This is quite simple. Language is best learned when used. Your children, based on your description above, use English, but they primarily listen to Chinese. I’m betting they understand Chinese spoken to them and respond appropriately (in English),no? If your wife and mother-in-law start ignoring the children unless they Chinese (nagging probably won’t get you far), for example, they’ll start learning to speak Chinese. You might have your wife start reading with the kids in Chinese, too.

You see the same for second generation kids in the US: they can understand the mother tongue but can’t speak it because they were not required to. When communicating, we take the easiest, i.e. most efficient route.

Cheers

Ahh, Mr. Goldhammer, you would have a better case if you lobbied from K-Street and/or sued for “obstruction of business/income”.

Ignore the propaganda. Focus on what you see. LOL

And that I can watch most of US-made hospital-soap, shoot-em-up-soap, supernatural-soap, and traditional soap TV stuff on local channels.Even, amazingly, a courtroom-soap like Boston Legal. I have to assume it’s not a coincidence.

You are missing two important things here. First: American series are sold relatively cheap in other countries, with production values that cannot be matched at local budgets. The budget per episode of Desperate Housewives is more than that of succesful Dutch cinema movies. I can assure you that parts of DH are completely weird to Dutch audiences, but even a big-budget local production looks poor in comparison, with less polished writing, and it is just easier and cheaper to buy an off-the-shelf foreign series.

The second thing is that audiences are to some extend used to American culture, or at least the subsections used in TV and movies. Courtroom drama is fundamentally strange to countries without a jury system, but after years of ‘Law and order’ and John Grisham you know enough of the American system to understand the basics.
Even stranger are high school comedies. In most European countries, schools do not have sports teams, cheerleaders, proms or prom queens. The students are allowed to drink, not to drive cars and cannot be rejected for colleges. Dutch doesn’t even have a translation for ‘dating’.
The miracle that people still watch American high school movies is not caused by their universal appeal, let alone that their writers had export in mind when writing. It’s simply years of training, so that Europeans know a lot about the cliche version of Aemrican high school life ( which I suppose might have little to do with reality).

This way we have more time to teach gym and study hall in US schools. These are skills you can’t get elsewhere.

Well, they don’t really need to be made for foreign consumption, as an example I give you Derrick which is as German as it gets, yet:

The series gained enormous popularity and was aired in more than 100 countries worldwide. In fact, there have only been a few areas around the world where Derrick has not penetrated, and the two protagonists long ago established for themselves a place in television history.

People love British films mainly for their Britishness as the big international success of the Richard Curtis or Ivory/Merchant films shows. French intellectual left-wing art house types have had a prolonged love affair with classic and often rather reactionary US cinema and, perhaps less surprisingly, adore Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog precisely for their utter Germanness. Films like Y tu mamá también, Amores Perros and City of God have proven that even US audiences can be won over
to a certain extent by rather exotic foreign fare.

So while I agree that American pop cultural hegemony is currently and for the foreseeable future undeniably dominant and also that the US market is particularly hard to penetrate for reasons outlined by others above, it would be wrong for foreign content providers to try to beat them at their own game, because they can only fail. If you want to put a dent into it, play to your strengths and rely on your own national myths and stereotypes.

Japan, India, China, even Latin America to a significant degree have had some success in selling TV and film internationally, even in American markets, and even subtitled. On pure quality of writing and acting, I’d say that Germany and Quebec seem competitive to me, but have no apparent access to anglophone world distribution, except Quebec to some degree within Canada. France… ok, they make crap TV and French film has fallen far from its peak. But I’d still put some brain-rotting Luc Besson thriller up against Roland Emmerich any day. In terms of music, I suspect that popular French and German music is no more incomprehensible to American audiences than American rap is to European ones.

Robert Feinman: (@45) alas, despite much publicity and myth and a lot of desperate wishing it was so, Canadian French immersion education does not, in fact, on the whole, work. Immersion students outside areas with active francophone populations do not generally emerge with good enough French to pass Quebec university entrance exams. (And in my day, the UdM entrance exam was pretty easy.)

This is not terribly shocking. You take a bunch of English speaking kids and put them together with no francophones except their teachers (not all of whom are themselves native speakers), and no more motivation than average school kids, and it’s not too surprising when the results are mediocre. The anglos I knew who attended Quebec universities successfully were all either Anglo-Quebecois (and thus people living in at least partially francophone contexts outside of school) and graduates of ordinary English language schools who had either shown talent for French, or who were personally strongly motivated.

San Francisco’s plan – mixing immigrant kids and anglos – is a much better approach than the Canadian way. This kind of immigrant mixed bilingual education was pioneered in – of all places – Texas under George W. Bush. (Since it was a good idea, I presume it wasn’t his idea.)