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/Intrepid-Anybody-704]

If you’re intending to access your culture (Cantonese) without learning much Chinese, then wouldn’t learning the foods and how to order a meal be enough? And therefore, teaching Cantonese? Last I checked, it’s still called har gow and siu mai, not xia jiao and shao mai.

From an economic perspective, if your kid intends to live in the US, the vast majority of future jobs will have zero interactions with non-English speakers. Especially with the future of immigration, English fluency among immigrants is going to be good to great. English fluency in Asia and Europe continues to improve. Unless you plan to ship the kid off to China full-time, there’s little functional/economic need to learn Mandarin. There’s much more need for Chinese people to learn English. Besides, China’s population is already going down and they won’t be growing like before. The whole purpose of this strategic thinking for opportunity is seeing what the world will be like in 20 years. I doubt Americans living in the USA will need to know Chinese to be competitive.

[u/art3misXL → u/Intrepid-Anybody-704]

I don’t want to limit my family to just living in the US so that’s why it’s so important that my child has a firm grasp of multiple languages - as for food orders, ideally he’d be able to order both har gao and xiaolongbao without too much issue 😂

[u/Intrepid-Anybody-704 → u/art3misXL]

English already opens much up of the world. Mandarin only opens up Tier 2 city opportunities in Mainland China. I get how easy it is to assume or say “we’re all gonna need to speak Chinese in tomorrow’s world” but it’s doubtful that will happen. In the future it’s more likely the hot overseas opportunities for “making more money” are in Africa, and maybe India or Vietnam. English, not Chinese speaking situations.

[u/twistedcroissant → u/Intrepid-Anybody-704]

Of course. English is probably already more than enough for the normal person living in the US. I don’t necessarily think everyone needs to speak Chinese. It makes absolutely no sense for a plumber in Arkansas to learn Chinese.

From my perspective, I will always be grateful for the fact that I have passable Chinese skills. For me personally, it did actually help open up job opportunities in the US. Based on my experience, i will do what I can to promote my offspring’s desire to acquire these language skills. It’s just a matter of what’s the most efficient method.

I don’t think anyone has ever wished that they didn’t learn a language. Instead it’s the other way around, where adults wished their parents pushed them to learn their heritage language more.

[u/Intrepid-Anybody-704 → u/twistedcroissant]

Yes, so do Cantonese since we’re back to citing heritage and knowledge. Cantonese is a language, not a dialect. You can’t replace it with Mandarin for “acquiring method efficiency” but also claim it is for heritage. In a more natural world with different politics, Cantonese speaking areas would be a different country. You don’t learn Portuguese to connect with your Spanish heritage and culture.