Monday, 15 February 2010
PROGRESS UPDATE: Lots of new French, no more Twi...
I realise through a quick scan of old posts that while the French is going great guns (both kids active bilinguals), sadly the Twi has pretty much fallen by the wayside. Their papa has never been that enthusiastic about speaking with the children in Twi, mainly because he found it almost impossible to communicate effectively with them - his Twi, while fluent, is nowhere near as rich as his English vocabulary and the kind of things he can say in the language are useful if you are working on a farm in Ghana but not much use chatting with your kids in urban London. We both wanted to prioritise the English, it being such a dominant world language and given that we do live in the English-speaking part! And as he was the children's main source of English, he was struggling to teach them both languages. To make things more difficult, we started very late with the Twi, so it was always going to be a struggle to convince Schmoo to talk this new language with Papa. The upshot of it is that the Twi has slowly pretty much disappeared from our daily conversations. Papa will say the odd thing in Twi and the children do understand, but it's clearly not going to be their third language anytime soon. However, saying that, I think having a good passive base has stood them in good stead for picking it up quickly later on, as we will probably spend many holidays in Ghana when they are a bit older, and where they will meet their Twi-talking cousins!
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6 comments:
I just wanted to comment quickly that I notice that you sound at peace with the "fall-away", and wanted to commend you for letting sleeping dogs lie. It's hard to give up on our language dreams, but it can be harder, I think, to paddle up hill when the river is clearly flowing down.
I don't recall if I've posted here before, but I just wanted to thank you (again?) for being my part of my inspiration to start a blog of my own on the same topic. It's been very helpful for me, and I like knowing that I might be adding to others' positive experiences of their own as an additional resource.
Take care,
Tamara
nonnativebilingualism.blogspot.com
Thanks, Tamara, I guess I've come around to the idea over a long time (without realising it!). It's great to hear this blog has inspired another and I'm off to look you up now!
Omma
Vacationing and speaking with their cousins will have them talking in Twi SO fast! My mom sent my sisters and I to El Salvador over the summers growing up, we always came back with such a great spanish vocabulary.
I love how real you are, it definitely is hard to be good at a language.
I think you trying to do all 3 is such a great thing and totally understand how difficult it must be.
It must be frustrating to lose the Twi but it sounds like the French is very successful which is a challenge in and of itself. I am stopping by from the Blog Carnival. We are a bilingual Spanish/English family living in the US.
Thanks, Marcela, it's good to have that inspiration. Papa has actually found a new way to implement the Twi, without it being too overwhelming for the kids, which is 'Twi Saturdays'! So now they only speak Twi each Saturday, which they really enjoy (and getting a great basic knowledge for when we go to Ghana at half-term).
Good to touch base, Adriana! Spanish is a great one to have in the US :-)
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