Best language-learning environment for kids: Two parents chattering away with fancy words

An article in the New York Times entitled Birth Order: Fun to Debate, but How Important? discusses language learning and birth order. Here's the money quote:

Frank J. Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives”(Pantheon, 1996), points out that second-born children tend to be exposed to less language than eldest children. “The best environment to grow up in is basically two parents who are chattering away at you with fancy words,” Dr. Sulloway said.

That seems fairly obvious to me—expose them to more words and they learn more words—but the good doctor lends some authority to it.

Can you help me improve my language-learning routine?

I thought I'd share with you what's shaping up to be my language-learning routine. I'd love it if you could take home a few good pointers from my routine, but I'd love it even more if you could give me a few good pointers to improve my routine.

My days are, predictably, dominated by Japanese and English. I try to maximize my use of Japanese because of my need to use it at work, but there are two places where I use English as a matter of course. The first is with my kids; I only use English with them, and my wife and I speak English to each other whenever we're in earshot of them, in order to maximize their exposure to English. This is of course a direct trade-off between my Japanese and their English, but one I'll take to prevent them from speaking Engrish. The other place I use English regularly is of course at work when I need to do any of the various things a lawyer might need to do in English.

My language-learning day gets kicked off with my morning alarm; I awake to the sound of Japanese podcasts giving me today's news. Breakfast with the fam is largely in English, although my wife always speaks to the kids in Japanese and the nanny speaks to all of us only in Chinese, so that'll be floating around as well. My mother typically joins us for breakfast via video chat, so once in a while she and I will use some Italian when we don't want anyone else to understand.

Read more... Whenever I'm walking around (such as to, from, and in train stations) or standing around (such as on trains when I can't get a seat), I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts and to review vocabulary with iAnki. My first iAnki/podcast stint every day is from the time I leave my apartment until I sit down on the train to work.

Once seated on the train, the podcasts continue, but I typically break out my computer and try to get stuff done that often doesn't involve a foreign language—doing actual work, responding to emails, working on the book, or preparing these blog posts. When I arrive at the station at which I get off, I return to iAnki/podcasts until I get to my office.

Once in my office, I switch from listening to podcasts on my iPhone to listening to them on my laptop quietly in the background, and I keep them playing in my office the entire time I'm there. I also run a screensaver that shows selected vocab on my laptop screen while I work from the firm-supplied computer. You do end up glancing at it from time to time, and it's especially useful for getting extra exposure to things you've been struggling wtih.

Although I end up doing much of my work in English, I get exposed to plenty of Japanese over the course of the day. Once people figure out that my Japanese is passable, they typically stop using English with me whether via email or in person (and I of course encourage this by using Japanese as much as possible). I also regularly have to deal with Japanese-language documents, websites, etc.

All of these serve as founts for vocab to feed into iAnki and from there into my brain. As I come across words and phrases that I'm unfamiliar with over the course of a day, I quickly note them down in an Excel spreadsheet. Before I leave the office each day, I send the Excel sheet I made over the course of the day—which typically has somewhere between 15 to 30 items in it—to my personal email. When I get home each night, I look up all the words, get example sentences, and add them to iAnki.

Whenever I write Japanese, I get it corrected, review the mistakes, and make any new items for iAnki that might be necessary (by first adding them to that Excel spreadsheet). My secretary helps to correct any Japanese I put together for work, but I've been submitting everything else to Lang-8 for corrections—totally gratis. On Lang-8, native speakers of the language you are learning will correct your writing (and you're expected to reciprocate). Response times are impressive, and I've rarely waited more than a hour for corrections, and certainly never more than a day.

As for other languages I encounter at work, I treat them the same way I treat Japanese. As I'm part of the China Practice Group at my firm, I regularly get exposure to Chinese. I've also had to review documents in other languages, such as Spanish and French, and there have been phone calls to Latin America, so any words I've had to look up have ended up mixed in with my mostly Japanese iAnki reps.

Whenever I get the chance, I'll revert to podcats/iAnki, e.g., on a walk to the bank, which is maybe 5 or 10 minutes away from my office. And whenever I get a little bit of time in which I can't effectively do anything else—such as if I'm on hold on a phone—I'll quickly pull out my iPhone and do a few reviews on iAnki. Even if I only have 30 seconds, I can probably get through at least 10 reviews in that short a time period.

On the way home, it's back to iAnki/podcasts. I typically can't find a seat until maybe halfway through my ride home, so this is typically the period each day in which I spend the most time reviewing vocabulary. Once I do find a seat, I break out my laptop and do the same kinds of things I do on the morning ride, while continuing to listen to the podcasts. And, once again, the walk from the train to home is more iAnki/podcasts.

Once home, I add the new items from the Excel spreadsheet mentioned above to iAnki and see what I've managed to do over the course of the day. Typically, I'll get through somewhere between 300 and 500 reviews in a given day. I'll then make any changes necessary to the items in iAnki (such as adding example sentences to things I'm struggling with), as well as updating the vocab words in my screensaver.

It's also at night when I do thing like read news in other languages, although I don't spend as much time doing that as I'd like to.

And that's pretty much my routine as it currently stands.

I am looking to make a few changes, however. One thing I've been puzzling how to do efficiently is bring in languages other than Japanese in a more systematic manner. I think I'm going to do this by assigning a time percentage to each language and then listening to podcasts in each language accordingly. Ideally, I'll be able to find podcasts with transcripts and then review those as well, and then put the vocab into iAnki.

And, of course, I'm sure you might have some tips for me as to how I can improve this routine, so please drop them in the comments below!

"In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History"

According to this article, it looks like some of the brick-and-mortar educators out there are finally starting to get the picture on where education is going:

“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” ... said [William M. Habermehl, superintendent of the 500,000-student Orange County schools]. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”

I'll bet we can come up with a few "brilliant" online courses in French—and probably for a lot less than $200.

Correcting small children's language use

Steve Kaufmann and I have been going back and forth on the correcting of small children's language mistakes in the comments of this post on Steve's blog The Linguist on Language.

Here's the play-by-play. In my earlier post on the best age at which to learn a language, I wrote:

Kids often get corrected by the adults around them...

Steve replied:

[I]t is not my experience that infants are corrected in their use of language.

And I elaborated:

Although some people correct children explicitly (we do), the usual route is that they're corrected indirectly when the adult repeats the phrase in some way back to them. Think something like a child saying, "Eat apple!", and the adult saying back to them, "Oh, do you want to eat the apple?" It's more subtle than directly correcting, but it's correcting nonetheless.

And that sort of thing is absolutely helpful when learning a language. When I'm not quite getting my point across, then finally I manage to grudgingly do so and the person says the equivalent of, "Oh! So you mean that you want to eat the apple!", I've got the correct way of saying it right there for the taking.

After I posted this comment, I went back and read Steve's earlier comment where he wrote "[kids] hear it and they imitate it", and began to wonder if this was a to-MAY-to / to-MAH-to thing where I'm calling it "being corrected" and he's calling it "imitating".

In any case, Steve continues:

I simply do not buy it. You cannot possibly correct enough errors to make a difference. Children and most good learners correct most of their mistakes on their own. The brain gradually corrects itself as the patterns of the language become clearer.

OK, I'll draw a line in the sand in response to that. My position, after the jump.

Read more... While I generally agree with Steve on most things language learning, the utility of being corrected is one place where we definitely disagree. When Steve touched upon this issue earlier, he wrote:

The idea of perfect strangers correcting my use of language . . . strikes me as just rude, and certainly not helpful.

In contrast, perfect strangers correcting my use of language is always extremely welcome but sadly doesn't happen enough. I definitely find it helpful and I think the difference comes down to how the learner takes the corrections. I've got a post on just this issue in the oven, but for now I'll just flag this disagreement as I think it may add some color to our views on correcting children's language use.

Turning to Steve's comment, I would say that the brain will gradually correct itself as the patterns of the language become clearer, but why wait? My first-hand experience with my daughter has shown me that waiting doesn't pay off. A recent example of a mistake of my daughter's that I corrected was "buyed". I don't recall the exact phrase, but if she had said, "I buyed it", I'd've probably said, "No, you gotta say, 'I bought it'" and, used to the routine, she'd just repeat, "I bought it", without missing a beat and the conversation would continue. Typically she'll use the word again soon in the conversation, e.g.: "What'd you buy?" "I bought..." So, while the brain will gradually figure out the rule from passive exposure (listening), she just had two repetitions of active exposure (speaking), which I always find to be even better for getting something in your head; once you can use it correctly yourself, you've burned some pretty good paths in your brain to that piece of knowledge.

Sometimes I'll even explain the rule to her. When she was having trouble with "geese" being the plural of "goose", I told her that that word is "weird" because, instead of adding an "s", it changes to "geese". After telling her that, the next few times she encountered the word she paused to tell me the rule and then said it correctly. Now she just knows it. In fact, she now actively asks why something doesn't fit into the rules as she understands them (just today I was asked why "fish" doesn't become "fishes" in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish).

I think in any of the examples above it would have taken her a lot more time to get enough exposure to "bought", "geese", etc., to have figured the rules out on her own, although I don't doubt at all that she eventually would have.

The end result of all this is that instead of spending more time trying to learn these passively, she'll get them more quickly and move on to something else. And, although far short of a scientific control, there's actually some basis for comparison with my daughter. My wife, who speaks Japanese with my daughter, corrects her about as much as I do in English. However, we've had Chinese nannies and babysitters teaching her Chinese for most of the time she's been speaking, and they are the generally less stringent about corrections. While living in the States when her exposure to Japanese and Chinese was roughly equal, her Chinese mistakes would linger much longer than her Japanese mistakes. So, while she was moving ahead in terms of grammar and vocab in Japanese, she was progressing more slowly in Chinese. I think the amount and efficacy of the corrections she was receiving was one factor in this.

Based on the above, I obviously don't think that we can't "possibly correct enough errors to make a difference". Beyond the results we've seen, this is really no different than any other spaced-repetition system. If she makes the same mistakes over time, she gets a repetition of that piece of information. If the typical spaced-repetition system requires five or six repetitions to generally learn something, why would kids be any different?

In sum, I feel like I'd be doing her a huge disservice by not correcting her and just letting her "brain gradually correct itself as the patterns of the language become clearer". That'd happen, for sure, but I can't see how it'd be the most efficient way to go about it.

Best time to learn a foreign language: between birth and age seven?

Some scientists seem to think that that's what new research shows (hat tip: Steve Kaufmann at The Linguist on Language), but I'm not fully convinced because I don't think the scientists have ruled out that the cause of young children's language-learning ability is the kind of exposure they are getting rather than some innate age-linked ability.

Just to scratch the surface, let me point out some of the advantages of small children's learning methods.

Read more... Little kids get to learn solely or primarily through real-life exposure. Complete immersion in a language is not needed, but lots of exposure is. I can take my own four-year-old daughter as a case in point. She speaks English, Japanese, and Chinese, which we've pulled off mainly by me speaking only English with her, my Japanese wife speaking only Japanese with her, and hiring only Chinese-speaking caregivers who of course only speak Chinese with her. This exposure has gotten her to a point where she has been able to swing classes with native-speaking peers in all three languages. Could you imagine sitting down kids seven or under and going through a textbook with them and getting the same result? Ain't gonna happen, so kids are stuck (actually, I should probably say blessed) with learning through exposure.

The second thing is that the exposure is meaningful to them; if they want some juice, they'd better learn to ask for it. The same is not true of most of the textbook-based teaching methods that schools use. A lesson on buying shoes in Paris in a French textbook probably won't have any immediate applicability for you. Actual exposure will stick in your brain much better than constructed exposure, and actual exposure is all that kids under seven will typically get.

The new research also points to another benefit seems to be pretty clearly a method differentiation that benefits young kids:

Recall that Japanese "L" and "R" difficulty? Kuhl and scientists at Tokyo Denki University and the University of Minnesota helped develop a computer language program that pictures people speaking in "motherese," the slow exaggeration of sounds that parents use with babies.

Japanese college students who'd had little exposure to spoken English underwent 12 sessions listening to exaggerated "Ls" and "Rs" while watching the computerized instructor's face pronounce English words. Brain scans — a hair dryer-looking device called MEG, for magnetoencephalography — that measure millisecond-by-millisecond activity showed the students could better distinguish between those alien English sounds. And they pronounced them better, too, the team reported in the journal NeuroImage.

So someone saying a word slowly and clearly to you numerous times helps you get the pronunciation down. Shocking!

And the list goes on. Kids often get corrected by the adults around them, something that can only be done on a much more limited basis in a classroom setting. Kids aren't doing much else beyond learning languages, so they're not limited to 45 minutes a day of classroom exposure to the language. Etc., etc.

Now take people eight years old and up. How do they typically learn? The old-school classroom method. Actual exposure trumps textbook/lecture exposure any day, so it's hardly surprising that little kids are at such an advantage.

So, while there are certainly some biological aspects to small children's language-learning ability (small infants' ability to distinguish sounds, lost by the time they're one year old, comes to mind), I'd be reluctant to conclude that a large percentage of children's language-learning ability comes from some biological advantage when their learning methods' advantages seem so obvious.

Language-learning linkwrap 7/16/2009

Company Settles Case of Reviews It Faked: Fake reviews cost this company $300,000. I wonder if Rocket Languages is on New York's attorney general's to-do list.

Raising a Child in Two Worlds: Nicole Sprinkle seems to be a bit too worried about whether her biracial child will be better at English or Spanish. Wrong question. The question she should be asking is how can I make my daughter obtain native-level proficiency in both languages? Note also the "two worlds" hyperbole of the title. Something like "Raising a Child to Use Two Tools" would be a bit more realistic.

The Chinese Language, Ever Evolving: A debate almost as exciting as Coke versus Pepsi: simplified or traditional Chinese characters.

Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says: More fun with Chinese characters. Now, if the characters in your name aren't on a pre-approved list, you can't use them.

Great Videos in Any Language: Videos translated into more than 40 languages.

Language-learning linkwrap 4/4/2009

European Parliament split over language teaching: Next time any of my fellow yanks get themselves in a tizzy regarding the use of Spanish in the U.S., just remember: it could be worse; translation costs could take up 1% of our budget. Tangential money quote: "'[P]romoting the learning of […] an international "lingua franca",' such as English, should be a 'political priority'." As if there were another international lingua franca.

Young Americans going abroad to teach: When in economic peril, teach English abroad.

Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials: Say what? Babies can learn in their sleep! I wonder when and if that wears off...

On to Z! Quirky regional dictionary nears finish: For buffs of obscure Americanisms, this book's for you.

More languages, not fewer: Professor Erin Hippolyte "regularly see[s] statistics that link world language proficiency to salaries that are 8-20 percent higher." What exactly is a "world language" anyway? I wonder if it's a West Virginia regionalism for "foreign language". Someone should check a quirky regional dictionary. I am probably proficient in one or two "world languages", so where do I apply for the raise? When are Professor Hippolyte's office hours?

The Waver's Dilemma: A lot more information on how runners communicate in English than I gave you in my post on the runners' nod. For the record, I'm personally against waiving on the grounds that it makes you break form.

Using Skritter with kids

Earlier this week, I discovered the addictive Skritter, a tool for learning simplified Chinese characters and the tones of those characters.

As promised, on Thursday I got the chance to let my four-year-old daughter use Skritter. She naturally likes to play video games, so I asked her, "Do you want to play a Chinese character game?" Naturally the answer was yes.

So I sat her down in front of the screen. The first character, if I recall correctly, was wǒ 我 ("I"). Out of context, I'm not sure that she knew what it was, even though she heard it, so I gave her some quick example sentences so she definitely knew which wǒ it was. To make this easier for kids, it'd be great if you could replay the pronunciation and if it had example sentences in Chinese, or even if it at least could read the English meaning out loud. Then I could just show her which button to push and she could go at it all on her own.

Once she knew what she was writing, I showed her how to press the "show" button to reveal how to write the character. She knows very few characters at this point, so she had to show pretty much every one. A few she only showed once, and then, beaming, she said, "I showed it once and then just remembered it!" Bingo. I hope getting kids to learn remains this easy forever.

Once she knew what she was writing and how to figure out how to write it, I just let her go to town. For each new character, she'd ask me what the word was. Some, like rén 人, she knew, but for the most part I had to give her examples so she'd understand the meaning. But she happily sat there going through them. This certainly looks like it can be a great tool for her to learn Chinese characters.

Related: Skritter to learn Chinese characters

Skritter to learn Chinese characters

I just stumbled across Scritter today. Scritter lets you study Chinese character by writing them on the screen. And it's awesome. The implementation is very smooth. They ask you to write a character, and if you don't know it you can press a button to show it. It appears and then fades away before you can write it all. You can of course show it again, but short term memory should hold it there for you, and then you get some muscle memory action by writing it out there.

I started toying around with it to see what it was all about, and I'm addicted. Since I pretty much only type in Chinese, how to write characters is something that often slips my mind. This makes for a great refresher. And what's even more fun is that they cover tones as well. If I have one weakness in Chinese, that is it.

But what I'm most excited about is sitting my four-year-old daughter down in front of this thing. "Wanna play a Chinese game?" We'll see how that goes tomorrow hopefully. So far she's only started to recognize characters, not write them, but this seems to be a great device for getting kids to learn. My only complaint as far as children's learning goes is that the feedback that appears in the window—"Should hook", "Stroke backward", "Excellent!" and the like—are all text only. For a kid who's just learning to read, it'd be great if these were audible.

Son's first word is ねんね ("sleep") in Japanese

With my obvious interest in language learning, it's great fun to have kids and watch how they learn languages. If you've been reading this blog, you know that my four-year-old daughter has long been a part of my language-learning observations, and now my son had joined the speaking world as well.

We've got what is essentially a trilingual environment set up for the kids. I and my mom, who lives with us, speak only English to the kids. My wife speaks only Japanese with them and we make them speak Japanese with each other (which has so far consisted of our daughter speaking Japanese to our son). We use only Chinese-speaking babysitters or nannies and have them around enough that our daughter speaks Chinese as well as English and Japanese.

Our son's first official word is nenne ねんね in Japanese, which means "sleep". It's the an infantile form of neru 寝る ("to sleep"). We give if the official designation because he's clearly saying the word and linking it up to a meaning that he can use to communicate with.

More observations of a one-year-old learning to speak, after the jump.

Read more...He's said lots of things that happen to be words. Mama, baba 爸爸 ("father" in Chinese), dada, etc., but he didn't seem to use these consistently enough to indicate things as to really count as his first word. He'd at times call me "Mama", or just yell it out randomly, for instance. However, he clearly uses nenne to convey a single meaning.

However, his interpretation of nenne meaning is a little different. When he says nenne, he lays down flat on his belly on something soft, whether a pillow, a bed, or a person. If you say nenne to him while in the living room, he'll grab a pillow from the couch, lay it on the floor, lay down on top of it and say "Nenne!" He'll use it when he lays down to go to sleep, etc.

There was one earlier contender for his first word, and that was ge 个 in Chinese. He'd point at things and say, "Ge!" We speculated that he got that from the ge in zhège 这个 ("this") nàge 那个 ("that"), which he heard from the babysitters. However, since the ge was only really part of the word, we couldn't really count that as his first word.

He's also got a few other close contenders. When an airplane flies overhead, he says, "Woooo!" in imitation of the noise it makes. When a car drives by, he says "Vroom!", again in imitation of the noise it makes, which happened to be among my daughters first words as well.

One interesting thing is that he got basic intonation down before he ever said a word. He could long ask a question by pointing and saying some syllable with a rising intonation to make a tone. He would give a warning when something was amiss, like a door being open that we usually kept shut, with a sharp, high tone. He's use a fall tone to indicate comfort or the like.

Gestures came in before words as well. That's a well-known phenomena; children whose parents use sign language end up learning to communicate with that long before their peers learn to speak. Pointing, nodding his head, shaking his head, clapping after doing something good, tilting his head to the side to indicate inquisitiveness, etc., are all among the gestures he learned early on.

Language-learning linkwrap 2/17/09

On the Spot - Vincent of Street-Smart Language Learning: Yours truly was interviewed as part of Aspiring Polyglot's "On the Spot" interview series with language learners.

Sound patterns boost language learning - study: What would otherwise seem to be useless gibberish actually helps you learn a language.

开心宝贝_欢语 (in Chinese): If you're looking for music and stories for your kids in Chinese, this is the place to go, complete with links to lots of MP3s.

Take an eduFire Classe for Charity: While this isn't exactly a language-learning effort seeking to benefit the public good (see my earlier post Pro bono language teaching), it is education for the public good.

Different language learning methods serve various needs: Does RosettaStone have the best PR people ever, or is it just me? In an article noting how great immersion is, Rosetta Stone gets a nice blurb but no one notes how far it is from immersion. And don't even get me started on what Mark Frobose, author and founder of Macmillan Audio's foreign language audio line, says: audio CDs or downloads are "the single best way to learn a language". Seriously? So next time you have a choice between immersing yourself in a foreign country and listening to some CDs, go with the CDs! Riiiight.

Early Launch for Language: Money quote: "Children learn inductively, by example and by interacting with the environment around them, and adults tend to learn analytically and deductively." They treat this as a conclusion, but it's really just an observation. Ponder.

Learn how not to trip over foreign tongues: An article listing out numerous language-learning methods. Your mileage may vary.

Saturday Chinese school for my daughter (and me)

To get back to the theme of ethnic experiences in the U.S. that I touched on earlier, many of you in the U.S. or Canada may remember from your childhood that you, if you're Asian, or your Asian friends always had to go to school on Saturday. While the rest of us were getting our brains rotted out by Saturday morning cartoons, Asian kids' parents forced them to do more school, as if any kid thought five days wasn't already enough. Those forced to go never seemed very happy about it, and often rebelled and stopped going when they got old enough to pull it off. As much as these kids may have been unhappy during classes, those who actually ended up sticking with it ended up (hopefully) thanking their parents, because they were probably pretty darn good at the languages that those classes were teaching them.

My daughter, age four, just kicked off her experience with this Asian-American tradition with Saturday Chinese school (yes, that is despite her Japanese mother and her Italian-American father). We recently discovered that there's one of these schools about ten minutes from our house and, although we missed the first semester, we were eager to get her started and finally got around to it today. While she's had Chinese nannies and babysitters for most of the time that she's been speaking, we found that she was progressing a lot more in English (she goes to English nursery school every day, karate once a week, and dance occasionally) and Japanese (she goes to Japanese Kumon classes twice a week and ballet once a week) than in China, whereas Chinese was originally her best language (she started speaking while we were in China).

As it turns out, her Chinese classes here are as much of a language experience for her as they are for my wife and me.

Read more...One of Felicia's babysitters had called the school this week to see what we needed to do to get her enrolled, as their online registration wasn't working. He basically said just go there at 9AM on Saturday to take care of whatever paperwork there was, and she should be set for class at 10:45AM.

We show up at the middle school where the classes are held to see a parking lot full of Chinese people (they were probably mostly or at least partially Chinese-American, but let's just keep it simple and call them "Chinese"). We then go into the cafeteria, which was something of a base for the classes and a gathering places for pretty much every one related to a kid attending any of the classes, and this too was chock full of Chinese people with an occasional white person (case in point) floating around. In the typical entrepreneurial Chinese style (that somehow, amazingly, Mao managed to suppress for a few decades last century), one person set up a store of various snacks and drinks on one table, looking like they had just bought bulk and driven it straight over here. And some of the scenes there were straight out of a movie like The Joy Luck Club, such as the cafeteria table claimed for a game of mah-jong by a group of grandparents, with grandchildren running around at their feet.

We wandered around the cafeteria for a bit and weren't sure who was in charge until someone started setting up a printer and a scanner at a desk near what I suppose was supposed to be the front of the cafeteria. So we walked up to them to inquire about what we needed to do.

We thought there might be a little issue about our daughter starting in the middle of the year, so my wife, who thinks I'm a better negotiator, had me do the talking. Although I'm pretty sure they all speak English just fine, I opted to use Chinese because of a concern about the classes. There's a Chinese class for Chinese speakers, like my daughter, and another for Chinese learners, i.e., English speakers who are starting to learn Chinese. I was concerned that they'd see my white face and think, "Oh, here's another one for the foreigner's class," and so I hoped to evade that discussion by going at them in Chinese. Doing that, they would assume that my Japanese wife is Chinese and then just put my daughter in the class that promises better language exposure by not using English (although the teacher did keep saying "sticker" in English while speaking Chinese in lieu of the perfectly available Chinese word tiēzhǐ). Sure enough, the mid-year start date was raised as an issue. We weren't concerned about my wife speaking up either, because her accent's good enough that she falls within a range that sounds Chinese, and Chinese people are always generically asking, "So you're from Southern China?" when they hear her talk.

Their first answer was, "No, we're full,", but one thing I found to be true in China was that, if someone initially said no to you, persistence could turn that into a yes, and I intended to see if the same thing worked here. The rational analysis sometimes seemed to be, "Is it less of a hassle to just say yes to this guy or to keep saying no?" If they say no and you just walk away, that's a piece of cake for them, but if you make a nag of yourself suddenly it becomes easier to just let you do whatever you want. (This is something I discovered as a kid worked with my parents too, but I'd rather my kids come up with this idea.) For instance, when I was studying Chinese in Beijing, the placement test put me a level or two below the top of maybe a dozen levels, but I wanted to be in the highest level possible because of how rapidly you can learn when you're immersed. When I was first told no, I kept bugging the person who told me no and several other people until I finally got bumped up, clearly above what the test results had gotten me. I'm not sure if this works in all bureaucracies in China (unfortunately, in some, a wad of cash will work much better), but it usually worth a shot.

The first answer we got from the Chinese administrator was, "Sorry, it's the middle of the year, we're full." So I said that we had called earlier this week and they said to show up at 9AM and we should be able to take care of everything. He asked who we spoke to and, since the babysitter called, I had no idea. I did know, however, that it was "the guy whose name and number were on the website", and I told him so. Apparently he had no idea who that was. After effectively repeating this interchange a few times, he finally gave in. I think he might have thought that the person our babysitter had spoken was someone important that was higher up in the administration, so he was weighing potentially needing to deal with that guy or just letting us sign up. He went for the signing up.

So we take care of the paperwork and whatnot and we're sitting in this cafeteria full of Chinese people. And then my son reminded me what good language-learning tools one-year-old kids can be; my son kept going up to people and pointing at them, and this would repeatedly result in them calling him cute and start talking with us.

My wife eventually left to run some errands, leaving me to escort our daughter to class. After dropping her off and again getting a chance to converse in Chinese - this time with the teacher, I was left alone. There happened to be free Chinese-langauge newspapers there so I picked one up and started reading it. It appears that the de facto standard Chinese in the U.S. uses traditional characters, and there were a few that were driving me nuts because I was sure I knew them as simplified characters but the traditional versions weren't ringing any bells. In any case, one of the articles I read was criticizing China's stimulus plan, saying it only helped bureaucrats' favored companies, while the U.S. stimulus plan was aimed at the average person. A pretty interesting read, but it was a shame I didn't have my dictionary with me because now I have to go back and reread it to find all the words I didn't know, if I even end up bothering to do so.

Today also happened to be the day of what they called "parent-teacher conferences", but were less the one-on-one meeting that that term conjures up than the teacher giving an update to all the parents at once. So I got to sit through my first such meeting in Chinese today, and I was surprised at how easily I was able to follow what she was saying. There were only two words I didn't get, but since they are things that the kids will be doing this upcoming semester (I got that much), I'll probably be learning the words soon enough.

So now we have a chance every Saturday to hang out in a hall full of Chinese speakers, and as my daughter makes friends and we meet people there, I'm sure we'll be putting our Chinese to great use. This is just one example of the many creative ways that you can find people to chat with, if not outright native-speaker tutors, and also get other kinds of exposure to your target language in less-than-obvous places far from the language zone. If you had asked me where I could find hundreds of Chinese people gathered together every Saturday in the New Jersey burbs just a month ago, I'm sure I would have had no idea. But now that I have found just that, it's definitely a great language-learning opportunity for all members of my family - and not only those for whom we're paying tuition.

Teaching my daughter how to say "th"

Until recently, my four-year-old daughter was unable to say "th" consistently. She'd sound right on "the", but "three" would be "free", "they" would be "dey", and "brother" would be "brudder".

For all language issues, we decided that we would teach our daughter normal language right from the get-go, and we would correct anything she got wrong right away. So we avoid "baby words" like "doggie", "go bye-bye", etc., and have just used standard terms, and whenever she makes a mistake we correct her and have her repeat the corrected form. By doing this consistently, we gradually remove incorrect patterns from her speech. We've applied this in both English and Japanese and in Chinese to a lesser extent due to the nanny not being as diligent as we are about it. When she is being uncooperative and won't repeat after us, we simply repeat it for her to hear and then let it go. We're generally not very forceful about demanding her cooperation, but she is quite used to it and generally cooperative.

Read more...Her pronunciation of "th" has been one issue that has been particularly intractable. Initially, when we tried to get her to say "three" instead of "free", I showed her that the tongue goes against the bottom of the teeth to pronounce the "th". She tried, but kept moving her lip up and making the "f" sound. After a few rounds of this, I tried physically holding her lip down so she couldn't move it up to make the "f". Doing this, she put her tongue on the bottom of her teeth and made a very spit-filled "th". I encouraged her and she did it a few more times, and even managed to get it without me holding down her lip, but ultimately went back to an "f" before not wanting to try anymore.

One time after that, as we were talking, she said "they" and then, without any prompting on my part, stopped and started repeating it, trying to get the "th" sound down. When I said it wasn't quite right, she herself held her lip down to get the "th" out, and she pulled it off. This kind of pattern played out several times. Over time, she's gotten out of the habit of needing to hold her lip down and now can say "th" perfectly.

After she got the "th" sound down, she pointed out to me that "You don't need to put your tongue on the bottom of your teeth to say 'th'", and she proceeded to make the sound by putting her tongue on the back of her front teeth. That one she figured out all on her own, but I think she was led to it by watching us say "th" words without being able to see the tongue.

However, the "th" issues are not over. She has many "th" words already programmed in as having an "f" or a "d" sound instead. Even for some words that we've practiced pronunciation on, she'll sometimes slip back into her previous pronunciation. The difference now is that, when alerted to the fact that something is a "th", she can typically pronounce them without trouble.

Using word frequency to teach writing to kids

The other day when I was looking at the word frequency lists that I mentioned in this post, my 4-year-old daughter came up to me and wanted to write, so she started writing down random words that were on my computer screen. When I looked at her paper, she had written "Genius Love Jazz Swing", which were from the children's music album Genius + Love: Jazz & Swing for Kids, one among the many that we have around here.

Having the word frequency list up in front of me and an eager student beside me, I put two and two together and wrote down a bunch of words for her to practice writing that were high in frequency rather than what just happened to be on my screen. A quick glance at one of the lists showed me that pronouns, the verb "to be", and possessives make up a lot at the top of the list, so I wrote "I am, you are, he is," etc., and "my cat, your cat, his cat," etc., and she gleefully ("glee" being a word she recently learned from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) practiced writing out the words I wrote for her.

And how quickly kids get that stuff down. Reading some books with her today, I pointed out words that she had practiced writing that day and, before reading them, I asked her what they were. While she wasn't running 100% by any means, she certainly still recalled a bunch of them. One thing I noticed was that she seemed to be able to better recall items near the top of the lists I wrote out for her. Although those words seem to be a bit more common, I'm curious as to whether there's something to being able to better recall items at the beginning of something that you studied compared to those closer to the end.

Related: Word lists based on frequency of use

Multilingual child

This post I wrote back in 2006 when my wife and I were talking about starting a blog on language learning for children. At the time, we were living in China with my daughter, who was just starting to speak, and a Chinese nanny. I think I intended to write more for the post, but since I've let it sit for so long, I can't recall where I was taking it. In any case, I'm posting it today, February 17, 2009, but keeping it's original date.

In the interest of full disclosure, we're not exactly the typical in terms of languages. In rough order of ability, Akiko speaks six (Japanese, English, Chinese, French, German, and Spanish) and I speak eight (English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German). Many say we both must be some kind of language geniuses, but I always argue against this assessment. What we had was not some blessed DNA, but rather a desire to learn languages and opportunities to do so which we took full advantage of. So while we have no qualifications in linguistics or the like whatsoever, we do know a thing or two about learning languages.

Our plan for our daughter and any other children that come along is for them to be fluent in multiple languages. English is an obvious first choice; even ignoring the fact that they'll be living in the States while they grow up and likely living there beyond that, English is of course the global language. And, of course, they'll need it to communicate with those in our family who haven't spent quite as much time learning other languages. Japanese is another no-brainer; they'll need it to communicate with the Japanese side of our family. Beyond these, we're incorporating two more languages: Chinese and Spanish. China's economic rise gives the Chinese language more and more import, and this will continue long into our children's lifetime. Spanish has become the unofficial second language of the United States and speaking it will be an advantage in a wide range of professions in the States.

There's also some strategy here if they want to branch out to other languages. Picking up another Germanic language—German, Dutch, Nordic languages, etc.—will be made at least a little bit easier by knowing English. Learning the other Romance languages—Italian, Portuguese, French, etc.—is much easier when you already know one. Learning Chinese—i.e., Mandarin—makes it easier to learn any of the other Chinese "dialects" (I put that in quotes because the they're usually as different as or even more different than the Romance languages which for some reason are not considered "dialects" of Latin). And learning Japanese can help with Korean.

If any of our kids branch out into any other language groups—Slavic languages like Russian, Semitic languages like Arabic, etc.—they won't get as much help from the languages they already know but they should already have the "hardware" for new languages. The hardware/software analogy is one I used often when describing my take on learning languages. With each new languages you learn, you're developing your language-learning facilities, i.e., the hardware. Grammatical rules, vocabulary, writing systems, accents, etc., are all just the software. The more languages, you learn, the better you develop your "hardware" and the more easily you can "install software". So if the language hardware is already top of the line, any languages they decide to take on should be made easier.

Of our four languages, we've got no convenient way to teach her Spanish at this point, so that's being held off on until we get back to the States and have some money to put towards it.

Our basic plan is creating the best environment for learning the language. We've hired a Chinese nanny to care for our daughter this year. She takes her our and she plays with all the Chinese kids in the neighborhood. Akiko is with her plenty as well, so Japanese is covered. I'm often busy at work and don't get to see her as much, so I always make a point of just running my mouth off in English when I'm with her, reading books to her, and simply teaching her what things are called.

So perhaps it's unsurprising that right now Chinese is her strongest language. It's generally her language of first choice when she proactively speaks, although it depends on which language she used to learn the word. For example, she learned to jump on the bed with me, so "jump" is in English. Japanese would be the next strongest, and English the least. However, in all of the languages she understands much of the same things when we say them, even if she doesn't proactively say them herself.

Several examples have already emerged of her knowing the words in multiple languages. "Dog" is one example. She recognizes and can say it in English, Japanese (wanwan), and Chinese (gǒu). She first learned it in Japanese, and that continues to be the most common to come out of her mouth, but Chinese has come more and more often as she's used gǒu with the nanny. She generally will only say "dog" when I first use it, but then she knows to use that instead of the other two. "Eat" is another example.