Over the past 17 years I’ve helped raise two great kids who are haafu, half Japanese and half American — well, a quarter American and a quarter British, but whatever. Since my Japanese wife and I both knew how hard it is to learn a language, we wanted to make sure our kids were raised bilingual, so we came up with some strategies to help make this possible. If the kids ever wanted something from me, they had to ask me in English, and I only purchased DVDs from the U.S. so they were forced to watch everything in English only — I even imported dubbed anime from the U.S. and watched it in English with them, pretending there was no Japanese track on the disc. I worked hard to make sure they were exposed to American cultural icons, ike Thanksgiving and Halloween and Scooby Doo, so they had a proper link to the U.S. In the end, of course, there’s no “free” way to learn a language, and both my kids had to buckle down and learn English vocabulary and grammar, which they’ve done very well at.
Like some of our favorite anime characters, my kids are haafu.
