 Hi guys evil dear here. So today I wanted to speak about teaching your child two languages or more Now I have a lot of Chinese friends in Sydney and I've noticed as of late because a lot of them I've just having kids or have had kids for a few years that they're all trying to teach their kids English rather than Mandarin their native languages Now I dug into this a little bit I asked a few questions and it turns out the reason being is because a lot of teachers here are Recommending that you don't teach your kid your native language you teach them English because it may confuse them at school Or it may hinder their progress to me. This is a load of baloney. It's it's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard Now I'll give you my reasons shortly The main one being that for instance you look at Europe. Okay, there's some countries there with three or more native languages Oh three or more languages that are used within the country You look at Africa where they have like tribal languages and then languages at the state level languages between countries and stuff like that And these kids all fine learn multiple languages without an issue and you can even look at our own history in Australia For instance, I read a study recently. I can't remember where it is But the basic premise is that before white people arrived in Australia the Australian Aboriginal spoke On-standard seven languages, so they had their tribal language and then they had languages of the nearby tribes Now this wasn't dialects. This was actually languages. So they were different enough to be considered languages So when someone tells me that oh, you shouldn't teach your kid a second language because you could Hinder their progress or cause lots of issues at school. That's only if you approach it incorrectly Five minutes of Google search will tell you what to do. So for instance If you have multiple languages The problem with the kid is that they don't distinguish that this is different languages They just clump it all together and just think it's one thing and that's where the problems occur So when you speak a certain language, you have to tell the kid that you're speaking a certain language So you'd say I'm speaking English and then you'll proceed in English or Or you just say English and then proceed or you'd say Esperanto and proceed like me parallel to Esperanto And then you continue on Now another thing you can do is you can associate languages with people so you can say mum speaks French and dad speaks English As long as the two parents understand each other that shouldn't cause too many confusions or too much confusion Another thing you can also try is you associate language with an area of say like you have English for the house or if you're a native Mandarin speaker Mandarin for the house And then you have English in the shopping center and you have French in The car or your grandma's house. It doesn't matter. You just have to associate language with Defineable things so the kid can realize that ah, this is actually split into segments So basically, I just wanted to say up so just sum up the whole thing is that a Kid can learn multiple languages No one knows how many languages a kid can actually learn as I said the aboriginals even though their vocabulary is probably small They spoke up to seven languages so Learning so trying to teach your kid English if it's not your native language is probably a massive hindrance to the kid itself Think about it. Okay, so you teach a Mandarin. You think they're not going to learn English Well, they go to school. They're gonna hear English. They're gonna watch TV. They're gonna hear English They're gonna hang around with their friends. They're gonna hear English. They're saturated by they've got no option but to learn it so why Take away that one Valuable skill that you have Mandarin and try to teach them something which they're going to learn anyway It just seems kind of pointless to me another thing is China is a rising superpower. There's no denying that we don't know where it's going to be in 1050 years how big how important economically it's going to be but Understanding Mandarin will definitely be something of value to your future child So you should definitely teach in that if I spoke Mandarin I would definitely teach my child that luckily my wife does so I'm going to make sure she teaches our child that another thing is for instance in Sydney, we have Chinese speakers, it's getting a little bit windy here Chinese speakers and they're called ABCs So Australian born Chinese and the thing that distinguishes them from other Chinese speakers There's a lot of them don't actually speak Mandarin. They just weren't taught it and this causes a lot of hindrances for them When they actually go looking for job opportunities because employers think oh, you're Chinese You'll be able to speak Mandarin and then you have to say well actually I don't and Although that seems like a little bit of a discrimination. It's just the way of the world People like Chinese speakers will go out and they'll see others and I'll just start speaking Chinese And then you have this awkward situation where you go. Well, sorry. I'm actually you know native English I don't speak Chinese at all. So You're going to create lots of really Awkward situations possibly economic damage to your child by following this mindset that I may possibly hinder their progress Don't let it happen. Okay. I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one And if not, I will find you