My Chinese wife does complain that our grand kids don’t speak good Chinese
“My Chinese wife does complain that our grand kids don’t speak good Chinese”
That sentence is as grammatically incorrect as anything Jeantel has ever said.
It can be difficult for kids in a multilingual family.
My mother spoke excellent English, Russian, Yiddish. My father spoke correct English, Yiddish and Argentinian Spanish. None of my grandparents spoke English as a first language. My maternal grandparents spoke different dialects of Yiddish and we had to remember which one said which pronunciation or they would get huffy and refuse to respond. We responded by calling things by combined words that used both dialects. They lived a large part of their adult lives in immigrant and first generation communities where all the adults spoke several languages and shifted between them.
Everyone was merciless on the kids when it came to correct English because “You don’t want to sound like a greenhorn.” We learned that excellent English so well, I once had a teacher remark that that I spoke it too correctly, like someone who learned it well, but as a second language.
However, they would use the other languages among themselves, especially when they wanted to communicate privately in front of us. So, we picked up the important words: daughter, son, names of foods and anything that might mean we were in trouble. Every other communication in our lives took place in English, most of it colloquial.
Today I know a few words and phrases in Yiddish, know zero Spanish except for American Spanglish and I never acquired an ear for Russian. I think they had their own amalgam of all their common languages and have no idea of their dialects, except Bubbe and Zayde who bickered constantly over “braedt-brodt” and “Pittur-putter” (phonetic for their differences in saying “bread and butter”).
I still sort of mentally translate colloquial English into academically correct English, and try not to wince internally at poor grammar.
Your grandkids are Americans and that is what they will speak.