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https://wordsummit.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/raising-bilingual-children-whats-your-strategy/
Raising Bilingual Children: what’s your strategy?
After posting about bilingual households, I came across a post about strategies for raising a bilingual child that really resonated with me. I liked the dad’s honesty about how he originally had plans of being able to talk about his effortlessly bilingual son who could possibly have been starting to learn a third language at some point. When my son was born I had the very same thought, and I definitely remember relatives fully expecting me to pour all of my language skills into my son’s little noggin. It’s hard to argue with the idea of teaching a child to speak more than one language; however, as someone who grew up in a monolingual household, I was left to ponder the not-so-small question of “how do you actually go about doing that?”.
发布关于双语家庭的文章后，我看到了一篇关于提高孩子双语能力策略的帖子，它确实引起了我的共鸣。我喜欢那位父亲就在于他如实地谈到了他原本是怎样计划谈谈他的孩子是如何毫不费力地说双语的，他的孩子可能在等待某个契机准备开始学第三语言了。我儿子出生的时候我有着同样的想法，我清楚地记得亲戚们希望我把我所有的语言技巧塞进我儿子的小脑袋里去。在教孩子说一种以上语言的理念上争论是很困难的；但是，作为一个在单语家庭长大的人，我开始思考一个似乎不那么不重要的的问题，“你到底是怎么做的？”。
My wife and I were confident from the beginning that we wanted to raise our son to be bilingual. We quickly settled into a pattern of her speaking to him in Mandarin, and me speaking to him in English. Surely, we thought, he would ‘naturally’ pick up both languages and would soon be speaking both languages with fluid ease.
我的妻子和我从一开始就很自信，我们想把我们的儿子培养成会说双语的人。我们迅速进入她跟孩子说普通话，我说他说英语的模式。 当然，我们认为，他将“自然”地掌握两种语言，并将很快能流利的使用两种语言说话。
As it turns out, my son had some opinions of his own:) It quickly became apparent that he wasn’t quite that excited about speaking Chinese. Mom would speak to him in Mandarin, but he would respond in English– if she pretended not to understand, he quickly figured out that he could come to me and say “tell mommy that …….” or some other ploy to get me to interpret for him.
结果发现，我儿子有他自己的想法：）很显然，他不是很乐于说汉语。妈妈会用普通话和他说话，但是他会用英语回答。如果她假装听不懂，他很快就会明白，然后对我说：“你告诉妈妈，.......”或者使用其他一些办法来让我给他翻译。
As we started to look around at other families that had aspired to raise a bilingual child, we saw more and more parents who somehow seemed dissatisfied or discouraged…..there were times when we wondered if we would actually be able to pull it off.
当我们开始环顾四周那些想要培养自己孩子的双语能力的家庭，我们看到越来越多的失望和沮丧的父母…有许多次我们想着是不是真的能成功
But we continue sticking with it—even now that my son fully realizes that mommy really does understand English, she continues to stick with one language. Whenever he expresses an interest in something Chinese we are both full of encouragement. One big “win” for us was when he dove into watching a Chinese cartoon called 熊出没 (both short clips and full movies). Many Chinese parents hold the show in great contempt because it it’s full of road-runner-esque violence, but we loved it because it was a major milestone in encouraging our son’s interest in Chinese. I enjoyed watching the cartoons with him, and we liked repeating one-liners from the show and tried to learn the theme song and put together the video at the beginning of this post.
但是我们继续坚持了下来，即使现在我儿子已经完全意识到他妈妈确实听得懂英语，但她还是一如既往地只说一种语言。只要他表现出对中文有一丝一毫的兴趣，对我们来说都是莫大的鼓励。对于我们来说有一个巨大的“胜利”，那就是他迷上了一部中国动画片，叫“熊出没”（短片和电影都有）。许多中国父母极度厌恶这个节目，因为里面充斥着暴力镜头，但是我们很喜欢，因为它是我们鼓励儿子对中文的兴趣的道路上，一个重要的里程碑。我喜欢跟他一起看动画片，我们喜欢重复里面的台词，我们还试着学主题曲，把视频收集起来放在文章的开头。
We were happy with the engagement; however, even through that time, he wasn’t really speaking that much Chinese in terms of spontaneous comments or sustaining conversation.
我们很高兴能参与进来；然而，即使在那个时候，他也没说用中文说一些评论或者跟我交流。
Skipping forward to the present, my son is now eight; we’re finding that his Chinese seems to improve in waves—sometimes months will go by and it seems like we’re not seeing any progress, but then he’ll have a burst of confidence that encourages us to keep going.So–I’ve learned to celebrate the small victories.
As it happens, we just had a mini-victory the other night— my wife was doing a mid-week grocery run because she’s heading out of town for a trip. As she was walking out the door, she asked if we needed to add anything to her shopping list– quite unexpectedly, my son piped up and said ‘梨’ (lí). It was so out of character that my wife didn’t quite catch what he said the first time, so he repeated himself and said “妈妈，我要吃梨”, telling her that he wanted to eat those fruits that I always translate as ‘apple-pears’.
转眼到了现在，我儿子8岁了，我们发现他的中文似乎是波浪式的提高，有的时候几个月过去了我们看不到他一点进步，但是接着他会爆发一下，让我们有信心鼓励我们继续下去。所以我学会了为微小的成就而庆祝。就在前几天晚上，我们有过一次类似的微小胜利，那时候我妻子因为要出城一趟，正在囤一周的杂货。当她走出门的时候问我们要不要在购物清单上再加点什么，我儿子大喊了一声：“梨(lí)”。这太反常了，他说第一次的时候，我老婆根本没听懂，所以他自顾自又重复了一遍：“妈妈，我要吃梨”，他想告诉妈妈他想吃这些水果，以前我都把梨翻译成“apple-pears（苹果梨）”
So–bit by bit it comes, and the road is paved with little happy moments like this one. My son doesn’t read very many Chinese characters, but he sees me practicing my characters and sometimes traces along with me. He likes to watch some Chinese TV with my wife, so the ‘input’ continues. I’m sure he’ll say the word 梨 at least once this week when we’re having a snack, or putting them into a smoothie, and that will make me happy.
and so it goes…
改变一点一点发生了，学习的路途由许多像这样微小的快乐时光铺就。我的儿子认不了几个汉字，但是看到我在练字的时候，他有时也会模仿我。他喜欢跟我老婆一起看电视，所以“输入”一直没停。我肯定这一周他至少会再说一次“梨”，在我们吃零食或者在我们把梨放到冰沙里的时候，这就会使我开心不已，而且也果真如此…
Going back to the article I mentioned— I thought one of the comments left by another reader offered some sage advice: he had always kept up with speaking one language with his child (in this case, English in a Portuguese environment); however, it was only when the parents stopped obsessing/worrying about the language that their son seemed to flourish.
回到我刚才提到的那篇文章——我觉得某一位读者的其中一条评论提供了一个非常明智的建议：他始终坚持只跟孩子说一种语言（例如，在葡萄牙语的环境里说英语）；然而，只有当父母不再纠结、担心用哪种语言的时候，他们的孩子似乎成长得更快。
Anyway, I don’t know if I have a cohesive strategy beyond trying to create an atmosphere around the house where speaking Chinese doesn’t feel heavy or onerous. I think if we stick with that, we’ll be ok; somehow, it seems like what you’re doing is less important than how your child is feeling about the whole experience.
总之，我不知道是否有一个统一的策略，而不仅仅只是试图创造一个说中文不感到沉重或繁重的家庭环境。我认为只要坚持，事情会好转的；有时候好像你做什么不重要，你的孩子的整体体验才重要。
https://wordsummit.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/raising-bilingual-children-whats-your-strategy/
