sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5hr ago
I'm not sure why you say it's a non-issue after I laid out how the cases I encounter IRL keep having this issue.
Successful Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent supplement it with some Mandarin kindergarten, later hopefully some Mandarin school or other classes, perhaps spending some time in the native country, hopefully establishing a friend circle in the relevant language, and most importantly, access to Mandarin/whatever-speaking media that seems cool.
You can probably make this work for Mandarin in areas of the country that have a lot of Chinese people and if the home languages are Mandarin and English. But if you don't have those things, or you are trying to raise kids trilingual with a third language that doesn't have schools nearby, you are going to have to make some tough choices. As far as I can tell, the choices usually involve fracturing family communication for uncertain benefit.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5hr ago
Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why.
I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with you there. They maybe can't exactly articulate it, but I think the fundamental reason, at least in the circles I'm in, is status. Very original take, I know. But the fact is that having multilingual kids "in touch with their culture" is high status among the generation having and raising kids today (I'm thinking basically people in their 30s and early 40s).
Same goes for perfect pitch. Are they ever going to need it? Maybe not, but it impresses others (and it preserves some optionality, what if Sally does want to become a musician after all? Of course, it would be better for her to be a surgeon). It's not just Grandma and Grampa that are being impressed, it's also your friends with kids, with whom you (as a mother) are trapped in a bitter status war in which quarter is neither asked for nor given. It's absolutely critical that you have the most well rounded little angels in the mom group. Husbands are typically dragged along and are happy to just grill.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5hr ago
it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.
That's not the salient question. The question is how Mom and Dad have a conversation with each other and the kids at the same time. Clearly such conversations are a significant fraction of language use in the home and having these conversations in English is compromising on the amount of language practice that the kids get, as well as encouraging the kids to be lazy in talking to Mom in Russian. There's no free lunch here.
I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.
UMC children of immigrants who grew up in a weird halfway culture and never developed their identity as Americans hold all kinds of regrets about their parents. They forced them to learn an instrument, or they didn't send them to music classes, or they didn't teach them their native language (despite fighting tooth and nail as children to speak English), or they taught them their native language but they didn't pass down the secret cooking techniques, or they taught them the native language and passed down the secret cooking techniques but didn't cultivate a relationship with the extended family, etc etc. These are mostly window dressing around the anomie of not fitting in.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
7hr ago
I try when parking to leave as much space as possible
Parking space is unfortunately a zero sum game and leaving more space on one side usually means less space on the other. I suppose I leave as much space as possible by virtue of driving a car that's narrower than average.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8hr ago
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions
I have not found many OPOL followers who do this.
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay.
Fair, though this is not a consideration in the cases I've seen (basically zero chance my sister moves to Russia or these WMAF couples move to China).
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8hr ago
Opol Ra
Or: Which way, Hapa parent?
I.
Have you guys ever heard of One Parent One Language? Basically, the idea is that if a parent speaks a second language that they want to pass down to their kids, they should speak to their kids solely in that language. So, for example, if you are a German/Spanish speaker and your wife is a French/Spanish speaker and you live in Spain, you speak to the kids only in German, your wife speaks to the kids only in French, and you and your wife speak Spanish to each other (and, of course, the kids learn Spanish in school). The ultimate goal is to have the kids be fluent in German and French as well as Spanish as adults.
Sounds simple enough, but there is a snag. How do you have conversations with the whole family? In the happy case, you and your wife speak, or at least understand, each others' second language (in our example, you also speak French and your wife also speaks German), and there's no problem: you understand what the kids say to your wife and she understands what the kids say to you.
However, that's rarely the case outside of highly polyglot areas of Europe (Switzerland?). In America, or at least my corner of it, the most common pairing that isn't two monoglots is an English monoglot and a diglot. So Father speaks to the kids in English and Mother speaks in, say, Mandarin, but Father can't speak a lick of Mandarin. This doesn't much matter when the kids are preverbal, but what is the future for such an OPOL family when the kids are old enough to have meaningful, grammatically complex conversations with a variety of vocabulary, spoken at normal adult velocity (or even faster, if passions are inflamed or someone is a naturally quick talker, or a mumbler)?
We can lay out a few possibilities:
- Father learns Mandarin and we're back to the happy case. The US foreign service estimates 2200 class hours to learn Mandarin. Father doesn't need to speak Mandarin, he only needs to comprehend it, but he's also not taking classes, he's trying to pick it up from "immersion" that happens whenever the family is all together. This is rare. Mandarin is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, so maybe this could work for, say, Spanish, but I doubt that this works in the long run. It's easy enough to pick up ve a bañarte ahora but I doubt that you can work your way up to actually substantive conversations as an adult with such minimal exposure.
- Mother and the kids say everything twice, once in Mandarin and once in English. This is an unbelievable pain in the ass and completely destroys conversational flow. I seriously doubt that anyone can keep this up over a decade and a half. I suspect that this scenario degenerates into one of the following.
- Father guesses what Mother and the kids are talking about based on picking out a few words he knows. This is only practical for the most basic conversations ("baño! I know that one!").
- Father checks out of the conversation when Mother and the kids are talking.
- The family avoids having any substantive conversations when together.
A cursory perusal of threads about dinner table conversations on /r/oneparentonelanguage bears out that these options seem to be exhaustive. Tellingly, very few people discussing this problem have kids older than six or so; presumably the details of their life become too embarrassing to publicize or they compromise on OPOL.
II.
To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life. Mother addresses the kids or she addresses Father, but she does not ever address her children along with her husband. This seems to be just fine in the eyes of many women who I bin as "type A elder millenials" who seem to treat the kids as royalty and the husbands as the help. These women would trade off adult social cohesion in favor of a little more comprehensible language input for their kids all day every day. These are the women who, if their kids interrupt an adult conversation, tell the adults to wait while they talk to the kids.
A word about my own situation: my parents both speak English and Russian, which I and my siblings all learned since Russian was all we spoke at home. My sister married a man who doesn't speak Russian and had kids, and I married a woman who doesn't speak Russian either. Any time we're together and I say something in English for the benefit of all the adults present ("should we think about lunch?"), my sister badgers me about saying it in Russian unless I was specifically addressing someone who doesn't understand Russian. Meanwhile, her husband's Russian skills have been eclipsed by his kids, and I don't think he's ever going to catch up, so option 1 and 2 are basically off the table. The only remaining question is how far down the list the family is going to end up. I've seen Chinese/American couples where the parents bring kids to the park and the Chinese wife finds other Chinese women and chats with them in Chinese while the husband looks off into space (they are also doing OPOL). I expect we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future and I don't think it's going to be pretty to see the products of marriages like this. The /r/aznmasculinity poster problem is only the beginning.
III.
This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense? Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk, and my sister has never brought them up. The arguments I've seen are:
- This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents. I think this is fair, certainly our parents are less comfortable in English than Russian. Of course, my sister is constantly on the outs with our parents, so I'm not sure how practically useful this is. Even so, it seems insane to prioritize the kids' relationship with their grandparents over your relationship with your spouse.
- It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
- Access to Russian culture. I'm glad I can read Russian literature in the original and I get a lot out of it, but I don't know that it's worth torpedoing my family life so that my kids can get the same benefit.
The base rates for language retention in second generation speakers (besides Spanish) in the US are quite poor. The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit. The odds of their kids speaking your language, even if it's Spanish, are effectively zero. Is it really worth splitting your family for this?
I think any reasonable person has to say no. I knew that marrying my wife meant that the odds our kids speak Russian is basically zero (at the time I didn't consider the simple solution of alienating my wife to pass on the language). If I wanted my kids to speak Russian, I should have married a Russian. If my parents wanted my kids to speak Russian, they should have stayed in Russia. This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish. You don't get both the freedom to come to this country, love a woman from a background different than yours, marry her, and start a family AND somehow pass on your idiosyncratic foreign background without compromising the relationship that is the bedrock of the family, namely, that between the wife and the husband. And I think that's basically as it should be.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
8hr ago
I appreciate your dissenting opinion. My kid is young enough that he can't get out of the car on his own, so I have to carry him out, making it pretty much infeasible to spare a hand to save the other car. I can at least feel superior for not driving an SUV.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
13hr ago
Make sure she's invested those retirement funds in something reasonable.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
This is a fairly popular place, so you'll be waiting until closing time to find three adjacent spots.
If you were already parked there and she is the one who parked her car so close to yours, then it is she who is at fault.
I did indeed park before she did and with no car in the spot she later parked in, but both cars were in the middle of their respective spots, so I can't fault her for parking in an open space.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
were you to consider confrontation unfortunate, perhaps you may have waited to extract your child after the goblin had ambled off to carry out her fiendish acts of greed. This, however, I do not see as a just act. For if you were already in the process of removing said noble heir fit would be most proper for another to await the tying of their steed until the completion of your deed, prior to encroachment on your space.
Ah, but in this case I was actually loading, not unloading, my heir. I did see that the boomer's daughter was sitting in the passenger seat as I reached my car, but the driver was nowhere in sight and the daughter was locked in (airpods in and phone on), so I figured I was good to go. Certainly if the car was about to leave I'd wait for them, especially because then I could just open the door as much as I liked.
Dear Emily Poast,
As I got out of my car after loading my kid into the car seat, I was accosted from behind by a boomer who accused me of scratching her car, parked next to mine. Now, I did indeed have my door touching her car, since the spot is pretty tight and even my small car's door couldn't open to the first door check before it touched the car next to it, and it was basically impossible to get into the back seat with an infant while preventing the door from opening too much.
As it turned out there was no scratch on her car but we discoursed for a few minutes on the acceptability of touching other cars with your car door in the parking lot. In my view this is perfectly acceptable, and especially in parking lots with narrow spots if you have an SUV you shouldn't expect your car to be untouchable, though of course slamming doors into cars is unacceptable. Her view was that contact is never acceptable and she informed me that she raised two kids without ever touching another car with her door.
Seeing that we had reached an impasse, I informed her that I disagreed and drove off. My wife doesn't believe I did anything wrong, but she herself would never touch another car with her door.
What do you think, Emily? Is it acceptable to touch another car with your car door?
— Well-formed
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
Canadian English.
You are telling me that in Canada "East Asian" refers to South Asians? Can you provide an example?
UK natives have a few names but "Indians" is not one of them.
Why would UK natives be called Indians?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
I'm confused about whether you are talking about US or UK English. I know that in the UK "Asian" means "South Asian" but I've never seen "East Asian" refer to South Asians in any dialect.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
1d ago
India and Bangladesh are unambiguously South Asia.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
Beware good china and cutlery that can't go in the dishwasher. Heaven preserve us from such "gimmes".
Jewellery can be a pleasant way to store value in a way that's more visual than a stock certificate.
Jewelry is generally quite a terrible store of value. Frequently you can only get scrap value back when you try to resell it.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
2d ago
The simple point I'm trying to make is that unless the phosphate levels have been measured during past algal blooms and found to be normal, we can't conclude that currently elevated phosphate levels represent any change at all. It's a mistake to reach for a unique explanation for this particular algal bloom unless we're sure that the conditions that led to this one are not the same as the conditions that have been leading to algal blooms for a hundred years.
CNN is reporting elevated phosphate levels in the pool; it seems a reasonable inference that these levels are elevated versus the water that's being pumped into the pool
"Fertilizer has been running off the grass and elevating phosphate levels, and causing algal blooms, since 1922" appears to be fully consistent with all the facts. Of course, I have not checked if previous phosphate readings were normal.
it seems logical to me that the phosphate is being added by the vandals.
This assumes that there has never been elevated phosphate in the pool previously. Is that the case?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
3d ago
The phosphate levels are elevated compared to what? To ordinary water, or to this pool that's had algae issues for apparently a hundred years?
those explanations really ought to account for the observable evidence.
You don't have to posit a novel explanation when the phenomenon in question is not novel.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
3d ago
Why do we need a conspiracy here? Hasn't there been algae in this pool all the time?
“The nanobubbler technology has successfully destroyed the algae bloom that has plagued every pool reopening since 1922—most infamously the Obama-era pool reopening, which resulted in massive algae clumps taking over the pool’s surface following years of construction that cost taxpayers millions upon millions, only for the pool to become broken and disgusting days later,” a spokesperson said.
Also, I assume the national mall is covered in security cameras. Surely they would have caught someone dumping bags of fertilizer in there if that was what happened?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
3d ago
Does the US enforce jurisdiction over citizen tax evaders?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
4d ago
The German Tourist doesn’t pay US taxes.
They pay sales taxes, of course. Oh, you mean income taxes? Well, 40% of American households pay $0 in income tax.
The undocumented migrant isn’t paying taxes on their savings account in Mexico.
Maybe, but they are in fact required to do so, and I don't think your view would change if they did (or if they didn't have a savings account).
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
4d ago
The Ptolemids seem like the closest parallel. They managed about 300 years before the Romans knocked them over and IIRC kept it, ah, in the family, so to speak.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
4d ago
Is London such a shithole that you run the risk of being robbed during a craigslist meet?
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
I'm not so post-modern to think everyone's idea of a good time has equal value.
TIL de gustibus non disputandum est is a postmodern sentiment.
Nevertheless it remains narcissistic to view his refusal to hang out with you through the lens of how it affects you.
Of course not. I will happily take them up on their offer of a quiet cocktail another night. If he asked me to game with him some night, or do a quick DnD campaign I would even though it's not my highest preference for an evening.
In all likelihood, he will never ask you to do this, though.
sarker
hantavirus landfill tour guide
5d ago
So if I’m in Mexico, what’s the “coolest” experience I can have on a given day with very little extra effort?
I knew a guy like this. He basically viewed doing "quirky" and "interesting" stuff like this as a way to present an interesting facade so that he'd have stuff to talk about with other people. Kind of like the guys who buy a Rolex as a "conversation starter". He was (and, I assume, still is) a total schmuck.
Anyway, point is that not everyone shares your view of what a good time is, and it's narcissistic to view this as some kind of personal sleight.
You're drawing a distinction that nobody I know applies and that I have not seen applied on the subreddit. The people I am seeing have kids who fully understand the distinction between languages and that some people speak one language but not another.
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