Are you raising bilingual/biliterate kids in Cantonese too?

Nice to meet you 👋

I started this bilingual parenting journey around 2019.

Contrary to what some of you may expect, raising bilingual children wasn’t my calling, nor was it an obvious path to me. I certainly didn’t start until my eldest kid was already a toddler.

For one thing, my strongest language is English — Cantonese is not even close second!

…and my spouse didn’t speak any Cantonese

…and I saw how my CBC (Canadian Born Chinese) peers “lose” the language as I was growing up (even with two completely fluent and native parents at home!)

So, I was resigned to the fate that the Cantonese language will be lost with me in my generation.

It was practically conventional wisdom that my jook sing kid will not speak Cantonese very well, and that he will definitely not read any Chinese.

So you can’t blame me for not trying in the beginning — why waste energy on something that is obviously impossible? :P

I’m sooo thankful though for the people I met in 2019, who changed the course of my kid’s life. Sounds pretty ~dramatic~ I know — but it really feels that way!

The Turning Point

In that fateful day in 2019, I went on a random play date with a fellow Cantonese parent. What I saw fascinated me.

This parent was a CBC...

…and her spouse didn’t speak Cantonese

…and she didn’t read Chinese

And yet (!!)

Her daughter (a few years older than my kid) was not only speaking Cantonese fluently, but she was in the early stages of learning to read Chinese!

This parent was a real-life example of someone doing what I thought was impossible — raising bilingual and biliterate kids in a country where Chinese wasn’t the majority language, and doing it successfully with only one CBC parent speaking the language!

As someone who was born in Hong Kong, and can read a little Chinese… I really have no excuse! I should be able to raise bilingual and biliterate kids.

With living proof of what’s possible, I immediately got to work. I sought out everything I could about bilingual parenting — from finding all the resources, to learning all the best practices, to reading about other people’s experiences and comparing notes.

That fateful playdate at the ROM, circa 2019

Going Down the Rabbit Hole

Back in 2019, there wasn’t a lot of info on the internet or social media tailored for the English-speaking parent. Dr Betty Choi from Chalk Academy was probably the OG resource at the time.

She was one of the few sites out there that documented her family’s journey in learning Chinese as a non-native parent.

There’s been a lot more information since, with many more blogs, instagram accounts, and facebook groups, where parents are generously sharing their experiences in raising little multilinguals ❤️

But… I find there is still a relative dearth of info for learning the language in Cantonese.

The “default” Chinese language is often Mandarin.

While information and advice shared by Mandarin-speaking families is still super valuable (resources and high-level approaches are often applicable across the spoken languages), there seems to be a non-trivial amount of tactical differences (?) to teaching literacy in Cantonese, that it felt worthwhile sharing these experiences as well.

This little newsletter/blog/substack is my attempt at sharing some of those things, so that Cantonese families don’t feel alone when they go through what I felt were uniquely Canto experiences in raising biliterate little ones!

Why this? Why now?

1. Clarify my thoughts around this topic

These thoughts have been swirling around in my head for months — maybe even over a year. Many of them were inspired by readings on early language development (research papers, other blogs, informal anecdotes in FB groups, etc), and from experimenting with my own children 😝

I’ve shared some of these unorganized thoughts in the past via ginormous word vomits over IG stories (if you’ve read them, I appreciate you!)

But there’s still a lot more I want to share, that it probably makes sense to lay them out on a platform that is better suited for “long-form content”.

Organizing these thoughts in long-form writing also forces me to properly unpack and clarify these ideas.

Brain dumping on IG stories is therapeutic, but the ideas are a little all over the place.

I want a little more clarity of thought — and writing things down in this format forces me to move towards that.

2. Help fellow Cantonese families with similar goals

There are still relatively few detailed first-hand accounts of raising biliterate kids from a Cantonese-speaking family’s perspective — trust me, I looked!

This is the kinda thing I wish I had when I started this journey a few years ago.

Many Cantonese people still think it’s impossible to raise biliterate kids because of our own experiences and observations growing up! I was one of these people not too long ago.

I hope to change that by sharing what is possible.

Some caveats!

I am not an expert. And I’m certainly not a trained language educator.

I’m merely a motivated parent, who is trying to raise bilingual and biliterate kids in Cantonese efficiently (I’m lazy — so I want do things with most results and least effort 😝), and in a way that doesn’t suck the joy out of parenting.

I am not an “authority” in anything. But I love digging into (or meandering through?) the science, experimenting with my super small sample size of two kids, and sharing some of these thoughts and learnings with others.

While I generally try to use evidence-backed research, I will continue to stress that I mostly don’t know what I’m doing. Everything I write here are ultimately… opinions.

I will always share the rationale behind my opinions, but I definitely wouldn’t ever blindly trust anything written here lol There’s a non-zero chance I’m wrong.

Besides — as I’ve learned in the last few years — it’s always a good idea to consider your own family’s situation before applying any sort of “advice” or “research” you read on the internet anyway.

Thank you for coming along for the ride — I hope you find this useful ❤️