Is Your Child Not Speaking His Mother Tongue with You?

Hey everyone, this is a short live about your child not speaking your mother tongue with you. And the reason why this is a topic is because I just got off a consulting call with a parent and she was like, okay, so my child only speaks English, and somehow, somehow that, you know, the child speaks, doesn't speak Indonesian, which is the mother tongue. And the problem is that the father doesn't speak English at all. And it's becoming a problem. Sorry, my glasses are fogging up. So the mother was like, okay, so we want to start from the beginning for this kid in order to catch up with Indonesian. And the problem here is that the child doesn't really have much functional communication language. Therefore, if you want to start from the beginning, it's rather easy because, you know, he hasn't established to use any sort of language in the beginning. So right now, if your child is also having problem that he speaks English more often than Chinese, Indonesian, I don't know, like French, Spanish, doesn't matter. And the most prominent reason I see is because, you know, most of the time when they look gadgets, they reading books, they're listening to whatever, they watch movies, it's all in English. And more and more becomes that, you know, English becomes a mainstream in the children's lives. And that's because entertaining videos on YouTube, especially for children, are in English. There's no way around it. Okay, so what can you do to navigate that? Well, first point I have for tonight is that you should watch these kind of videos with your child. Not just to let them just watch it themselves because they will just absorb whatever that you, you know, whatever it is in the video. Right? So when you watch with your child, you can actually control a little bit more. You can stop the video, you can talk to them about the video in your mother tongue, you can translate it a little bit more. Right? You can tell them, my cat's around, you can tell them what's going on in your mother tongue. Okay, so if you don't do that, you're leaving them to their own devices, Right? Leaving them to their own, their own YouTube time. Okay, and is that a good thing? No, it really isn't. Because although sometimes I talk about using gadgets as rewards, using it as a way of teaching, which I love, by the way. I love using it. The main problem here is that if you leave them just by themselves, it's very hard to control what they learn. Okay. And I made it very clear that I love using gadgets for learning, for using them as like flashcard machines, using them as rewards, watching videos, whatnot. But please, please don't let them alone on the device for too long. Or else they go inside rabbit hole. I mean, you have done it yourself, right? Just before bed. I'm guilty of that. Just before the bedtime, you just keep on watching like, I don't know, maybe Facebook or YouTube. You keep on searching, searching for more for a certain topic. And you can't stop. The same as for your child. If you don't regulate it, it becomes something that will control their main language and also control how they view the device. Right? Okay, number two point. Number two point. The parent told me that the kid cannot understand the mother tongue, but when she says the instruction in English, he understands. Okay, so there's a few points I want to point out here. Okay? Number one, does he even register that Bahasa Indonesia, which is his mother tongue, as a language at all? That's the question you have to ask yourself. Okay, Is he already like. Is it just gibberish coming out of your mouth when you say it? Meaning that you haven't said it enough or meaning that whenever he, you say an Indonesian Bahasa or your mother tongue, okay, he doesn't. He ignores it. Therefore it gets reinforced, right? That behavior of ignoring whatever you say. Because later on you will say it one more time in English. Okay? So how do you deal with that? So after thinking about it, I told the parent, hey, try this. I don't know. I really don't know. Because at this moment in time, because the child doesn't have much functional communication, what I told the mother was was that, hey, how about try this. You say it in your mother tongue once in a very easy to understand format. Meaning like one to two words. So for. Let me give you an example. If I were to tell the kid to, hey, go to the bathroom and get a toilet. Sorry, Go to the bathroom and get a towel, right? So it's very long. Go to the bathroom and get a towel. So it's like, go there and then do something. There's two parts to it, so keep it easy. Say, go get a towel and point to the toilet, right? Towel. Go get towel. Maybe if you say it in your mother tongue, make sure it's in that easy format first. Okay? Speak as if you're speaking to a foreigner. Because that is what your child is right now, right? If your child isn't speaking on mother tongue, so keep it like that and then add it in English one more time. All right? So maybe in my mother tongue is Cantonese, right? If I say means like Take the towel, right? And I say, one more and once more in English, I say, hey, get the towel. And then he does it. And what I do is I give a feedback, right? I tell him, good job, nice giving me the towel, but in the mother tongue, all right? Therefore, whenever he does something, he listens to it twice sandwiched between the English. I don't know if this is going to work or not, but you have to try it in order to know because it's now an increasing fact that more and more people are bilingual. And to think that, hey, hey, to cut out all of English or Chinese or Spanish or whatever the two languages is rather impossible, okay? So what you can do is to strengthen and say it in two languages, especially if you're trying to, you're trying to teach your mother tongue back, okay? And this is where, you know, speech pathologist will come out and say, including myself, right? This is the advice that I give as well. For bilingual children, we shouldn't mix code, okay? We shouldn't mix it. We shouldn't say one part of a language the other part of another. And we shouldn't even use. We should stick to one grammatical thing, one grammatical system, right? If we're talking in English, don't use a Chinese grammar, don't use an Indonesian grammar to talk in English and add some Indonesian words inside. That doesn't work like that, okay? So keep in mind that you should, whenever you say something, one sentence and one language, one grammar, and the other sentence, when you, like, translate it for them, it needs to be in the precise grammar of the other language, okay? Don't mix it up. Do not mix it up, all right? So the third point of tonight saying that, hey, maybe your child doesn't have that vocabulary, okay? Don't have that vocabulary in the mother tongue, all right? And it's been established by the fact that, you know, bilingual children, they have a huge, a bigger vocabulary than monolingual speakers. I myself, I have to remember the same word in different languages just to use it in my daily life, okay? And it's going to be increasingly so down the line, all right? Whether it's, it's for better or worse. But what I mean is, if that's the case, then you should teach the vocab just as you are learning a foreign language, right? Give them. What I told the mother in the consultation is that because the child is older, is around nine, so you can sit down and do some flashcards. Well, do that and write it out in the mother tongue language. Given that the kid can Actually read. Okay, do that and start off with comprehension first because it's very difficult for him to speak. He doesn't even speak in English yet. Therefore it will be hard for him to speak in Indonesian. You have to remember that you have to do two things now. Learn how to speak and also learn the new language. That's difficult. Stick to one thing at a time. So start with comprehension first. Have you guys used the app called Duolingo? I don't know if you have or not. Just let me know in the comments, right? The thing about it, it's made by some PhDs in linguistics and language learning and whatnot. When I use it for my own benefit, learning some different languages, I understand that they start off with comprehension. They start off with telling you to identify different words before you actually have to use it in a sentence. Always start with comprehension and identifying. If you don't do that, it's going to be very difficult. So let me give you example in the live video, I did a few, like a few moons ago now, a few months ago, I told you how to teach vocabulary, right? You use comprehension. You put like some flashcards on the table. Once you finish it, when the table's empty, the child can play, right? So you can do that using a flashcard method for those words in the foreign language. Okay? And I talked about all these different advice in my micro course. I'm just going to talk about. I made a micro course for parents who are wanting to teach our children over the Internet. And you can go to agentsofspeech.com Michael, type it right here for you. Www.agentsofspeech.com Oopsies micro. So if you go there, if you go there, you will be able to see what you know is installed inside the micro course. These kind of advice helped a lot of parents. And you will see inside there's stories about parents who used it, who, who use those advice to help the child to speak. And we're not talking about, like just a little bit. One of them start speaking in sentences in a week because the parent used these kind of tactics. So check it out. Okay. At the end of this video, which is now is a short live just to tell you what I learned this week. I want to tell you to go check out agentsofspeech.com micro and also to put in the comment section or email me, as you guys have done very nicely, about all the questions you have regarding, you know, teaching your son. It's no use telling me, oh, can you help me, like, after Telling me, like, your son's age and diagnosis, like, oh, my son's three year old and autistic. Can you help me? Hey, I don't know enough. You don't haven't told me anything. You haven't told me how much he's saying, how much he can understand. Like, are there any, like, speech errors? What's his behavior like? Has he done any speech therapy before? Has he done any kind of therapy before? You know, you cannot just ask me, like, can you help me? I don't know because you always needs me to, like, follow up, follow up, follow up until you tell me more. So I'm telling you here. If you email me, please tell me, please, please do tell me the whole story. I don't mind if you write a lot because I read quite fast. But the thing is, you have to give me more information in order for me to help you or else there's going to be a huge back and forth. Okay? And that's not the best use of both of our times. All right? So just tell me if you have any questions, do ask me. But the question shouldn't be like, can you help me? Because that's not really a question. I don't know if I can help you or not. The answer is I don't know because I don't know enough. Okay, so that's the end of this live video here. Please, if you do have really have any questions, just let me know. All right? I know I said there's no stupid questions, but one of the stupid questions are, there is one now is can you help me without enough information? Okay, so thank you, have a blessed Monday night, and I will see you next Monday. Goodbye.