an English-speaking mother who speaks only English to the kids but Japanese to the father, who sometimes speaks English to the mother but never to the kids. The kids speak Japanese to their father and to each other, but only English to their mother.
Big Son`s English reading and writing skills are still way ahead of Daughter`s, because he attended a
ritzy private prison camp for two years in Tokyo. Daughter has had no formal English instruction until now, but is holding her own so far, and making steady progress.
I am a foreign language idiot, although I confess to loving them all. I am like a music lover who can`t play an instrument or carry a tune, and can therefore appreciate and respect music all the more.
The first foreign language I ever heard was Polish. My grandmother, who lived with us, spoke to me in Polish until I was two, and her sister overheard her and told her to stop because she would confuse me, or else people would tease me and call me a Pollack. I have no doubt that somewhere, trapped deep in the recesses of my brain, are little bits of Polish baby talk, but if I hear someone speaking Polish now, it doesn`t even sound vaguely familiar. I am a bit pissed off at my aunt, may she rest in peace, for sabotaging my only chance to grow up with a foreign language.
The first written foreign language I ever saw was a Latin inscription on a church we sometimes attended,
Orate pro nobis. Latin, I was told, was a dead language -- of course, I took this to mean that Latin was the langauge of the dead, and therefore what people spoke in the afterlife. This made it all the more fascinating. Exposure to Latin was a big plus about being raised Catholic, since they had long since stopped teaching it in the public schools in my town. (Reminder to UK readers: "public school" = "state school.")
I studied French for four years in high school, which was when I realized I had no natural aptitude for foreign tongues (which is what I mean when I call myself a "language idiot"). I could express myself just fine -- I`m a naturally expressive person -- but I couldn`t seem to do it correctly or politely all the time, and got mediocre grades. I spent a summer in France when I was 15, where I lived with a homestay family in Nancy and never quite knew what was going on around me.
I started studying Japanese my senior year in high school in Connecticut, because I was in a short-lived magnet language program at Hartford Public High School. I remember the day when the program directors came to recruit students at my high school -- it seemed too good to be true. It was a half-day, afternoon program, so a bus would come and get me at my suburban high school and bring me into Hartford, where I would get to study a bunch of non-Western languages, as well as intensive French. Wow!
The language part sounded great, but leaving my boring high school, and going into the city every day sounded best of all. Hey, I would have applied to a magnet school that made students copy the telephone directory by hand, just to get to leave my high school for half of every day.
Amazingly enough, I was the only student in my entire school interested in this program. I still can`t quite believe that.
We had a few weeks of Japanese, which wasn`t enough to learn much, and a few weeks of Arabic in which we learned the alphabet, but no actual words, which was kind of pointless. We also had a few weeks of German, which they snuck in there even though it wasn`t non-Western.
Of course, they had trouble finding qualified teachers to accept public school part-time contract wages to teach rare languages. For the Chinese part of the course, they hired a dancer from the Hartford Ballet, who sometimes came to class in black tights. He taught us to say, "Ni hao" to him when he entered the room, and he would then spend the rest of the class going on and on in Chinese and hoping we were following it (which of course we weren`t), while flitting around the room in his tights. We didn`t learn Chinese, but it was certainly much more entertaining than anything my suburban high school had to offer.
We had a few different French teachers -- again, they had trouble finding them, and getting them to stay. One of them had recently escaped from Iran (this was 1982), where she claimed she had been the Shah`s translator, and her husband had been vice minister of communcations. She was beautiful and exotic and soon left for a better job doing Spanish-language TV news in Miami. I sometimes Google her, and have never found her, but if you`re out there, Elah Joubine Sabah, I want you to know that every one in that class was in love with you, even the girls and the gay boy.
My senior year in high school was my only interesting year in my entire early education. I look back on my dozen years in public schools with very little nostalgia, only a peculiar feeling of dread. I remember wondering if there really was a world outside of my boring Connecticut suburb, and if so, wondering how I could get out and see it. Studying foreign languages was the only way I could connect with it in any meaningful way.
And then I went off to college, majored in East Asian Studies, went to Japan and in some sense, never came back.
I don`t know if I`m raising happy, emotionally healthy children, but when I hear my kids chattering in Japanese, I know one thing is certain. My kids do not know that peculiar feeling of dread I had, growing up in an isolated suburb, worrying I would never see anymore of the world. They`ve always had friends from lots of countries who speak lots of langauges, and they`ve always had two languages themselves. They take it for granted that the world is out there.
Whenever I say I loved studying foreign languages to escape, I hope they will always have no idea what I`m talking about.
