I grew up with it as an immigrant to the US. I arrived in Brooklyn, NY at 8 years old and started public school there. I’m basically a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, no translator tools necessary lmfao. English is actually my primary language, I’m a US Citizen now.
As for Cantonese and Mandarin, I can express my self using basic 2nd-grade level words + some vocabulary I learned while looking up the online dictionaries for some terms. I can recognize most of the basic characters. But if I read a text from someone that has more education than I did, and they use higher level vocab or like colloquel terms, then I’d actually be stuggling to reading Chinese and might have to read very very slowly or have to use Google translate to verify I understand it correctly.
Pat_Riot@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Ah, well then hello fellow American! It’s great that you have retained understanding of your childhood languages. I took German in highschool and probably know about enough now to get myself arrested, or more likely just laughed at and I know none of the Irish Gaelic my family would have spoken when they emigrated in the mid 1800s.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Lol, it takes like just 1-2 generation for the language to be lost. I know alot of US-Born ethnic Chinese that speak very broken and heavily-accented Cantonese, zero Mandarin. These are the 2nd-gens, they still speak their ancestral language at home, but I bet by the 3rd generation, they are not gonna be able to speak it since the 2nd-gen’s primary language is already English so they’ll just be using that at home, since that is the path of least resistance.
Idk if I’ll ever have kids, but if I do, I’ll try to pass on the language, but I highly doubt that kids growing up here would care to learn…
Oh well… 🤷♂️ you can only preserve it for so long.