For those who adopted transracially...?

Question

Do you plan to have your child learn their original native tongue?

Like, if they're only an infant now, are you considering sending them to language classes?

Or if they're approaching the end of toddlerhood, are you determined to have them attend language classes when they're a bit older so as to give them a bit of their culture?

Answer 1

My son and I have been taking classes together since he was two and a half. He's ten now. His teacher says he speaks without an accent. He's not fluent, but when he watches something on Youtube from his country, he's delighted to find that he can understand some of it.  The lady who teaches the classes also prepares food for us and teaches him general culture things so that he won't feel quite foreign when we bring him back home.  On the flip side, we were trying to pay for his younger brothers back home to go to English school so that when the boys met, they'd have two languages to try to communicate in.    

Answer 2

Hi Mei-Ling:

English is the official language of Liberia.  Some Liberians do speak some French or some tribal dialects in addition to English, but my children only speak English.  Our language barrier issues were more of a dialect/accent barrier.  They understood us in the beginning, much better than we understood them!  I have learned a lot of what we call "Liberian slang", which we sort of incorporated as a family.

We get some strange looks sometimes when we say to "wait small" or promise to "carry you to the mall."  

I do support making sure that children adopted from non-English speaking countries learn their native language, however.

Answer 3

Our son was in an ethnically different foster home before he came home to us, and we're considering nurturing his language from there... we got him at almost 8 months.  Several months later, someone in a restaurant asked us where he picked up the (foreign language) that he was babbling in. So, it's with him.  There are immersion schools in this area with that language and there are also day cares if we chose to put him in one before he's school age.  

Answer 4

Yes, my husband and I are planning to learn Korean as well so it can be something we do as a family. We've lookied into Korean language classes in our area, but it'll be 2 years until my oldest is old enough to attend. There are a few "teach your child Korean" programs that I've found online, so we'll probably work with that in the mean time.

Right now we do have some board books, videos, and CDs in Korean, which I think is a good start for toddlers (they are 1 and 3 yrs old)

Answer 5

I have on and off considered the possibility of adopting from Sierra Leone. I think it's very unlikely that I'll actually do it, as my inclination is more toward domestic foster care adoption, but if hypothetically I did...

I would want the children to learn Creole (or more like keep it up, since they'd probably be old enough to speak,) but probably not in a formal class setting. I'd be more likely to ask the people in my own extended family to teach them or practice with them. Since a large number of my relatives do speak the Creole of Sierra Leone, it wouldn't really make sense to go outside the family for language instruction-- though I would want to hook them up with other people who shared their heritage, too, in a more purely social setting. I'd ideally want to find a group that wasn't just family members for some cultural activities.

Like I said, I don't really anticipate that I would ever adopt internationally as I just don't think it's for me, but if I did, that would be how I would handle it.  

Answer 6

Absolutely.

Baby girl is 3 and she will be attending her first Mandarin classes in the fall. She seems very excited about it. When we brought her home we subscribed to the Mandarin channel, play Chinese music and have books on CD that were translated into Mandarin. We think it is VERY important that she retain her native language for a number of reasons: she may want to go to school, work or live there. And finding her first family will already be hard enough without the language barrier getting in the way. And hey, lets face it, learning another language is simply an asset.

As she gets older, particularly when she's a teen, she may find it boring or lame, and usually I wouldn't push a kid to do something they didn't want to do, but in this case, I think we would insist. Simply because we can see the bigger picture, that at 16 she simply may not.

As parents who adopted transracially, we also felt it was important to learn some Mandarin ourselves. We know some words and can speak a few simple sentences (very choppily), but we also want to take some extra classes (we took some before we left for China).

With the timelines extended the way they are right now for China, I don't think any PAPs have an excuse not to at least get a few basic phrases under their belt.

Answer 7

No. As they get older they will have the choice to learn more languages if they would like to but I wouldn't force it on them.

Answer 8

My son was 10 when we adopted him. His first language was Spanish, but he could not speak it, only understand it, when he came to us at age 7. He is going to be taking Spanish classes, and it may be easier for him to relearn the language since he spoke it early in life. We help him to explore his culture as much as we can, exposing him to customs, foods, holidays, etc. We have sought out individuals from his culture to kind of mentor him. We just feel that all of us come from a diverse ethnical background, and try to honor all of them in one way or another.

Answer 9

Yes 100%  I would like our daughter to learn our 2 native languages, English and her orignal native language. But i would wait for her to be fluent in our 3 languages before i start her on the 4th. She has a lot of pressure but i think its important.  

Answer 10

Mei

I haven't adopted but my fiance is from Norway and we usually spend the holidays and summers there. We are going to raise our child to speak Norwegian at home and in Norway and English at school in the states. This will of course mean that I'll have to learn a 3rd language. I only know a bit of Norwegian and his family only speaks it at home.  

Knowing foreign languages is valuable no matter how you look at it.

I think trying to learn Mandarin in your late teens and adult years is unbelievably difficult. I tried learning Cantonese in college and gave up on it because of the characters and intonations.  

Good luck and I hope that you'll be able to at least be able to communicate your feelings and get the context of what your trying to say across to your nfamily .   There are groups on meetup.com that get together to practice speaking and reading foreign languages.

I think its extremely important for Aps of trans-racial adoptees to make it a priority for the child to "retain" their native language and very important for Aps to speak it a bit themselves.

Answer 11

Yes, my son takes language courses, goes to culture camp and I started a culture club at his school. But you have to tread very carefully because children can easily feel that you're trying to stuff a culture that may mean nothing to them own their throats.

We celebrate the major holidays at home and I work with native parents at school to bring celebrations to school.

We cultivate relationships with friends from his culture an I make sure that he has role models from Korea through martial arts but if he protests the rest I will let him drop it for a time. When I talk with parents with older children they usually say that the kids start to push back when they get to be 9 or 10. I think it's OK to let them drop at that point as long as you offer again from time to time.  

Answer 12

I'm the transracial adoptee & where I wouldn't have wanted to go to language classes because I had issues about all that...I really wished they had somebody involved in my life that spoke it so that I would not have forgotten it in the first place.