On Being Bilingual

Just this week, a friend shared this article on Google Reader, resparking thoughts on raising our child bilingually.

Being bilingual myself (although my Korean could use a LOT of work), I have always valued this trait. It’s helped me to understand (although not actually speak) other languages faster than average (or so I believe), having internalized the concept of grammar, context, and situational conjugation differences in languages and cultures, not to mention untranslatable colloquialisms, since early on.

Take a simple question like, “Do you feel up to going to the library, or do you feel like going home?” which is, almost verbatim, a question I overheard my second grade teacher asking my fellow student when she was feeling sick in class one day. To someone who was trying to literally translating the sentence, as I was in my first year of having immigrated to the US, that was a completely incomprehensible sentence to me.

These were the thoughts going through my head: “feel” means “to perceive by touching”. “Up” is the direction opposite to “down”, the direction of the sky above my head. “Like” means “enjoy” or something less than “love”. So the teacher’s question made no sense to me. What did the question have to do with the fact that the student looked like they were sick? Within a matter of months, if not weeks, of the incident, the secondary meanings and the combined phrases became second nature to me, and taught me a variety of flexible linguistic guidelines, the most important of which was that I needed to be open to new guidelines that I hadn’t yet encountered.

Just on Sunday, Seppo’s lifelong friend E and his lovely wife J were in town from the east coast and dropped by to hang out with us and a couple of other friends. E’s family is fluent in French and J also speaks a fair amount of French, so they are raising their two kids bilingually, by having E speak at home exclusively in French and having J speak a combination of English and French.

I would love to do this, except with Korean, obviously, since that is the language I have the most emotional and cultural ties to, outside of English. The big challenge is that my Korean is pretty weak. My comprehension of the grammar is near perfect, but my vocabulary comprehension is horrific. My ability to speak grammatically correct is atrocious. I wish my family lived near by so that our future kid(s) could have access to people who speak pretty much perfect Korean as a natural part of their lives.

I’ve gotten in touch with an Oakland Korean American Mom & Pop group that meets nearby, because I’d love to have our child grow up with other Korean Americans around them, not just me. It’s not that I value our future child’s Korean American-ness more than his Japanese & Finnish American heritages more, but that it’s the part of his heritage that I can do the most to help define. A part of this desire is a linguistic connection that goes back millenia; a part of it is wanting my own mother and my older relatives to be able to communicate meaningfully with him; a part of it is wanting him not to reject them as strange and foreign; a part of it is wanting him to grow up with a sense of global community and not just a nationalistic sense of self.

Within my own extended family, there is a huge linguistic gulf between the first and second generation, where children and parents can’t communicate at all, not just from the growing pains of adolescence and beyond, but from the inability to form the sentences that would adequately express themselves to the other generation. There are so many things I can’t say to my parents, and that I don’t understand when they speak to me, and I’m one of the luckier ones in the family who learned & retained more Korean from actually living in Korea.

Recently, my grandmother passed away. I think about all the things I couldn’t tell her when I saw her last. I think about how when my little brother met my grandmothers in Korea for the first time, he had nothing to say to them, both because he saw them so rarely and because he didn’t have the language skills to reach across the divide, nor any motivation to try, and it makes me so sad. My relationship with them meant so much to me, but he didn’t and doesn’t have that, not that he feels the loss. You can’t miss something you never had.

But that’s the thing. I don’t want our kid to grow up never missing what he didn’t have, in terms of being around family, being around people in touch with his cultural heritages (all of them), being able to grow up with the internalized knowledge of other languages and customs. If he didn’t have them, I’m sure he wouldn’t miss them, at least until he was well into his twenties or even thirties, if ever. But I would know what he was missing out on, and I want these things for him.

I really need to learn more Korean!