Raising a multilingual kid | Our Multilingual Story | Life with 6 languages | TJ Fam #15

Hey everyone! 👋
With this video, we are finally diving into the heart of being a multi-cultural family. LANGUAGES and daily communication.
We are explaining which languages each one of us speaks and why. While we were already living a life that consisted of many languages you will see how it increased after having Kai in our lives.
#multilingualkids #multilinguallife #polyglot
⏲Timestamps⏲
00:00 Intro
00:30 Languages Tomo and Bilge speak
01:38 Kai's progress with speaking and languages
06:04 Influence of daycare in Kai's languages
09:14 How many languages Kai speaks and how
09:31 Languages in Switzerland
In the next video, we will talk more about how we are handling the complexity and share with you our best practices.
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I N S T A G R A M: / biz_minasan

[@ruizhang4231]

It's amazing Kai is growing up with six languages! It's really adorable when he's mixing up different languages when counting:) We are a Chinese and French family and we are raising our kids in four languages. I think our kids are sharing a lot of similiarities in language progressioon. Hope to see more of your multilingual stories.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Great to be connected, Rui, and learn from each other. 🤗

[@anabohanes107]

You guys also have an amazing family. Your two boys are hypnotizing =)

[@UniqueDestinations]

6 languages? Wow!! We only have 4 languages (Japanese between my husband and kids, Russian between me and the kids, English as our "common language" and French as the language in school/work). I'm curious which languages Kai will be most comfortable with as he grows 😊

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

4 languages is pretty impressive! We will update Kai's language journey here soon x

[@mehmetkurtkaya3106]

Great video Kai is very sweet and obviously talented in languages already

[@dustinholley2477]

In probably multiple videos if you would have time, I would like to understand differences and similarities between your home cultures? What led you to choose living in Switzerland rather than Turkey or Japan? On that note what led you to leave your home countries and cultures? I'm very interested in both cultures and countries and you seem like the most logical source to ask. I hope it would not be too consuming of your time as most of your videos seem to be about Kai, which I do appreciate seeing the culture and language meld. I think it could do excellence to your channel delving into these topics and raising your personal experience amd awareness to culture. Thank you for your time and consideration.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

What a thoughtful comment! Thanks for asking in details. We definitely want to get into the culture topic deeper.

[@anabohanes107]

Thank you so much for this video! We have a nine month old who will be learning 4 languages. Dad speaks Czech, I speak Spanish, family language is English and we live in Austria so environment language is German. He’s not yet exposed to German but we were getting a bit concerned if it would. Be too much since we don’t know many people who do this. It’s great to watch this video from you guys and see how Kai does so well. I’d love to watch more of these videos. Blessings to your little family.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Hi Ana, they are like sponges have no fear ❤️ my favorite example is the puzzle making video he is using his motor skills and many language skills at the same time ☺️ I will drop the link below.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/i6qpn3l_bNqYpM0

[@sibelefe4909]

İcinde bulundugunuz durum cok karisik ve bekleyip gormek lazim ufaklik cok tatli ve akilli 🧿

[@TeslaXOnTheRoad]

Hello there, we are "somewhat" of the same boat as you. The difference is, we use the "family language-community language" English is the FL & Swiss German is the CL (& all the other languages they can hear/acquire outside the house ;-) although recently, I have to nudge my husband when he responds immediately in Swiss German to our daughter. I have to say from my experience that it is very important to start establishing the family's "language system" with your eldest child as the rest of the brood will follow him/her. Happy to have found your vlog. Will definitely watch more :-)

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Thanks for sharing your experience ♥️ Eldest child advice is a gem, we didn't even think about it.

[@jahsoka8307]

You two are inspirational to me. Both my husband and I speak English fluently (only ever lived in the USA), his first language was Hmong and I want our daughter to grow up learning Hmong. I'm learning it and ironically am the main source of Hmong exposure for her.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

I didn't get to respond to this back then with a tiny human being in my arms. You go mama teaching Hmong to your daughter. How is it going?

[@StomachAcid]

That's so cool! Both of my parents are from India, and they speak different languages at home. When I was younger my parents didn't go all like, "oooooh say it in this other language!" cause I had to go to the doctor a lot, and the doctor asked me questions. My parents wanted to make sure the doctor didn't think I had some cognitive thing, so they really emphasized on me speaking English. But when I got older, I actually found out that I'm really interested in learning other languages. It's so fun!

[@kimchan382]

My Mom is a Vietnamese and Father Chinese. My first language was Cantonese and after moved to Germany Vietnamese became more and more developing. Ofcourse, German were in School and Friends (Breisgau, South West Germany close to the Swiss and French border. Now having Kids by my own, their Mom is a Finn. We are living now in Finland. Home language is in the begin German. Now Finnish and English became more and more important for them. They are starting to get interested in Asian movies and culture. Ofcourse, to be good in something you have to practicing and using it all the time. In Finland, kids have also to pick Swedish in School. I think, English and Finnish will be dominant. The other languages are only like "nice to have".

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Such mind-blowing journey of etnicities, cultures and languages. Thanks for sharing.

[@Doing_Time]

I really appreciate the similarities in your experience to mine even though you are coming from a totally different language situation. My wife and inlaws refuse to speak their native tagalog to our two girls. I read and write fluently in a few languages but I really only hear/speak english well enough to model it. So the rule for my kids was they're not allowed to watch any fictional videos in english. Since it's really hard to find child-appropriate videos in languages other than english, I had to really work hard to find a few good shows for them to watch between 1 and 4 years old when they were allowed limited screen time. I found like 10 good shows in asl, 6 good shows in german, 4 in spanish, 3 in french, 1 in italian, 1 in mandarin, 1 in tagalog...so by 2 years old my oldest seemed to understand about 5 languages and spoke english, spanish, and german while my youngest spoke fluently in asl, spanish, and english. They both could say their ABCs in 3 languages (they can't do that in anything but english now) and count to at least 10 in 6 and 3 languages respectively by 1.5 years old. Neither had delayed speech and both have very high english skills and could do very light phonetic reading in english before 4 years old. Around 5 and 3 years old respectively, after having traveled through asia for a few weeks once and attended school where peers mostly spoke street spanish, they both were comfortable conversing in english and spanish but suddenly they asked to watch specifically language learning videos, strangely enough in their weakest languages, french, mandarin, and tagalog (they also started hounding their mother to tell them how to say specific things in tagalog). After 5 the main emphases of our activities have moved away from languages and we mostly worked on art, mathematics, and computer programming languages because this is a crucial time for that in brain development. However, they still seek language learning activities as a hobby. I think they would have done better with languages if their mother had spoken only filipino to them, but I think I did the best I could do with them with my own speech limitations. It doesn't really matter to me that they remain fluent in multiple languages, I believe the connections have been made in their brains so that they will always be able to pick up languages easily whenever they need them. The biggest surprises in the process for me were that 1) there were no speech delays and 2) they almost never mixed languages within sentences, though they would regularly respond to a question in a different language than the one from which it was asked at 1 to 3 years old (by 3.5 years they exclusively answered us in English no matter what language we asked from, but they answer peers and each other in the same language asked).

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Thanks for sharing your experience. Our similarities give us confidence and relief! It is already great your kids can handle so many languages 🌸

[@elifcnar435]

Burasi değerlenir

[@Bolshoytsheburek]

Hoi zäme! Cool, Kai isch en mega herzige! I was also raised with Multi-languages (Swiss-german, German, Russian, Crimean-Tatar, Turkish, English and a bit french which I don’t count). I’m 28 years old and what I can say out of my life exp. is, that it can be a bless but also a curse. It took me longer time to get a word pool (Wortschatz) like my friends in school. I kinda suffered, but maybe it’s because of my adhd. But at the university I realised that it’s a bless. And I am grateful that my parents raises me up like you raising up Kai. My Suggestion there is a book on psychological development of children. They have also studies of language development ( Robert Kail, Children and their Development, global edition) I hope that I could help you. I wish the best for that Kai. Take care 😊

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

Hoi Can! Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Lovely language mix you have. And we will look at the book you are suggesting. Merci viel mal!

[@ertugrulgaziaydn1168]

Kai is so cute 😊 Kai は可愛すぎる😊 Kai çok tatlı 😊 Also he is very smart そして、彼はとても頭がいいです。 Ayrıca çok zeki 😊

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

ありがとうございます！

[@putalaweamala7191]

He will have to learn four languages at a very young age. I'm curious to know which language he will use the most on a daily basis as he grows up.

[@TurkishJapaneseFamily]

At the moment he uses Swiss German the most and we have a feeling it will stay that way 🤓

[@helinika]

Wonderful story :)