Entries tagged bilingual

The last time I talked about parenting it was in the context of a childcare timetable, where my wife and I divide the day explicitly hour by hour so that one of us is "in charge" at all times.

For example, I might take care of Oiva from 7AM-12pm on Saturdays, then she takes over until 5pm, and I take 5-7PM (bed-time). We alternate who gives him a bath and sits/reads with him until he's asleep.

Even if all three of us are together there is always one person who is in-charge, and will handle nappies, food, and complaints. The system works well, and has done since he was a few weeks old. The big benefit is that both of us can take time off, avoiding burnout and frustration.

Anyway that's all stable, although my wifes overnight shifts sometimes play havoc with the equality, and I think we're all happy with it. The child himself seems to recognize who is in charge, and usually screams for the appropriate parent as required.

Today's post is more interesting, because it covers bilingual children, which our child is:

• His mother is Finnish.
  • She speaks Finnish to him, exclusively.
• I'm from the UK.
  • I speak English to him, exclusively.

Between ourselves we speak English 95% of the time and Finnish 2% of the time. The rest of our communication involves grunting, pointing, and eye-contact.

He's of an age now where he's getting really good at learning new words, and you can usually see who he learned them from. For example he's obsessed with (toy) cars. One of his earlier words was "auto", but these days he sometimes says "car" to me. He's been saying "ei" for months now, which is Finnish for "no". But now he's also started to say "no" in English.

We took care of a neighbours dog over the weekend, and when the dog tried to sniff one of his cars he pointed a finger at it, and said "No!". That was adorable.

Anyway his communication is almost exclusively single-words so far. If he's hungry he might say:

• leipä! leipä! leipä!
  • Bread! Bread! Bread!
• muesli! muesli! muesli!
  • muesli! muesli! muesli!

He understands complex ideas, commands, instructions, and sentences in both English and Finnish ("We're going to the shop", "Would you like to play in the park?", and many many more). But he's only really starting to understand that he can say the same thing in multiple languages - as per the example above of "ei" vs "no", or "car" vs "auto".

Usually he uses the word in the language he heard it in first. For example he'll say goodbye to people by saying "moi moi", but greet them with "hello". There are fun words though. For example 99% of the time a dog is a "woof woof", but sometimes recently he's been describing them as "hauva". A train is a "choo choo", as is a tram, and a rabbit is a "pupu".

He's started saying "kissa" for cat, but when watching cartoons or reading books he's more likely to identify them as dogs.

No real conclusion here, but it's adorable when he says isä/isi for Daddy, and äiti for Mummy. Or when he's finished at the dining table and sometimes he says "pois" and other times says "away".

Sometimes you can see confusion when we both refer to something with different words, but he seems pretty adept at understanding. I'm looking forward to seeing him flip words between languages more often - using each one within a couple of minutes. He has done that sometimes, but it's a rare thing. He'll sometimes say "daddy car" and "äiti auto", but more often than not the association seems random. He's just as likely to say "more kala" as "more fish".

Tags: bilingual, english, finnish, languages, parenting, suomeksi | No comments

Nothing too much has happened recently, largely as a result of the pandemic killing a lot of daily interests and habits.

However as a result of Brexit I'm having to do some paperwork, apparently I now need to register for permanent residency under the terms of the withdrawal agreement, and that will supersede the permanent residency I previously obtained.

Of course as a UK citizen I've now lost the previously-available freedom of movement. I can continue to reside here in Helsinki, Finland, indefinitely, but I cannot now move to any other random EU country.

It has crossed my mind, more than a few times, that I should attempt to achieve Finnish citizenship. As a legal resident of Finland the process is pretty simple, I just need two things:

• Prove I've lived here for the requisite number of years.
• Pass a language test.

Of course the latter requirement is hard, I can understand a lot of spoken and written Finnish, but writing myself, and speaking a lot is currently beyond me. I need to sit down and make the required effort to increase my fluency. There is the alternative option of learning Swedish, which is a hack a lot of immigrants use:

• Learning Swedish is significantly easier for a native English-speaker.
• But the downside is that it would be learning a language solely to "cheat" the test, it wouldn't actually be useful in my daily life.

Finland has two official languages, and so the banks, the medical world, the tax-office, etc, are obliged to provide service in both. However daily life, ordering food at restaurants, talking to parents in the local neighborhood? Finnish, or English are the only real options. So if I went this route I'd end up in a weird situation where I had to learn a language to pass a test, but then would continue to need to learn more Finnish to live my life. That seems crazy, unless I were desperate for a second citizenship which I don't think I am.

Learning Finnish has not yet been a priority, largely because I work in English in the IT-world, and of course when I first moved here I was working (remotely) for a UK company, and didn't have the time to attend lessons (because they were scheduled during daytime, on the basis that many immigrants are unemployed). Later we had a child, which meant that early-evening classes weren't a realistic option either.

(Of course I learned a lot of the obvious things immediately upon moving, things like numbers, names for food, days of the week were essential. Without those I couldn't have bought stuff in shops and would have starved!)

On the topic of languages a lot of people talk about how easy it is for children to pick up new languages, and while that is broadly true it is also worth remembering just how many years of correction and repetition they have to endure as part of the process.

For example we have a child, as noted already, he is spoken to by everybody in Finnish. I speak to him in English, and he hears his mother and myself speaking English. But basically he's 100% Finnish with the exception of:

• Me, speaking English to him.
• His mother and I speaking English in his hearing.
• Watching Paw Patrol.

If he speaks Finnish to me I pretend to not understand him, even when I do, just for consistency. As a result of that I've heard him tell strangers "Daddy doesn't speak Finnish" (in Finnish) when we've been stopped and asked for directions. He also translates what some other children have said into English for my benefit which is adorable

Anyway he's four, and he's pretty amazing at speaking to everybody in the correct language - he's outgrown the phase where he'd mix different languages in the same sentence ("more leipä", "saisinko milk") - when I took him to the UK he surprised and impressed me by being able to understand a lot of the heavy/thick accents he'd never heard before. (I'll still need to train him on Rab C. Nesbitt when he's a wee bit older, but so far no worries.)

So children learn languages, easily and happily? Yes and no. I've spent nearly two years correcting his English and he still makes the same mistake with gender. It's not a big deal, at all, but it's a reminder that while children learn this stuff, they still don't do it as easily as people imagine. I'm trying to learn and if I'd been corrected for two years over the same basic point you'd rightly think I was "slow", but actually that's just how it works. Learning languages requires a hell of a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a lot of feedback/corrections.

Specifically Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, the same word is used for "he" and "she". This leads to a lot of Finnish people, adults and children, getting the pronouns wrong in English. In the case of our child he'll say "Mommy is sleeping, when he wake up?" In the case of adults I've heard people say "My girlfriend is a doctor, he works in a hospital", or "My dad is an accountant, she works for a big firm". As I say I've spent around two years making this correction to the child, and he's still nowhere near getting it right. Kinda adorable actually:

• "Mommy is a woman we say "when she wakes up"..."
• "Adriana is a girl we say "her bike".."

Tags: bilingual, brexit, childcare, english, finland, finnish, languages, oiva | 3 comments