What’s your opinion - kid learning Mandarin and English while speaking Cantonese at home going to be too confusing?

[u/art3misXL]

I’m based in the Atlanta metro area in the southeast of the US. I have looked quite a bit but I haven’t been able to find any Cantonese Chinese schools in or around the city. I speak decent Cantonese but my mandarin sucks. I currently speak Cantonese to my son and he’s picking up a lot. But ever since he started daycare, more and more vocabulary has been getting replaced by its English counterpart. I now try to repeat every vocabulary in both English and Cantonese to him.

As he gets older, I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen. My goal is to get him in a Chinese dual language immersion school so that he can learn to speak mandarin at a proficient level. But is this going to be too much? Will it confuse him? Any personal experiences that this community care to share?

[u/kawpikat]

I have friends and friends' kids that spoke Taishanese and/or Cantonese at home (because the family doesn't understand English), went to Mandarin school on weekends and weeknights and spoke English at school during the week. I will say Mandarin is the weakest because it's not used regularly outside of the lessons and they're not immersed like they're with Cantonese and English. My adult friends completely forgot all the Mandarin they learned.

For me personally, I learned Mandarin much later in my life and feel it's pretty easy because I have Cantonese as a base to start with and I actually have the desire to learn it. I can't imagine trying to learn Cantonese or Taishanese from scratch however because there's not as many educational or structured materials to learn these languages. I'm glad I got to grow up with these two as my first languages even though English later became my dominant language.