| my hubby tries to speak in chinese to our kids, and their grandparents here ONLY speak cantonese. however, the language my kids are more comfortable with is English.
this is why we've put him into a cantonese kindie. so that he's as comfortable with cantonese as he is with english.
language develops like this:
recognition/understanding of basic commands
recognition/understanding of more complex commands
recognition of certain "nouns" and "verbs", usually only one word or so
recognition of more complex nouns & verbs
vocalisation of certain "nouns" and "verbs" (ie. cat, dog, table, tv, jump, dance, etc)
vocalisation of very short sentences (ie. i hungry, i sleepy, me happy, etc.)
vocalisation of more complex sentences with more grammatically correct structure. (ie. I am very hungry. I want to drink milk.)
every child develops at a different pace and like i said before, those with more than one language to contend with usually take longer in the first few steps.
my son can now translate for me from chinese into english, but still refuses to speak much chinese. i'm not too worried as i know that the understanding is there. (the other day, my m-i-l, told my son that if he finished his veggies, she would give him some $ so that he could buy a toy car. i asked him what she'd said, and he could translate it for me.)  |