We often go to the Natural History Museum near us in Seoul. It’s always fun for the kids and they enjoy the animal displays. Yul has started copying what Hugh does though, which is commenting on what animals he would like to eat. However, they are not the only ones who do it while there! I definitely hear others talking about what sea creatures, in particular, taste good. At least these just the taxidermy animals. I think it’s more annoying when it’s at a zoo or wildlife park.
There are cultural and historical reasons why Koreans seem obsessed with food. I can’t go into all the detail here, but it’s less weird to me now, after living in Korea for 10 years. But I have seen comments from those part of the Korean diaspora who can get quite angry at older relatives who make comments like this.
This comic has the English and Korean combined as that is how the moment is in real life. The bigger font is always the language that it was spoken in. This is a conversation in Korean but I am responding in English.
Also, a reminder that the majority of the conversation around my comics, now happens on social media rather than comment section here.
Yul is learning Korean reading and writing at school but I am teaching him to read English at home. I wasn’t raised bilingual so when I was learning to read as a child, I didn’t have this awareness of different languages that Yul has. The Korean language is almost completely phonetic and is quite easy to read but in comparison, English can seem like a mess. Koreans also know their history about King Sejong and the development of Hangul, so perhaps that’s why Yul was also asking about who invented English. Maybe when he is older he will learn to appreciate all the influences English has and how it grew and changed over time.
A challenge for parents raising kids to be bilingual is maintaining the interest in both language, so they continue learning both. As Yul is now in elementary school, there is a big focus on Korean, so he possibly feels like learning to read in English is much slower and more boring. I also try not to pressure too much because I want him to discover how amazing reading is for himself. I was a voracious reader as a child, and I want my children to also have that escape from the world too. We are lucky to have an English kids library close by to where we live in Seoul and Yul enjoys visiting it. Hopefully it is just a matter of time before English seems a bit less stupid.
We filmed a video to give an update on our son Yul’s language process.
Hello everyone! Finally a bilingual update video! We tried to get it as natural as possible but of course can never be completely like a normal conversation at home.
Our bilingual method:
We do “one parent, one language” method but with flexibility.
Nichola speaks English with Yul and Hugh speaks Korean with him. Nichola and Hugh speak mostly English to each other, so Yul constantly hears English conversation.
Within the community Yul is hearing mostly Korean. He goes to a completely Korean daycare/preschool but they also have some English classes a few times a week. Multicultural families are offered free Korean classes for kids in Korea, so he also attends Korean class twice a week. Even though he is a native Korean speaker, he goes to them to make sure there are no gaps in his learning. The teacher also caters to what he needs or what we ask. For example, there is a whole element of culture and manners in Korea that children are taught but what Nichola, as a foreigner, might not be able to instinctively instill in him. So the teacher is making sure they know manners and bowing etc. He really enjoys his Korean classes because the teacher makes them very fun.
Nichola will sometimes use Korean with Yul in public, as a way of showing others that he can speak Korean, and to not just use English with him. It’s a way of signalling that although Yul’s mother is obviously a foreigner, that he is a Korean child, and to treat him as one.
Hugh does the opposite sometimes to show that Yul can speak English too.
Nichola can participate in basic conversations in Korean and can understand the general gist of Korean but has to answer in English at home usually. This is for Yul’s benefit and because the focus on English means she doesn’t have opportunity to develop speaking skills at a higher level yet.
We are working on Yul changing using his own name to “I” at the moment in English. Nichola often corrects him gently, but didn’t during this video. While it’s something that is normal around this age, it’s also something to get kids to adjust to.
At the moment Yul is still working out the difference between English words in English and English loan words in Korean. Sometimes he will say a Korean pronunciation of an English word that is used in Korean, but he wasn’t sure of the English pronunciation in English. That’s something that gets corrected gently as he still needs to know how to pronounce loan words how Koreans do, rather than never saying them at all. He can have a few issues with pronouncing some English sounds that aren’t in Korean, and when quizzed he can say them, but he is still working out how they are used in English and sometimes defaults to the Korean adjustment of that sound. We are keeping an eye on his speech and will make sure he has some evaluations as he gets older.
Yul has not been back to Australia since 2020, so it’s difficult to check his English compared to other Australian kids. We will be visiting next year and will have a better idea of his progress.
(We show videos to Yul before we post them to make sure he is okay with them. He found this one hilarious. He also banged the keyboard and deleted the whole video accidentally! Luckily I managed to undo and get it back and export it, but there may be a random blue square that appears at some point, which I think was because of that haha.)
In this video we head to our local markets to show you the type of food we often buy from there. One of the stalls was selling dalogna, which has become internationally popular recently because of the TV show ‘Squid Game’. While this show is definitely NOT FOR KIDS, it features children’s games in it. Dalgona is a honeycomb candy where children try to get the shape out without breaking the actual shape. It’s been around for several decades but popularity had dwindled in recent years. It’s now been very much revived and apparently there have been huge lines for it as young adults are keen to try it. We were lucky to find it locally without there being big lines.
You may have heard fruit and vegetable can be expensive in Korea, and while that can be true for big supermarkets or department stores, it’s usually decent prices at markets like this and sometimes can be very cheap. Food in general at markets tends to be cheap and it’s an easy way to put together a meal for at home with a variety of meat and seafood, as well as already prepared side dishes.
Hugh and Yul try out some different food in this video, as well as attempting the dalgona game. This is probably the most natural situation we have filmed that shows how Yul is bilingual. You may notice that he uses English when talking to both of us, he will use Korean when talking to Hugh directly and English when talking to me directly. When talking to both of us he may mix some Korean and English into one sentence and this is called “code mixing” and is normal at this age. This is different from “code switching” that bilingual adults use as this is more a part of bilingual development as he learns both languages, but even at this age he is well aware of which language a word belongs to.
Yul switches between languages easily and is a similar level in both. What he speaks is not “Konglish” as I’ve seen some people say, as Konglish means English words that have been absorbed into the Korean language but have changed somewhat in meaning. Konglish is also different from English loan words in Korean, which retain their original English meaning. Yul competently speaks both languages, knows when to switch and only code mixes when he knows that we will understand. There is a lot of myths about kids and bilingualism, one of them being that they are confused, but it’s really not true at all.
In this video I show conversations in English with our son Yul. Since we live in Korea, he is of course surrounded by Korean. He hears it at daycare, he hears it in the community and Hugh speaks Korean to him. His English comes almost entirely from me and hearing Hugh and I speaking to each other in English. In the future he’ll have more English exposure as we can interact more with my family and other English speakers, but he has done really well learning English naturally from me.
I hope these videos are encouraging for other families in similar situations. I know people can worry a lot about the bilingual aspect. I also hope they help Korean families where parents do speak English and they want to introduce English to their children, but find it hard to know how to speak to children in English. There can be quite a difference between knowing how to speak a language to other adults and how to help a child learn a language. Hopefully seeing these types of examples are helpful.
Even while Hugh was helping me translate this comic, Yul was jumping on his back and demanding attention. And in case you think our child is starved for attention… he is not haha. He gets so much love and attention. He just doesn’t realise that Mummy and Appa need to talk to each other too, not just to him.
He has done this many times when Hugh comes home and I’d like to have an normal adult conversation and Yul puts his hands on our mouths and tells us to stop talking. It’s a good thing he is so adorable and it’s super cute.
In this video we talk about some myths about bilingualism, in particular the myth that children must be confused if learning more than one language. What we have found is it’s actually us as parents who get the most confused. As an English speaking Australian I have experience with English toddler talk, but Hugh, as a Korean, doesn’t have much experience hearing little children talk. So some things our son Yul says in English make no sense to Hugh, but to me I know it’s just a little kid way of saying something. And it goes the opposite way as well, some Korean things Yul says I either don’t understand or takes me a few moments to realise what he is saying.
We talk about much more in the video as well so please check it out! I hope it’s helpful for other parents in a similar situation as us.
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