My youngest (adopted) daughter arrived in America with no English and a different alphabet. One thing that Arizona does right is Enough immersion.
At school she was in total language isolation. Her incentive to learn English was high. 1st year, I did her homework with her helping. 2nd year, she did it with me …
My youngest (adopted) daughter arrived in America with no English and a different alphabet. One thing that Arizona does right is Enough immersion.
At school she was in total language isolation. Her incentive to learn English was high. 1st year, I did her homework with her helping. 2nd year, she did it with me helping. 3rd year, I inspected.
The Spanish speaking kids took much longer because there are so many Spanish speakers here. No social isolation.
Then there is parental help in other ways. One of my daughters was having difficulty learning multiplication tables. Note from teacher. The days of the Commodore 64. I wrote a program that quizzed her and gave a happy/neutral/sad face result. Made it fun. In a few days, note from teacher, she has advanced beyond the rest of the class, what did you do? Does the child have a parent who can and will help with the learning process.
For my youngest daughter's science fair project she had asked me about the seasonal sunlight hours difference in Arizona and Thailand. I had her do, with guidance from me, a lat/lon calculation using a home made sextant to shoot the North Star for true North elevation angle and the shortest shadow length for true noon vs WWV time for distance into the time zone. The novelty may have been a factor, but she got first place. What I noticed was that the kids with good projects had dads standing with them checking out the dads of the other kids with good projects. Engineers from Honeywell, Intel, Motorola most likely it seemed. Again, parents capable and who will take the time to help.
How does a kid with a Spanish speaking single mom with two jobs compete with that?
None of that is about tooting my own horn. It's about the advantage of having educated parents with time and inclination to provide help and guidance.
As an aside, by the time my multiplication table daughter made it to HS she was a paid tutor. In business school she had her own accounting/tax prep business so when she earned her degree in Accountancy, she already had the required experience to test and obtain her CPA. Now a partner in an accounting firm. She did it, I'm not taking credit. But ask, how much difference in what she came home to made.
My first partner was a Tejano and taught ESL to a mixture of Latino and Asian kids from several language groups. He spoke Spanish with the Latino kids a lot.
One day he told me that the Asian kids were learning both English and Spanish. They didn't know that they were supposed to be learning only English. "Colors." ¡Si! ¡Colores!
My second was Malaysian Chinese. He spoke Cantonese at home. In kindergarten (!) the kids began learning
* Mandarin
* Malay
* English
at the same time. And they thought nothing of it. Kindergarten.
When we went to Malaysia, whose language he had not spoken in many years, he talked to the taxi driver in Malay like a native speaker. He spoke six languages, four of them Chinese dialects (Hakka and Hokkien were the others; his mother was Hakka) and thought nothing of it.
We have a number of Vietnamese friends. Their children it to the 3rd generation the children all speak accented English because they learn Vietnamese first.
My wife was at a friend's house a couple of days ago. She remarked that's their dog understood Vietnamese but not English. "What language did you speak at home?"
Thai is a tonal language, and my damaged ears have difficulty with that. I once had "market That" ability and knew enough of the alphabet to make menu decisions and navigate. I always had the "that's what I said" "no you didn't" problem. If you can't hear the nuisance, you can't speak it. Mispronunciations in Thai can be beyond embarrassing, they could get you in a fight.
My grandfather came to America from Germany when he was 12. He spoke with a German accent all his life but I never heard him speak a word of German. I am fluent, from high school. My teacher was later called the best German teacher in the country.
The Chinese railroad workers who came to the USA in the 1840s were from Toisan province. Ten generations later they still speak Toisan at home.
My wife's accent will never go away, but there is never a day that I don't hear Thai on the TV or her talking on the phone with friends. In her case it is constantly reenforced.
I can do Vietnamese tones perfectly, I can even do both northern and southern "dialects." And my grasp of the idiom is good; where most westerners can only point at a sandwich and hold up a finger, I use the counting-word ô for sandwich (same word as for "umbrella") that shows I actually know idiomatic Vietnamese. Between tones and idiom, people think I am fluent, which I am not.
Today, living here 13 years, today I learned the word for "wrong." I am far from fluent.
But I can't speak fast. In any language, unless I am near passing out from barbituates or benzos, then I speak like an auctioneer. And Vietnamese is spoken very fast, like most tonal languages.
There was a phrase in the book I learned from that I could hear on the recordings, three difficult tones in a row, VERY fast. I was finally able to do it after the tones were solid. "There will be a big storm."
I got Cantonese tones in six weeks, one day I realized they were like G C E in music and after that I had no more trouble. Vietnamese tones took me a year to get right and several more to make them second-nature. Now they're easy.
I live in the south but I use the Hanoi dialect because it makes me sound more educated. But I doubt I will ever understand the spoken language very well.
I know four words spelled cu with different tones.
* old (things, not people)
* counting-word for underground vegetables (onion, etc)
* owl
* penis
Nobody smirks if I say onion or garlic, nobody thinks it sounds like penis. The tones are too fundamental for that.
My Vietnamese was very limited. There were plenty of Vietnamese people with functional English around US installations.
When not in convoy on the road between LZ Baldy and FSB Ross two young boys came running out of a field carrying mortar rounds. The big boy an 81mm, the little boy a 60mm. They were supposed to get 500 piasters for each round. The Marine at the fire base always shorted them. I'd ask if they had more. They always said no, but they became a regular feature of that ride while I was in that operations area. Impressive that the kids picked up the English they needed so quickly. Smart, they correctly assumed that since they were not carrying rifles, we would not shoot them, and we would know what they were up to. They were in more danger of getting caught by the VC who's cashe they were robbing than from us. They probably knew that too. They always came out where people were sparse.
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!
There are so many influences.
My youngest (adopted) daughter arrived in America with no English and a different alphabet. One thing that Arizona does right is Enough immersion.
At school she was in total language isolation. Her incentive to learn English was high. 1st year, I did her homework with her helping. 2nd year, she did it with me helping. 3rd year, I inspected.
The Spanish speaking kids took much longer because there are so many Spanish speakers here. No social isolation.
Then there is parental help in other ways. One of my daughters was having difficulty learning multiplication tables. Note from teacher. The days of the Commodore 64. I wrote a program that quizzed her and gave a happy/neutral/sad face result. Made it fun. In a few days, note from teacher, she has advanced beyond the rest of the class, what did you do? Does the child have a parent who can and will help with the learning process.
For my youngest daughter's science fair project she had asked me about the seasonal sunlight hours difference in Arizona and Thailand. I had her do, with guidance from me, a lat/lon calculation using a home made sextant to shoot the North Star for true North elevation angle and the shortest shadow length for true noon vs WWV time for distance into the time zone. The novelty may have been a factor, but she got first place. What I noticed was that the kids with good projects had dads standing with them checking out the dads of the other kids with good projects. Engineers from Honeywell, Intel, Motorola most likely it seemed. Again, parents capable and who will take the time to help.
How does a kid with a Spanish speaking single mom with two jobs compete with that?
None of that is about tooting my own horn. It's about the advantage of having educated parents with time and inclination to provide help and guidance.
As an aside, by the time my multiplication table daughter made it to HS she was a paid tutor. In business school she had her own accounting/tax prep business so when she earned her degree in Accountancy, she already had the required experience to test and obtain her CPA. Now a partner in an accounting firm. She did it, I'm not taking credit. But ask, how much difference in what she came home to made.
Very cool. Well done.
My first partner was a Tejano and taught ESL to a mixture of Latino and Asian kids from several language groups. He spoke Spanish with the Latino kids a lot.
One day he told me that the Asian kids were learning both English and Spanish. They didn't know that they were supposed to be learning only English. "Colors." ¡Si! ¡Colores!
My second was Malaysian Chinese. He spoke Cantonese at home. In kindergarten (!) the kids began learning
* Mandarin
* Malay
* English
at the same time. And they thought nothing of it. Kindergarten.
When we went to Malaysia, whose language he had not spoken in many years, he talked to the taxi driver in Malay like a native speaker. He spoke six languages, four of them Chinese dialects (Hakka and Hokkien were the others; his mother was Hakka) and thought nothing of it.
We have a number of Vietnamese friends. Their children it to the 3rd generation the children all speak accented English because they learn Vietnamese first.
My wife was at a friend's house a couple of days ago. She remarked that's their dog understood Vietnamese but not English. "What language did you speak at home?"
Thai is a tonal language, and my damaged ears have difficulty with that. I once had "market That" ability and knew enough of the alphabet to make menu decisions and navigate. I always had the "that's what I said" "no you didn't" problem. If you can't hear the nuisance, you can't speak it. Mispronunciations in Thai can be beyond embarrassing, they could get you in a fight.
My grandfather came to America from Germany when he was 12. He spoke with a German accent all his life but I never heard him speak a word of German. I am fluent, from high school. My teacher was later called the best German teacher in the country.
The Chinese railroad workers who came to the USA in the 1840s were from Toisan province. Ten generations later they still speak Toisan at home.
My wife's accent will never go away, but there is never a day that I don't hear Thai on the TV or her talking on the phone with friends. In her case it is constantly reenforced.
I can do Vietnamese tones perfectly, I can even do both northern and southern "dialects." And my grasp of the idiom is good; where most westerners can only point at a sandwich and hold up a finger, I use the counting-word ô for sandwich (same word as for "umbrella") that shows I actually know idiomatic Vietnamese. Between tones and idiom, people think I am fluent, which I am not.
Today, living here 13 years, today I learned the word for "wrong." I am far from fluent.
But I can't speak fast. In any language, unless I am near passing out from barbituates or benzos, then I speak like an auctioneer. And Vietnamese is spoken very fast, like most tonal languages.
There was a phrase in the book I learned from that I could hear on the recordings, three difficult tones in a row, VERY fast. I was finally able to do it after the tones were solid. "There will be a big storm."
I got Cantonese tones in six weeks, one day I realized they were like G C E in music and after that I had no more trouble. Vietnamese tones took me a year to get right and several more to make them second-nature. Now they're easy.
I live in the south but I use the Hanoi dialect because it makes me sound more educated. But I doubt I will ever understand the spoken language very well.
I know four words spelled cu with different tones.
* old (things, not people)
* counting-word for underground vegetables (onion, etc)
* owl
* penis
Nobody smirks if I say onion or garlic, nobody thinks it sounds like penis. The tones are too fundamental for that.
My Vietnamese was very limited. There were plenty of Vietnamese people with functional English around US installations.
When not in convoy on the road between LZ Baldy and FSB Ross two young boys came running out of a field carrying mortar rounds. The big boy an 81mm, the little boy a 60mm. They were supposed to get 500 piasters for each round. The Marine at the fire base always shorted them. I'd ask if they had more. They always said no, but they became a regular feature of that ride while I was in that operations area. Impressive that the kids picked up the English they needed so quickly. Smart, they correctly assumed that since they were not carrying rifles, we would not shoot them, and we would know what they were up to. They were in more danger of getting caught by the VC who's cashe they were robbing than from us. They probably knew that too. They always came out where people were sparse.
The grammar is ridiculously simple. Subject, verb, object. “Want eat what.” “Want eat noodle.” Pronunciation is an obstacle but I’m past it. But my hearing isn’t great either and spoken Vietnamese is just too fast for me. Half the time I’m dumbfounded it turns out that every word I didn’t understand is in my vocabulary.
I had a few students whose English was astonishingly fluent. Idiomatic, clear American regional accent, never been outside Vietnam.
I experienced the same in Japan. American night at a hotel, two stupefyingly beautiful hostesses. I commented to one that her (American) English was perfectly unaccented Midwestern and asked how long she had lived in America. "Oh, you flatter me. I have never been outside of Japan and learned entirely in a university" Holy wow!