The Daily Language Tug of War in Our Bilingual Home

Recently, I stumbled across an article about the struggles Taiwanese parents face when raising their kids abroad, especially when it comes to teaching them Chinese. Apparently, children find Chinese too challenging and resist learning it at every turn. As I read it, I thought, This sounds exactly like my own home. 

But here is the thing. We are not abroad. We live in Taiwan. My daughter is surrounded by Chinese speakers every single day. I speak Chinese with her. Her grandparents speak Chinese. Our neighbors speak Chinese. Even the lady who sells soy milk downstairs greets us in Chinese. And yet, whenever she gets the chance, my daughter picks English. 

She talks to me in English, sometimes forgetting she's supposed to use Chinese with me. She talks to her dolls in English. She even chats with her invisible friends in English. It is like her brain defaults to it. Chinese is something she uses when she has to. But if there is a choice, English wins every time. Whenever she wants to read, she’ll automatically pick up an English book, but she rarely chooses a Chinese one.

I have a friend whose husband is Italian, and their family also lives in Taiwan. Their son, too, prefers reading English books over Chinese ones because he finds them easier. So clearly, this is not just happening to bilingual kids whose mother tongue isn't English.

When it comes to writing Chinese characters, things get even worse. She absolutely hates it. To her, it feels like some kind of medieval punishment. I try to make it fun by telling her stories behind each character, such as how the radical for "heart" shows up in emotional words, or how "woman" and "child" come together to form the character for "good." She loves hearing these fascinating little connections. But the moment I ask her to sit down and write a few characters, she suddenly remembers she has to go feed her stuffed animals. 

For a long time, I did not really understand why people say Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world. I grew up speaking and writing it. It always felt natural. But then I started learning English. The more fluent I became, the more I understood what people meant. English has its quirks, sure, but Chinese is on a completely different level. 

Now that I have seen foreigners struggle with Chinese and tried teaching it myself, I finally get it. Even GPT struggles to translate perfectly from English to Chinese. That says a lot. 

So I really cannot blame my daughter when she complains about learning Chinese. Maybe I should teach her Taiwanese first, so Chinese will seem easier by comparison and she might actually be more willing to learn it. 

Honestly, I feel lucky. Chinese is incredibly complex, and somehow I got to grow up mastering it without even thinking about it. That saves me a lot of time and stress. My daughter still has a long road ahead, and I will be right there beside her, telling her silly etymology stories and quietly slipping Chinese back into our everyday life.

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