Spanish or Mandarin immersion for our toddler?
September 5, 2023 11:43 AM Subscribe
We have an 18mo toddler and are trying to plan their future, as one does. Our current quandary is whether to send them to Spanish or Mandarin immersion schools (which will then influence our daycare/pre-K choices).
My wife and I both took Spanish in high school, and my parents moved to South America, so Spanish is looking preferable; OTOH the Mandarin schools are much closer to us. I read the past questions about full-immersion schooling and it was all overwhelmingly positive, this is something we do want to pursue, I just have no clue about the real-world, future applicability of either language. I'd love to hear anecdotes or data to help us decide.
The local school district offers full-immersion Spanish for grades K-5, or dual-language Mandarin/English for grades K-5 (or full-immersion French for grades 6-12 but then we'd need to something extra-curricular until then).
There is also a private school that offers full-immersion Mandarin (and follows Quaker Education) for grades K-8.
If you have other suggestions, let's hear them too.
My wife and I both took Spanish in high school, and my parents moved to South America, so Spanish is looking preferable; OTOH the Mandarin schools are much closer to us. I read the past questions about full-immersion schooling and it was all overwhelmingly positive, this is something we do want to pursue, I just have no clue about the real-world, future applicability of either language. I'd love to hear anecdotes or data to help us decide.
The local school district offers full-immersion Spanish for grades K-5, or dual-language Mandarin/English for grades K-5 (or full-immersion French for grades 6-12 but then we'd need to something extra-curricular until then).
There is also a private school that offers full-immersion Mandarin (and follows Quaker Education) for grades K-8.
If you have other suggestions, let's hear them too.
Similar to Praemunire, I'd encourage choosing the language that is more widely used in your city, family, and/or immediate community. If your child encounters the language in everyday life outside of school it's more likely to stick with them long-term — and it's just more useful generally!
From the details in your question it sounds like that equation leans heavily in favor of Spanish — although if there's a very large Mandarin-speaking community in your area, and very few Spanish speakers, that could potentially sway things in the other direction.
Speaking as someone who has studied several languages, including Mandarin and Spanish — but the only ones I speak passably are the ones I use on a daily basis (currently, French and English).
posted by mekily at 12:23 PM on September 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
From the details in your question it sounds like that equation leans heavily in favor of Spanish — although if there's a very large Mandarin-speaking community in your area, and very few Spanish speakers, that could potentially sway things in the other direction.
Speaking as someone who has studied several languages, including Mandarin and Spanish — but the only ones I speak passably are the ones I use on a daily basis (currently, French and English).
posted by mekily at 12:23 PM on September 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
My kids are in Mandarin immersion right now. I think it's harder to learn Mandarin than Spanish for English speakers, so it seemed like the benefits of early immersion in Mandarin kept more doors open in that if they wanted to learn Spanish later on it would be still be a possibility; I don't think the reverse is quite as easy.
posted by thewumpusisdead at 12:51 PM on September 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by thewumpusisdead at 12:51 PM on September 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
Our kids are in Mandarin immersion as well and I'd echo what thewumpusisdead said about the relative ease of learning Spanish as an adult.
Also, because there are so many native Spanish speakers in the U.S. and it's fairly easy to acquire, Spanish language skills are much less likely to open significant employment opportunities in the future. But speaking and reading Mandarin is much more likely to stand out.
posted by limagringo at 12:56 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
Also, because there are so many native Spanish speakers in the U.S. and it's fairly easy to acquire, Spanish language skills are much less likely to open significant employment opportunities in the future. But speaking and reading Mandarin is much more likely to stand out.
posted by limagringo at 12:56 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
My kids were in Spanish immersion schools and had a good experience. A friend had a kid in a Mandarin immersion school and had a very bad experience — the impression I got from him was that the teachers and administration thought of the school as a way for American children from Chinese families to preserve their heritage, and weren’t super happy about teaching the occasional Anglo kid who signed up. The kid didn’t learn Mandarin or anything else for a couple of years until he was pulled out.
That was one bad school (or, bad for white kids, but I don’t know that your kid is white) but I’d tour the schools and avoid anyplace where you get a feeling that might be the dynamic.
posted by LizardBreath at 1:11 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
That was one bad school (or, bad for white kids, but I don’t know that your kid is white) but I’d tour the schools and avoid anyplace where you get a feeling that might be the dynamic.
posted by LizardBreath at 1:11 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
China is not going away. I think it would be really useful to speak Mandarin, (I've read too much William Gibson). But agreed, with your South American connections, Spanish seems useful. I wish I could speak either, but all I've got is a little French. Mon Dieu!
Oh, I see you are Bellevue. That changes my thinking a bit. I think the Mandarin speaking population is only going to go up on the eastside. When I used to be there frequently, I heard a lot of Mandarin.
We have so many Spanish speakers, I really wish I could speak Spanish, I get a word or two here and there. But when I hear Mandarin, I hear nothing but gibberish. I have to think it is more difficult to learn. If you are going immersion, I echo limagringo above, might as well bite the bullet.
posted by Windopaene at 1:16 PM on September 5, 2023
Oh, I see you are Bellevue. That changes my thinking a bit. I think the Mandarin speaking population is only going to go up on the eastside. When I used to be there frequently, I heard a lot of Mandarin.
We have so many Spanish speakers, I really wish I could speak Spanish, I get a word or two here and there. But when I hear Mandarin, I hear nothing but gibberish. I have to think it is more difficult to learn. If you are going immersion, I echo limagringo above, might as well bite the bullet.
posted by Windopaene at 1:16 PM on September 5, 2023
Yes, Spanish is easier to learn. Several people suggested that is a reason to start with Mandarin, with the option to learn Spanish later. I would think the opposite: Even successful Mandarin study is unlikely to result in fluency*, whereas it is likely to do so for Spanish. Similarly, there's a high likelihood of Spanish being professionally useful because it's so common, but as limagringo notes, many more potential employees will have the same skill. For both reasons, Mandarin seems like a riskier approach: A relatively small chance of huge benefits, compared to Spanish, which has a large chance of significant but smaller benefits. (*Anecdotal evidence only, based on a conversation with a parent of a child who's been in immersion for 10 years.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:21 PM on September 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:21 PM on September 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
Yeah, now after reading LizardBreath's post, don't go to one of those programs, go Spanish if they act like that.
posted by Windopaene at 1:24 PM on September 5, 2023
posted by Windopaene at 1:24 PM on September 5, 2023
it's fairly easy to acquire, Spanish language skills are much less likely to open significant employment opportunities in the future
Au contraire. There is a demand for Spanish speakers wherever there is a significant Spanish community, which is big swathes of the U.S. and almost every city of significant size. Spanish fluency is a particular plus for professionals who interact regularly with the public. For example, I see many jobs in public interest law in which Spanish is preferred or even required. In most (not all, obviously) parts of the U.S., if you're looking to add some language capacity to your services, you're going to start with Spanish. There's much less demand for Mandarin speakers outside of certain geographic areas and some narrow professional contexts.
Also, "fairly easy to acquire," let's not kid ourselves here--for an adult to acquire any language to a level of relative fluency is going to require several years of hard work. Mandarin poses additional challenges for native English speakers because it's tone-based and uses a different writing system, but, man, I wish I could just take classes for a year and be fluent in Spanish!
posted by praemunire at 1:40 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
Au contraire. There is a demand for Spanish speakers wherever there is a significant Spanish community, which is big swathes of the U.S. and almost every city of significant size. Spanish fluency is a particular plus for professionals who interact regularly with the public. For example, I see many jobs in public interest law in which Spanish is preferred or even required. In most (not all, obviously) parts of the U.S., if you're looking to add some language capacity to your services, you're going to start with Spanish. There's much less demand for Mandarin speakers outside of certain geographic areas and some narrow professional contexts.
Also, "fairly easy to acquire," let's not kid ourselves here--for an adult to acquire any language to a level of relative fluency is going to require several years of hard work. Mandarin poses additional challenges for native English speakers because it's tone-based and uses a different writing system, but, man, I wish I could just take classes for a year and be fluent in Spanish!
posted by praemunire at 1:40 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
I’d lean toward Spanish but that’s just a personal bias from a person who speaks Spanish as a second language and it has influenced the course of my life. Probably in your shoes I’d visit the schools and see what they feel like. Culturally a LatAm focused school and a Chinese focused school and parent community may be very different and may match differently with your home’s culture, your parenting values and your kid’s personality. There’s no wrong decision here.
posted by vunder at 2:01 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by vunder at 2:01 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
You'd rank it serious/effective Mandarin immersion --> Spanish immersion --> bogus Mandarin immersion.
Only a rare and truly terrible Spanish immersion program produces kids who don't have proficiency.
By contrast, easy for a Mandarin immersion program to get nowhere. Even starting as a kid, it is hard for a non-native speaker to develop a proficient tongue and ear and (for characters) hand and eye. Before you pick the Mandarin program you should be sure that most of the graduates are heading into middle school with actual proficiencies.
posted by MattD at 2:14 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
Only a rare and truly terrible Spanish immersion program produces kids who don't have proficiency.
By contrast, easy for a Mandarin immersion program to get nowhere. Even starting as a kid, it is hard for a non-native speaker to develop a proficient tongue and ear and (for characters) hand and eye. Before you pick the Mandarin program you should be sure that most of the graduates are heading into middle school with actual proficiencies.
posted by MattD at 2:14 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
I agree with everyone saying that Mandarin immersion can end up being futile.
I have learned mandarin to fluency as an adult and have seen a lot of mandarin language learners. Most everyone I have met that didn't speak Mandarin at home who did mandarin immersion programs as a kid ended up losing their Mandarin with time-- there's just very limited opportunity to use it in the US.
Any kind of proficiency is going to be gone basically immediately once the kid stops needing to use it and was barely there to begin with. Chinese people also generally do not like speaking Mandarin with non-Chinese people, especially outside of China.
You can make it stick but I think you will probably need to be aggressive about tutors and sending them abroad during the summers, stuff that who knows if the kid will even be up for.
Spanish is much more useful in the US (at least as of now ) especially in healthcare. Unless they get a career that is specific to China (pretty rare imo) Chinese probably wont end up being professionally that useful to them in the US and will be something they will have to painstakingly maintain their entire lives if they want consistently high levels of fluency.
posted by Res0ndf7 at 2:33 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
I have learned mandarin to fluency as an adult and have seen a lot of mandarin language learners. Most everyone I have met that didn't speak Mandarin at home who did mandarin immersion programs as a kid ended up losing their Mandarin with time-- there's just very limited opportunity to use it in the US.
Any kind of proficiency is going to be gone basically immediately once the kid stops needing to use it and was barely there to begin with. Chinese people also generally do not like speaking Mandarin with non-Chinese people, especially outside of China.
You can make it stick but I think you will probably need to be aggressive about tutors and sending them abroad during the summers, stuff that who knows if the kid will even be up for.
Spanish is much more useful in the US (at least as of now ) especially in healthcare. Unless they get a career that is specific to China (pretty rare imo) Chinese probably wont end up being professionally that useful to them in the US and will be something they will have to painstakingly maintain their entire lives if they want consistently high levels of fluency.
posted by Res0ndf7 at 2:33 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
Spanish (disclaimer: it is my L2).
Chinese and its usefulness is dependent on one country.
Not so for español
posted by falsedmitri at 3:22 PM on September 5, 2023
Chinese and its usefulness is dependent on one country.
Not so for español
posted by falsedmitri at 3:22 PM on September 5, 2023
I'm always interested at responses around language learning geared around future employment-- that's pretty far off! And at least anecdotally, as a multilingual 2nd gen Chinese-American, has not seemed to be something that has given a huge career boost to the more fluent folks in my friend group (exceptions: actually looking at working abroad), though it sometimes does come up as a topic of conversation at interviews. If possible, I would not focus on job or career path but how the 2nd language will enrich your child's life as a whole-- relationships with your family, relationships with close community, art, literature, internet memes (which I will say Chinese internet memes/puns can be pretty great) etc. And of course travel: if you have any plans to travel with your child to mainland China (I'd recommend against it currently), Taiwan, Singapore.... or Mexico, Bolivia, Peru... you get the picture.
As a person with a professional interest in language acquisition though, I'm going to echo a lot of other people here: whatever language you think your child will have the most on-going exposure to (not just in school!) is going to best. If there's a chance that you'll be spending any summers visiting grandma and grandpa in a Spanish-speaking country, then yeah, choose Spanish! Your own language backgrounds should also help keep you engaged and able to keep up with whatever your child is learning, at least at the daycare-K level. (i.e., be able to jump into singing "los pollitos dicen, pio pio pio" whenever they ask for it; this will be harder for you to do with something like 小兔子乖乖. )
Learning up a language to a fluent level and keeping it there is a hugely intensive task, which people don't do unless they are motivated. While in an immersion environment, you'll learn as long as it's the only option at times (sink-or-swim), but you're going to need more personalized motivation as immersion lessens. (Which it will, as soon as they can play more independently with friends, or eventually jump into the wild west of the internet.)
posted by hazelscribe at 3:28 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
As a person with a professional interest in language acquisition though, I'm going to echo a lot of other people here: whatever language you think your child will have the most on-going exposure to (not just in school!) is going to best. If there's a chance that you'll be spending any summers visiting grandma and grandpa in a Spanish-speaking country, then yeah, choose Spanish! Your own language backgrounds should also help keep you engaged and able to keep up with whatever your child is learning, at least at the daycare-K level. (i.e., be able to jump into singing "los pollitos dicen, pio pio pio" whenever they ask for it; this will be harder for you to do with something like 小兔子乖乖. )
Learning up a language to a fluent level and keeping it there is a hugely intensive task, which people don't do unless they are motivated. While in an immersion environment, you'll learn as long as it's the only option at times (sink-or-swim), but you're going to need more personalized motivation as immersion lessens. (Which it will, as soon as they can play more independently with friends, or eventually jump into the wild west of the internet.)
posted by hazelscribe at 3:28 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
My nephew went to a Mandarin-immersion school from K-5; he's able to keep it up because his middle and high school offer a few classes in Chinese for those students, including math and science. The culture in his K-5 immersion school was quite strict, with a lot of homework even at a young age. His younger brother only lasted a year there, as he's not cut out for so much structure and rigidity. His teachers hailed from China, and I think their educational culture is more serious/strict than ours. Something you might want to look into if you choose the Mandarin school and have a kid that wouldn't do well with that!
posted by leftover_scrabble_rack at 3:42 PM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by leftover_scrabble_rack at 3:42 PM on September 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
My older kid was in a fairly high quality public Mandarin immersion program from K-4 and my younger one was there for K-3 before leaving during the pandemic.
The school they were at is a K-12 school with a lot of rigor, but my understanding is that few graduates, even those who were there K-12, graduate with anything approaching fluency and their reading skills lag significantly because it is just so hard to get to a level where you can read age-appropriate material.
Our experience was similar to leftover_scrabble_rack's in terms of school culture, with the added fun bonus that many of the teachers really struggled with classroom management whenever there were students with difficult behaviors. Our older child actually did well with the structure and mostly did well with the rigor, but really struggled with the classroom chaos. Our younger child seemed to be having a better experience, but left because of the pandemic (we could not hack 6-7 hours a day of synchronous remote learning) and ultimately did not want to go back.
The kids are now 12 and 15 and neither has any interest in Mandarin and they remember very little. I think if they had been in a Spanish immersion program they would likely still have a reasonable level of proficiency in Spanish because I think they would have been better Spanish speakers after 4/5 years than they were Mandarin speaker, I think they would have been able to read age-appropriate books in Spanish to help maintain their proficiency and grow their vocabularies, and as a person with rudimentary Spanish but no prior experience with Mandarin it would have been much easier for me to find opportunities to reinforce their Spanish.
TL/DR - Our kids were in a Mandarin immersion program, but they no longer retain any Mandarin skill or interest and I wish we could have put them in a Spanish immersion program instead.
posted by ElizaMain at 4:46 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
The school they were at is a K-12 school with a lot of rigor, but my understanding is that few graduates, even those who were there K-12, graduate with anything approaching fluency and their reading skills lag significantly because it is just so hard to get to a level where you can read age-appropriate material.
Our experience was similar to leftover_scrabble_rack's in terms of school culture, with the added fun bonus that many of the teachers really struggled with classroom management whenever there were students with difficult behaviors. Our older child actually did well with the structure and mostly did well with the rigor, but really struggled with the classroom chaos. Our younger child seemed to be having a better experience, but left because of the pandemic (we could not hack 6-7 hours a day of synchronous remote learning) and ultimately did not want to go back.
The kids are now 12 and 15 and neither has any interest in Mandarin and they remember very little. I think if they had been in a Spanish immersion program they would likely still have a reasonable level of proficiency in Spanish because I think they would have been better Spanish speakers after 4/5 years than they were Mandarin speaker, I think they would have been able to read age-appropriate books in Spanish to help maintain their proficiency and grow their vocabularies, and as a person with rudimentary Spanish but no prior experience with Mandarin it would have been much easier for me to find opportunities to reinforce their Spanish.
TL/DR - Our kids were in a Mandarin immersion program, but they no longer retain any Mandarin skill or interest and I wish we could have put them in a Spanish immersion program instead.
posted by ElizaMain at 4:46 PM on September 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
I also think it’s worth emphasizing that exposure to multiple languages is considered great for kids’s cognitive functions even if it does not lead to fluency or lifelong skills in the non household language. And any great (or even good) preschool program is better than any bad one. And language immersion preschool does not require you to continue to immersion elementary school if that is not a good match for your kid/family.
posted by vunder at 7:22 PM on September 5, 2023
posted by vunder at 7:22 PM on September 5, 2023
I work with multilingual children and teens in an educational setting. Choose Spanish. A few reasons why:
- Spanish being alphabetic like English means Spanish will simply be much easier and faster for your child to learn to read in, and thus independently write and speak in, than Chinese. With the Spanish knowledge you as parents already have, you can teach your child to read in Spanish using basically the same phonics methods you’d use for English literacy development. The orthography of Spanish is actually less complex than English in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondence: in English, “e” has a lot of possible pronunciations but this isn’t true in Spanish, where “e” is basically always pronounced like the “e” in “el” or “esos”.
- People teaching Spanish (and Italian and Greek and Turkish and all other alphabetic languages) around the world are using the same proven phonics methodologies as folks teaching English are. Do the Chinese-immersion settings you’re looking at manage to get children like yours, without Chinese-literate and Chinese-fluent family members at home, to some semblance of Chinese literacy beyond pinyin (that is, reading and writing the characters) as well as oral fluency?
- Relatedly, if the quality, depth and amount of content your child learns in school is important, do not underestimate the intellectual challenge that is posed by learning about local history or times tables or the water cycle or even the rules of today’s PE games in a language your child cannot easily read in and that you as their parent cannot read or speak at all. With your present knowledge of Spanish, it would be trivial to help your child navigate unclear areas of the content or instructions of schoolwork only available in Spanish; this wouldn’t be true with Chinese.
- Any English speaker can type in Spanish pretty much instantly if you’re used to an English keyboard and can find the tilde and the accent marks. This isn’t true for Chinese; you can certainly type “da” on the Chinese pinyin keyboard on your phone, but should you choose 大 or 打?
- The practical achievability of Spanish literacy/fluency and the ease of your recognizing your child’s success here is important not only for your child’s linguistic knowledge later in life, but to make sure they know you can keep them safe and happy at school every day. You want your child to be able to report problems to you, or to teachers or staff, and not feel unable to (or even forbidden to) communicate during “immersion time” about something they must share because they feel unsafe. Isolation and bullying feels like a higher risk in a setting where being a competent user of the community language is harder for your child to demonstrate or for you to evaluate. What would a chat with the principal or an email to the school look like if your child was being bullied in Chinese and neither they nor you could write it down?
- There are probably going to be a lot more choices for Spanish-language children’s books in your local library, Spanish-language activities at local children’s museums, and Spanish-language places to participate as a family in art and cultural classes.
Good luck!
posted by mdonley at 8:45 PM on September 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
- Spanish being alphabetic like English means Spanish will simply be much easier and faster for your child to learn to read in, and thus independently write and speak in, than Chinese. With the Spanish knowledge you as parents already have, you can teach your child to read in Spanish using basically the same phonics methods you’d use for English literacy development. The orthography of Spanish is actually less complex than English in terms of phoneme-grapheme correspondence: in English, “e” has a lot of possible pronunciations but this isn’t true in Spanish, where “e” is basically always pronounced like the “e” in “el” or “esos”.
- People teaching Spanish (and Italian and Greek and Turkish and all other alphabetic languages) around the world are using the same proven phonics methodologies as folks teaching English are. Do the Chinese-immersion settings you’re looking at manage to get children like yours, without Chinese-literate and Chinese-fluent family members at home, to some semblance of Chinese literacy beyond pinyin (that is, reading and writing the characters) as well as oral fluency?
- Relatedly, if the quality, depth and amount of content your child learns in school is important, do not underestimate the intellectual challenge that is posed by learning about local history or times tables or the water cycle or even the rules of today’s PE games in a language your child cannot easily read in and that you as their parent cannot read or speak at all. With your present knowledge of Spanish, it would be trivial to help your child navigate unclear areas of the content or instructions of schoolwork only available in Spanish; this wouldn’t be true with Chinese.
- Any English speaker can type in Spanish pretty much instantly if you’re used to an English keyboard and can find the tilde and the accent marks. This isn’t true for Chinese; you can certainly type “da” on the Chinese pinyin keyboard on your phone, but should you choose 大 or 打?
- The practical achievability of Spanish literacy/fluency and the ease of your recognizing your child’s success here is important not only for your child’s linguistic knowledge later in life, but to make sure they know you can keep them safe and happy at school every day. You want your child to be able to report problems to you, or to teachers or staff, and not feel unable to (or even forbidden to) communicate during “immersion time” about something they must share because they feel unsafe. Isolation and bullying feels like a higher risk in a setting where being a competent user of the community language is harder for your child to demonstrate or for you to evaluate. What would a chat with the principal or an email to the school look like if your child was being bullied in Chinese and neither they nor you could write it down?
- There are probably going to be a lot more choices for Spanish-language children’s books in your local library, Spanish-language activities at local children’s museums, and Spanish-language places to participate as a family in art and cultural classes.
Good luck!
posted by mdonley at 8:45 PM on September 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
A language acquired as a young child will only stick if your child continues to use it. Spanish is far easier to use in the US, but even so I lost much of my fluency after I stopped taking classes in college.
That said, any additional language will help with learning other languages later.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 11:20 PM on September 5, 2023
That said, any additional language will help with learning other languages later.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 11:20 PM on September 5, 2023
Are there any learning disabilities or challenges that run in the family? If so, one language might be preferable over another. For instance, if executive function issues run in the family, Spanish might be preferable so that parents can play an active role in the after school homework routine.
posted by oceano at 6:24 PM on September 6, 2023
posted by oceano at 6:24 PM on September 6, 2023
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by praemunire at 11:55 AM on September 5, 2023 [18 favorites]