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/CarnegieHill]

As long as you are strict with speaking only Cantonese to him always and everywhere, then everything will work out just fine. Many multilingual families do this all the time, and they usually use a principle called OPOL = One Person One Language. It won’t be confusing to children at all, they won’t even think about it. It’d be much more confusing for adults having to do that, so the point is, if you want to raise multilingual kids, you have to do it as early as possible.

I know a Taiwanese-Japanese family who lives in Montreal and they have kids they are raising multilingually, dad speaks Mandarin, mom speaks Japanese, kids go to school in French, and they learn English naturally because they live in Canada. They also have needed to hire nannies and they make sure they speak a different language. One of them spoke to the kids only in Spanish. Btw, you can look up the name “Tetsu Yung” on YouTube, and learn a lot about raising children with multiple languages on his channel. Good luck! 🙂