Natural Bilingual Play with a Toddler

In this video we set up cameras and played with our son Yul as we normally would. Hugh is using Korean and I’m using English mostly, but as you can see in a natural environment we still both use words from the other language too.

People are always curious about the bilingual aspect so we wanted to show that. We also wanted to show that toddlers speak a lot of “toddlerspeak” too! Kids don’t usually just start with full sentences. There are lots of sounds and not quite words yet.

Yul gets his Korean from Hugh and the environment like our community and daycare. He hears English from me and other English speakers in Korea, as well as when he sees my family in Australia. So far this has been a good balance and he understands both languages pretty equally.

We will continue to do videos like this as it’s a nice moment to capture as well as a way to be able to see his progression with both languages.

People have some preconceived notions about kids and speaking…

Parents, whether parents of monolingual or bilingual children, always get asked “Does he/she talk yet?” And usually when the child is still young, parents have to say “Well, he can say this word, or this word and he babbles a lot”. Unfortunately there are a lot of people that don’t understand the slow process of acquiring language and think it happens overnight. I was even asked in a YouTube comment, “Does he speak in coherent sentences yet?” Well what do you consider a coherent sentence to be for a toddler?!

This can be frustrating for parents of monolingual kids, but there are even more questions about bilingual kids learning to speak.

I deliberately left the Korean untranslated in the comic to give the real feeling of interacting with a bilingual toddler. But he’s just saying things like “Mummy”, “Let’s go”, “Strawberry”, “Crocodile” and “Don’t want/ Don’t like”.

Even though there is a lot of research showing all the benefits of being bilingual, there are still a lot of misconceptions out there. People think bilingual children’s language skills are “delayed” but really they are just sorting out two different languages. Also a monolingual adult is only recognizing the words from their own language. This has caused situations where monolingual speakers can judge the number of words a child can speak and claim it’s less than the average child’s. But really, bilingual kids have the same amount of words as average, they are spread over both languages.

Only someone who speaks both languages can accurately judge if the number of words they can say is in a normal range.

Of course our son is still learning to speak and around us he knows we can understand both languages. Though I think very soon he’ll realise the limits of my Korean! He understand both languages pretty equally but his babbling sentences seem to have more Korean structure at this point. But he has been saying “No!” in English a lot more now!