Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
Wrong. You need to build up a healthy connection between child and parents, with active and clear communication. It does NOT have to be in a single language. If a child is being raised bilingually, they are pretty much equal in both languages. They are NOT speaking a foreign language to one parent - they are speaking both of their *native* languages with their parents.
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Sorry to butt in, but I find this discussion really interesting. There's lots of kids in the world being raised with three or four languages, and they never have any trouble. I know several British Indians who speak the native dialect of their mother, the native dialect of their father, hindi or urdu AND english. It's pretty natural to them to swap between them depending on the situation. When it's just mum, they speak in mum's language, when dad comes home, they speak hindi/urdu; outside the house it's all English. But there's no way they could combine it because for starters, dad doesn't speak mum's dialect and visa versa, and dad's good at english but mum isn't so much, etc etc.
Actually, fluency must be a factor, right? I imagine for a lot of mixed Japanese families, both partners aren't going to be perfectly fluent in both languages. Plenty of couples out there where one side doesn't speak a lick of Japanese, or conversely, only middling english. The only time I can think of where it might be better if both parents were to constantly speak both languages to the child across the board is for languages where male and female speech are drastically different.