Several weeks ago in this column, I wrote about some of the nonlinguistic aspects of raising a bilingual child. These can be social, financial and marital, involving the milieu the child grows up in, the necessity to move back and forth between countries, and even the periodic separation of husband and wife in the interests of exposing the child to one of the native-language environments.
I want to return to the subject of bilingual children because some readers have responded with letters following that earlier column, and it's also surely a matter of concern to many others who aim to give their offspring the benefits of being both bilingual and bicultural.
Let's look at five aspects of bilingualism — when one of the languages is Japanese — from the standpoint of modes of communication. As parents who have brought up bilingual children will know — my wife and I raised four — a truly native command of a language involves far more than just the amassing of a large vocabulary and stringing words together in what appears to be a fluent manner.