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I speak 2 languages. My wife speaks three. We only have English in common. We tried OPOL, but as my kid learned to speak my wife's main language, she didn't know English, and so I couldn't speak to her at all. Since I was at work all day, my kid never learned English, so I insisted that OPOL stop and my kid just be taught English.
Because of my wife, my social exposure to immigrants and their children is extremely high. Furthermore, I have learned 3 living and 2 dead languages, am employed as a French immersion teacher. For all these reasons, I question the value of kids learning domestic Mandarin or Japanese or whatever. OPOL usually doesn't lead to kids speaking the language the way I speak English. It leads to them knowing all the language you need for home life ("bedtime," "toothbrush," "clean your damn room!"), in a slang frozen in whatever era the mom left the old country. So if the kid ever wants to do business in China, or watch Chinese movies, etc, he's going to need focused study, or he'll speak Mandarin the way Tony Soprano speaks Italian. The choice ends up being between "limited communication with one parent and you never really reach fluency in Mom's language unless you buckle down and study" or "as much communication as possible with both parents and you never reach fluency at all in Mom's language to fluency unless you buckle down and study."
Option 2 has a much better cost/benefit ratio.
Yeah, that's pretty much been my personal experience as well. My family immigrated from China when I was in elementary school, and my Chinese vocabulary is still around that level. My brother, who was born in the states, is about the same. The only people I know who've reached greater fluency either studied it in college or got really into watching Chinese dramas.
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Yeah. I'm in Malaysia where my wife's family speaks a mix of Mandarin and Hokkien. They did Mandarin schooling and consume enough mainlander media that they're comfortable talking with Mainlanders, but a lot of Malaysian Mandarin speakers I know feel quite uncomfortable speaking with mainlanders due to the accent and word choices being different.
Likewise my 2 year old speaks a pidgin of Malay, Mandarin and English presently. I've got a bit more than her in both non-English languages, and it's fairly normal for Malaysians to learn this way as it's one of the most multi-lingual countries in the world and it seems to work for them. In an affluent Chinese household typically it's sort of an OPOL setup, albeit with the maid/nanny speaking Malay or Indonesian to the child, family speaking Mandarin and school/online sources trending more English.
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