Yul is learning Korean reading and writing at school but I am teaching him to read English at home. I wasn’t raised bilingual so when I was learning to read as a child, I didn’t have this awareness of different languages that Yul has. The Korean language is almost completely phonetic and is quite easy to read but in comparison, English can seem like a mess. Koreans also know their history about King Sejong and the development of Hangul, so perhaps that’s why Yul was also asking about who invented English. Maybe when he is older he will learn to appreciate all the influences English has and how it grew and changed over time.
A challenge for parents raising kids to be bilingual is maintaining the interest in both language, so they continue learning both. As Yul is now in elementary school, there is a big focus on Korean, so he possibly feels like learning to read in English is much slower and more boring. I also try not to pressure too much because I want him to discover how amazing reading is for himself. I was a voracious reader as a child, and I want my children to also have that escape from the world too. We are lucky to have an English kids library close by to where we live in Seoul and Yul enjoys visiting it. Hopefully it is just a matter of time before English seems a bit less stupid.
We filmed a video to give an update on our son Yul’s language process.
Hello everyone! Finally a bilingual update video! We tried to get it as natural as possible but of course can never be completely like a normal conversation at home.
Our bilingual method:
We do “one parent, one language” method but with flexibility.
Nichola speaks English with Yul and Hugh speaks Korean with him. Nichola and Hugh speak mostly English to each other, so Yul constantly hears English conversation.
Within the community Yul is hearing mostly Korean. He goes to a completely Korean daycare/preschool but they also have some English classes a few times a week. Multicultural families are offered free Korean classes for kids in Korea, so he also attends Korean class twice a week. Even though he is a native Korean speaker, he goes to them to make sure there are no gaps in his learning. The teacher also caters to what he needs or what we ask. For example, there is a whole element of culture and manners in Korea that children are taught but what Nichola, as a foreigner, might not be able to instinctively instill in him. So the teacher is making sure they know manners and bowing etc. He really enjoys his Korean classes because the teacher makes them very fun.
Nichola will sometimes use Korean with Yul in public, as a way of showing others that he can speak Korean, and to not just use English with him. It’s a way of signalling that although Yul’s mother is obviously a foreigner, that he is a Korean child, and to treat him as one.
Hugh does the opposite sometimes to show that Yul can speak English too.
Nichola can participate in basic conversations in Korean and can understand the general gist of Korean but has to answer in English at home usually. This is for Yul’s benefit and because the focus on English means she doesn’t have opportunity to develop speaking skills at a higher level yet.
We are working on Yul changing using his own name to “I” at the moment in English. Nichola often corrects him gently, but didn’t during this video. While it’s something that is normal around this age, it’s also something to get kids to adjust to.
At the moment Yul is still working out the difference between English words in English and English loan words in Korean. Sometimes he will say a Korean pronunciation of an English word that is used in Korean, but he wasn’t sure of the English pronunciation in English. That’s something that gets corrected gently as he still needs to know how to pronounce loan words how Koreans do, rather than never saying them at all. He can have a few issues with pronouncing some English sounds that aren’t in Korean, and when quizzed he can say them, but he is still working out how they are used in English and sometimes defaults to the Korean adjustment of that sound. We are keeping an eye on his speech and will make sure he has some evaluations as he gets older.
Yul has not been back to Australia since 2020, so it’s difficult to check his English compared to other Australian kids. We will be visiting next year and will have a better idea of his progress.
(We show videos to Yul before we post them to make sure he is okay with them. He found this one hilarious. He also banged the keyboard and deleted the whole video accidentally! Luckily I managed to undo and get it back and export it, but there may be a random blue square that appears at some point, which I think was because of that haha.)
In this video we head to our local markets to show you the type of food we often buy from there. One of the stalls was selling dalogna, which has become internationally popular recently because of the TV show ‘Squid Game’. While this show is definitely NOT FOR KIDS, it features children’s games in it. Dalgona is a honeycomb candy where children try to get the shape out without breaking the actual shape. It’s been around for several decades but popularity had dwindled in recent years. It’s now been very much revived and apparently there have been huge lines for it as young adults are keen to try it. We were lucky to find it locally without there being big lines.
You may have heard fruit and vegetable can be expensive in Korea, and while that can be true for big supermarkets or department stores, it’s usually decent prices at markets like this and sometimes can be very cheap. Food in general at markets tends to be cheap and it’s an easy way to put together a meal for at home with a variety of meat and seafood, as well as already prepared side dishes.
Hugh and Yul try out some different food in this video, as well as attempting the dalgona game. This is probably the most natural situation we have filmed that shows how Yul is bilingual. You may notice that he uses English when talking to both of us, he will use Korean when talking to Hugh directly and English when talking to me directly. When talking to both of us he may mix some Korean and English into one sentence and this is called “code mixing” and is normal at this age. This is different from “code switching” that bilingual adults use as this is more a part of bilingual development as he learns both languages, but even at this age he is well aware of which language a word belongs to.
Yul switches between languages easily and is a similar level in both. What he speaks is not “Konglish” as I’ve seen some people say, as Konglish means English words that have been absorbed into the Korean language but have changed somewhat in meaning. Konglish is also different from English loan words in Korean, which retain their original English meaning. Yul competently speaks both languages, knows when to switch and only code mixes when he knows that we will understand. There is a lot of myths about kids and bilingualism, one of them being that they are confused, but it’s really not true at all.
It’s been hard to make any content at the moment, for example comics are just too exhausting, but when we can film a bit I can edit it into little videos. In this video we are back in the countryside to visit Hugh’s parents for the Chuseok holiday.
It’s been about 2 years since we’ve been back there and we made sure Hugh’s parents were vaccinated so the risk was low for them. It was nice to be back, but also quite exhausting for me at this stage of my pregnancy. Hugh did get a chance to fly his drone though, which is near impossible to do in Seoul without special permission. The other reason why it’s been hard to make much content lately is because firstly, we are really not going anywhere due to the current situation of the world. And secondly, Hugh is very busy with his company, so even filming at home becomes a challenge.
That said, I am glad when we can do something as it’s great to be able to look back in years to come. The charye (ancestral memorial rites ceremony) is still done by Hugh’s family, but may eventually fade out as Hugh may be unlikely to continue the tradition. But I am always happy to be included in this element of Korean culture.
We also went to the Goseong Dinosaur Museum, which we have been to before, but Yul doesn’t remember. I suspected the actual museum would be closed but at least there are the outside attractions and the real dinosaur footprint fossils to see. Yul heard me mention “museum” and got really excited because he loves museums. At least he was satisfied with everything else, but would have been nice to actually go inside the museum. So many things catered to children like museums are immediately shut in these times while places for adults stay open. While it’s been hard for everyone, children have been so negatively affected during this pandemic. Hopefully next time it will be open, and in the meantime we try to book for the Natural History Museum in Seoul when we can. I definitely miss the days of deciding to go to a museum on that day and just showing up and being able to go in!
Now that Yul is almost four, I have a better understanding of why so few families live in the countryside and prefer urban areas. The Korean countryside is not really set up for young children, at least in this area. Korea is very mountainous, so it’s great for adults that want to hike, but it means all valley areas are usually farm lands. I don’t mean the western ideal of rolling hills and space type farmland. With not much space the areas are often taken up with green houses for growing produce, sides of the roads are all irrigation ditches and many things are dangerous to children. It’s not an idyllic lifestyle.
Yul couldn’t understand why there was no convenience store or park for children there. In order to go to a park we have to cross the bridge to the next town. The one time we went to a playground, he was disappointed that there were no other children there to play with. Countryside areas no longer having families living there is a big problem these days, but I can’t blame families for moving when so many rural areas don’t have the infrastructure for raising children. You would think a rural area would have more places for children to play, but there was less than what is easily accessible for us in Seoul.
That’s some of my thoughts and perspective after living in Seoul for years and then going back to a rural area with a child. Hugh’s parents will retire in years to come and want to live closer to the sea, so will move. I’m hoping a more seaside area will at least have more public access areas that our children can enjoy in years to come when they visit.
Yul’s English has been exploding lately. He is quite confident in both English and Korean. People often ask if he favours one over the other but he doesn’t really. He just chooses what is appropriate for the situation. When playing games by himself he just decides whether it’s an English game or a Korean game and will talk to himself in that language.
However, because we live in Korea and he has a lot of exposure to other kids speaking Korean, there are some words he prefers to say in Korean, even when it’s in an English sentence. He knows the word in English too, and he knows I know what it means, so he will decide to use the Korean word instead of the English word. In this video we talk about which words they are!
In this video I show conversations in English with our son Yul. Since we live in Korea, he is of course surrounded by Korean. He hears it at daycare, he hears it in the community and Hugh speaks Korean to him. His English comes almost entirely from me and hearing Hugh and I speaking to each other in English. In the future he’ll have more English exposure as we can interact more with my family and other English speakers, but he has done really well learning English naturally from me.
I hope these videos are encouraging for other families in similar situations. I know people can worry a lot about the bilingual aspect. I also hope they help Korean families where parents do speak English and they want to introduce English to their children, but find it hard to know how to speak to children in English. There can be quite a difference between knowing how to speak a language to other adults and how to help a child learn a language. Hopefully seeing these types of examples are helpful.
Even while Hugh was helping me translate this comic, Yul was jumping on his back and demanding attention. And in case you think our child is starved for attention… he is not haha. He gets so much love and attention. He just doesn’t realise that Mummy and Appa need to talk to each other too, not just to him.
He has done this many times when Hugh comes home and I’d like to have an normal adult conversation and Yul puts his hands on our mouths and tells us to stop talking. It’s a good thing he is so adorable and it’s super cute.
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