Tetsu’s Road to Multiligualism (Part I: 0-6 years-old)

Early in this blog, I guess I should start by telling you about myself, and the easiest way is of course, in a chronological description, which I will divide into a six-part series. You can read those that correspond to your age and get ideas for yourself, or perhaps you can read the earlier ones for inspirations on how to raise your kids. Of course, these are overviews, but if you would like me to develop certain examples in more detail or have other requests, please let me know! So here goes.



My father is from Taiwan and my mother is from Japan. Question 1: How did they meet? Well, my father left Taiwan in his twenties to work in the Hong Kong movie industry, while mom was working for an airline at that time. See the connection? (pun intended…) Didn’t think so. Well, you see since my dad spoke Japanese, he was also doing some side work as a tour guide catering to Japanese tourists. And since mom was working in the airline business at the time, given the wonderful perks of flying anywhere you want practically for free, an innocent weekend shopping trip to Hong Kong would change her life forever. By a stuntman disguised as a tour guide (oh, I forgot to tell you he was a stuntman…, not front man).

So I was born.

Born to be multilingual

Well, right away you can see that I was immediately blessed with the possibility of learning 3 languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. However, my family would move back to Taiwan when I was 8 months old, so I never really got around to speaking Cantonese. But I’m glad I got Mandarin, the official language of Taiwan and the most spoken Chinese. But as some of you may know, there are other important dialects in Taiwan, including Taiwanese and Haka. When I was a kid, all my friends, neighbors, and most significantly, my nanny, spoke Taiwanese so I had to use it all the time. Also, all my family on dad’s side spoke Haka, so growing up I had to use that also. Today, I cannot speak these two dialects fluently, but I can maintain a conversation with people speaking to me in Taiwanese or Haka and me responding in Mandarin.

Also, I should add that during this period, other than speaking with my extremely busy mother, a significant contributor to my strengthening of Japanese were Japanese videos that my mother would rent for me. So, growing up in Taiwan, I was watching all the cartoons that were popular in Japan at that time, including The Battle of the Planets (“Gacchaman”), Lupin III, Doraemon, Ultraman, etc. I will definitely discuss these in more detail in later posts.

So there you go, you now know about the origin of two of my fluent languages, Mandarin and Japanese, and two dialects to which I have had significant exposure to growing up, which today I can only understand but barely speak.

Alrighty, I’ll wrap up “Part I” here. Stay tuned for 6-13 years-old!