Educating Fuzu: Part III

Fuzu lives in Japan. He has been attending a Japanese nursery school since the age of 7 months, he is now 2 1/2 years old. End result... he speaks Japanese.

I speak to him in ONLY English. He understands everything I say but almost always replies in Japanese, until recently...

Seeing that Fuzu had reached a stage at which he could communicate verbally (in Japanese) almost anything and everything he wanted to say, and at the same time was able to repeat whole utterances in either language, it seemed to me a good time to push his productive English language ability. How did I do it? By being stubborn I guess you could say. Here are some example conversations below (italics represents Japanese words)

F: doco?
G: Where is it?
F: doco?
G: Where is it?
F: Where is it?
G: Under the table.


F: nani shiteiru?
G: What are you doing?
F: nani shiteiru?
G: What are you doing?
F: What are you doing?
G: Setting the table.

and so on like this... every time he asked me something in Japanese I would repeat it in English until he said it in English, and then I would answer. Now on day one I had to say most things three times before he would repeat them to me. But by day 2 and 3 of this routine I was down to only twice, and by the end of the first week, he would often be reapeating after the first time, and even asking some of the questions in English directly, without going through me. Intersetingly enough he chose only some words to use directly. "Where is it?" and "How do you do it?" came quite easily, but "What's this?" he just didn't want to let go of the Japanese version.

In this first week I also started repeating some of the things he would say in Japanese that weren't questions:

F: purarairu yaritai
G: I wanna play with my trains.
F: I wanna play my trains.

F: isshoni asobou
G: Let's play together.
F: Together.
G: Let's play together.
F: Let's play together.

By the end of the second week some of these common expressions were also coming out directly. One of his favorite and earliest memorized ones was "Daddy, come over here!" So much so that I almost wished I hadn't taught him.

In Japanese you often speak of yourself in the third person.

F: Fuzuki wants to eat it.
G: I wanna eat it.
F: I wanna eat it.

So getting him familiar with the use of 'I' and 'you' has been difficult. Case in point:

F: Fuzuki jusu nomitai
G: You wanna drink juice?
F: You wanna drink juice.
G: I wanna drink juice.
F: No, Fuzuki wanna drink juice! (getting mad!)

But slowly he is coming around to be able to distiguish between a prompt and an actual expression that I am teaching him to use.

It's been a month now and it is truly amazing how much he has picked up!!! He always seems keen to try speaking in English, although sometimes obviously frustrated, it's usually more a of a game, a kind of 'can I say it' challenge.

Last weekend was very rewarding. As a family we got together with 10 other families to go the beach for a sand castle building competition and BBQ. There were a number of other non-Japanese kids and parents in the group. Fuzuki clearly distinguised between the two languages by asking English questions to the 'foreign' dads, and Japanese to the Japanese.

We'll keep you updated on his progress!