I know it's hard to believe that Alex has lost his language. I mean really, less than a year and he's been speaking it for over ten? Is it just in his head? Does he just want to be American so bad he's blocking it out? Lately he hasn't been so adverse to trying to remember words but he draws a lot of blanks. Here is an example of his current Ukraine language retention. .
A: Mom, I remember Ukraine! You know in Ukraine when say Spicybo?
(That's my phonetic spelling for the Ukraine word for thank you.)
Me: Yes.
A: Well you say Spicybo and then you answer and say "No problemo."
Me: Really?
A: Yes
Me: "No problemo" is Ukrainian?
A: (Looking puzzled) Yes.
Me: Honey, I'm not sure but I think that's Spanish. (Or maybe just a Spanish accent?)
Alex: Oh, no. I mean NO PROBLEM.
Me: No problem?
A: Yes.
Me: Honey, that's English.
A: (Sighs) Never mind. I can't remember.
See what I mean? He's too the point now where he THINKS he's remembering Ukraine and he's speaking English.
2 of my blog friends said something...:
It's not hard to believe at all. It happens, whether we want it to or not, to most internationally adopted kids, especially those who were younger than 12 or 13 at the time of adoption. My kids started losing their ability to speak Ukrainian (well, my youngest never did actually speak it) within just a few weeks of being home. By the time we were home 6 weeks, our translator would ask Joseph something in Ukrainian and he'd respond in English. The last time he was able to have any sort of a conversation in Ukrainian was about 4 months after we came home. Now, neither of my kids remember ANY Ukrainian. They don't even remember the simple stuff like yes and no. Nor do they have even the most remote hint of an eastern european accent (other than our famous Utah accent) that is.
Unfortunately, they don't pick up English at nearly the same rate. They do pick it up amazingly fast, but they really won't be completely fluent in it for 4-5 years or more. What makes it really tough is that unlike truely bilingual kids, ours don't have the ability to translate in their heads. They end up in a state of language limbo. Even after being home for more than 2 years, Joseph still tested as non-English speaking at the beginning of this school year. I'm sure now that his reading has dramatically improved, he'd test higher, but he'd still most likely be in the lower level.
Now with Matthew, even though he was almost 3 when we adopted him, he still wasn't speaking any language audibly. He was still just baby babbling. So, his first real spoken language is English. What was interesting, though, was that when he did start to speak actual words, for about the first two weeks, there were a lot of them that came out in audible Ukrainian rather than English. And then *poof*, it was gone. We just had a speech eval done with him through his school a few weeks ago, though. Guess what? Much to our surprise, he failed the vocabulary portion of it. He still tests significantly lower on it than his same age peers going on 3 years after coming home.
We'll definatley have him assessed by the ESL teacher when he starts K in the fall!
I was admittedly a little sad about Joseph losing his native Ukrainian so quickly. But, I had a therapist tell me something that really changed my mind. She said point blank that some kids NEED to forget. There's a lot of reasons for this. The first is trauma based. In order to really heal, they need to shed all the reminders of their former past, including their first native tongue. They are Americans now, and they want and need to embrace their new life here now with as few shadows of the past creeping in as possible. I'm certain this was true with Joseph. There for awhile, he didn't understand people all over the world speak different languages depending on where they live. If someone tried to speak to him in Ukrainian, he got really agitated. This wasn't because he didn't understand what they were saying, but because he did and he thought that these people who knew the "secret code" from the internat that they were going to take him back.
This same therapist then said the second big reason some kids NEED to forget is so they can excell in English. Very often kids who are verbally bilingual struggle to read and write in both languages. In a nutshell, some people are blessed with the gift of tongues and can function quite nicely bilingually. Not everyone is blessed with that gift, though. Just because our kids have the potential to remain bilinqual doens't mean they should or even can no matter how hard we try to keep their first native tongue alive, especially if we are not fluent speakers of than language ourselves.
It's interesting, Wendy. I'll bet if he listened to someone speaking Ukrainian, he would be able to understand, though. Maybe he can't speak but still understands. My Alex called his school in Rivne this morning and spoke to the director. She seemed very excited to hear from him. He's been calling his teacher, but she doesn't answer her cell phone.
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