Any sharing on language acquisition (both Chinese and English) of kids?

onema

My kid is about to turn two. There have been suggestions that mother tongue (Cantonese) should come first. Yet there are also people who choose to use English as the dominant or only language at home with the kids, believing that children will get to know Cantonese anyway in Hong Kong, a Chinese-dominant society. With all those claims and suggestions of language confusion, I just wonder if anyone can share the successful case of their children who can master both English and Chinese well?

- What is the language environment at home (and at school)?- Anyone with kids who are proficient in both languages despite an all-Chinese or English family background?
- If kids are exposed to both Chinese and English since birth, by when would the children be able to differentiate Chinese and English in listening and speaking?
- Does it really work to have one parent speaking one language and the other speaking another?

Or any sharing on failed, if not undesirable, outcome of language development because of unsuitable approaches?

My mother tongue is Cantonese but  I am also pretty proficient in English. Like all mothers, I want my kid to have a good command of both languages.

jeff76916

Many academics would tell u that a child can learn more than one languages at the same stage, but better to use fixed language with each fixed person,and the child would switch to different fixed languages when approaching different persons. If she is closest to u, and if your Chinese is better than English, better to use Chinese yourself, leaving english communication work to others at this 2 years of age,coz many nuances of meanings can only be conveyed by u and picked up by the child when using most familiar mother tongue. Once his Chinese literacy is stable and on the well developing path, it is not late to have intensive communication in english say starting at 3 years old. But when use Chinese, u must use good, effective and elegant simple Chinese in order to achieve something useful for the long term