Prince Roy's upset with a Taiwanese woman who insists on speaking English with him.


My Chinese is nearly native and my wife's from Taiwan, but the Taiwanese husband of one of her classmates who has immigrated to California with her insists on speaking English not only to me but also to my wife. And his English isn't all that good (he confuses liver & kidney, for instance). We can't figure out what's going on in his mind--is he trying to be as American as possible?

It reminds me of our Chinese friends who insist on speaking their poorly accented, ungrammatical English with their children, or worse, a mixture of their mediocre English with the occasional Chinese word thrown in. I'm guessing it's because they want their kids to fit into American society. However, most children are whizzes at picking up a new language, and I believe that they'd be better off if their parents would insist that they speak Chinese at home. When the children grow up, I suspect many of the parents are going to have increasing trouble communicating more complex ideas to their children.

Ironically, a large proportion of students taking Chinese at American universities are these second-generation Chinese, many of whom didn't learn the language very well at home when they could have.