Raising a trilingual kid in Hong Kong



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ORIGINAL POST
Posted by londonboy78 4 yrs ago
Hi there! We are expecting a child and I am looking in to some of the educational elements specific to raising a kid in Hong Kong and in particular language learning.

We parents are both monolingual (English) but would ideally like to raise our child as trilingual (Mandarin and French), eventually sending our kid to the Lycee. Are there any people that have attempted something like this in HK and have any advice or know where to find relevant online resources or local support groups?

I would also be very interested if there were any kids story / song books that are out there that cover all three languages so that it would be easy to get the child to make connections between the various languages e.g. did they make Mandarin and French versions of The Teletubbies and is there somewhere online that it would be easy to play back the same episodes concurrently in each different language for the kid to watch? I know kids love to repeat shows again and again so thought this could be a good method for helping them to learn the various languages - appreciate direct interaction between child and a living human being is the best method (!) but if I could find shows or books to use and interact with them in this manner then I'm guessing it would also be helpful.

Also, an obvious question maybe but has anyone raised their kid this way and then found a lack of Cantonese to be an issue for them? I'm thinking particularly in terms of whether that might exclude the child from social situations, even if they are at an international school.

Thanks

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COMMENTS
DarylH 4 yrs ago
Your situation would require a lot of tutoring and attention to the two languages the parents don't speak. Where the family language is English and only one parent speaks Chinese, it is very important that parent pushes the issue of speaking Chinese with the child one on one, or you'll all end up speaking only English.

Fun bilingual or language learning activities help a lot. Kids of this tic-toc era love making videos, and my daughter enjoyed making this one very recently, which motivated her to take more interest in Cantonese:

https://youtu.be/5gVeKnu0zpo

Mandarin camp - she did for the first time last year - boosted her skills a lot. About a year ago we found a tutor that she likes and that has worked well too.

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