can I ask parents of kids of Victoria trilingual class

jjsweet

can your kids really handle 3 language?  supposed not too many family would adopt 3 languages during daily life? if the kid only use 1 of these 3 languages at home, is it hard for them to pick up the other 2?  do they really speak all of them finally?  all good accent and gramma?

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Kids will converse most confidently in his own mother tongue (language used at home) and the other 2 languages are just add-on features.  The proficiency of the other 2 languages will improve in a normal way anyone learns a language, i.e. comprehension, speaking, and then grammar.

Accent wise, there will be some mix up of Cantonese and Putonghua for words like water, me, sky..etc.  But since English is taught by Native English Speakers, kids will put up the Teacher's native accent.

Living in Hong Kong, we are expose to a mixture of different English accents from Native English Teachers coming from different places in the world.

For me, I would already consider the trilingual exposure successful if the child is able to and is willing to answer questions asked to him in the same language used, be it Cantonese, English or Putonghua.

Take for example people in Singapore.  Most people has either English, Mandarin or Chiu Chow dialect as their mother tongue, but they could still achieve a high proficiency level in an additional language.  I believe, kids can be trained to be bi or trilingual given enough time to expose them to it.

One may criticize the accent of Singaporeans, Malaysians or even Hong Kong people.  But Canadians do have Canadian accent and so do Australians, and Americans.  Would you mind and detest it if your child speaks English with Australian accent?


As for grammar, my child sometimes do express herself in Chinese using English sentence structure and vice versa.  What I do is to correct it right away so that the same mistake will not be made again.


If you are worried that your child won't have enough English exposure, you can consider applying to change to Eng/Putonghua class so that you get more time for English and Putonghua and you can speak Cantonese at home with her.  My friends so that and their kids are still trilingual (per my definition).

I reckon some parents may have higher standards for being trilingual.  It really depends on your expectations.

jjsweet

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thank you very much for your sharing and thoughts.  i applied for bilingual actually, but finally got accepted by trilingual only.  i'm not worried about English, but Mandarin mixed up with Cantonese.  comparatively i think English is much easier than Chinese to master.  i did not have the experience of learning 2 different Chinese at same time during my childhood.  sounds very confusing to me, that's why i chose bilingual.  anyway, as we do not have more choice, a place in whatever class is already a big prize, so i just want to get some review and experience.

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原帖由 jjsweet 於 14-04-30 發表
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thank you very much for your sharing and thoughts.  i applied for bilingual act ...

Dont expect to see overnight results in PTH.

  As far as I see, most parents care more about English than PTH.  Despite the fact that some parents provide English only environment at home and hence the kids' mother tongue is English, they do understand n respond in Cantonese and PTH in school.