raising children to speak the minority language of only one parent?

Post date: 2018-11-12 05:39:24

I'm in NYC. I would like my children to learn Mandarin, but my wife does not speak it at all and I speak it only poorly. We don't regularly socialize with people who speak Mandarin except my family. What are the minimal lifestyle changes we need to make in order to give our kids a good shot at learning Mandarin? Complications inside.

Mandarin is actually a second language for my family. We natively speak a less common dialect of Chinese. My parents are fluent, but find it effortful enough that they will easily lapse into their native dialect. I have a bit of an accent from that other dialect, and my vocabulary is pretty limited to domestic matters. I could not discuss my work or even my kids' homework. I would ideally like my children to speak Mandarin better than I do.

My wife doesn't have any Chinese language background at all. She's been taking lessons for about a year, but ninety minutes once a week isn't helping much. We can't chat at home in Mandarin yet because it's too easy for me to use words and grammar that she doesn't know, and she can't pronounce the words well enough for me to understand what she means. (She only speaks English, so most of the phonemes are different and the tone system is totally foreign. Our goal for her study of Mandarin is only to allow me to speak Mandarin to our kids without excluding her from the conversation.)

Also, neither of us socialize with any Mandarin speakers. When I moved to this city, I fell into an exclusively English-speaking hobby that is now almost the entirety of my social circle and my life outside of work. I am in the (multi-year) process of certifying to teach this hobby. And my fellow hobbyists are in many ways a lovely environment for raising kids. If I stay in this hobby, my kids will have a peer group and kids' camps for a wholesome and family-friendly activity with people whose values are mostly in line with mine. But they won't meet any Mandarin-speakers that way.

I don't know what to do. It seems clear that our current setup is not going to produce children who can converse with their relatives or shop in Chinatown or reap any of the supposed professional benefits of Mandarin fluency. What does the hive mind recommend?

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