We have two boys who are tri-lingual (thai, german, english). The essential thing is that the kid makes the association:
one person = one language
If you speak both English and Chinese to your son, he might be later confused on what words are from which language.
I would recommend you only speak Chinese to him. For our kids, English is now their strongest language but it was only taught by their 'environment' i.e. kindergarten / school and they started with English only at age 2-3. Now they talk English with each other (before they went through a period in which they talked German or Thai with each other). So you should not underestimate the 'environment language'.
Also, you might consider having some other relatives speaking certain specific languages with your son (e.g. grandparents). This could reinforce their language skills.
Personally, I do not believe that learning languages from TV is effective. Learning languages is about relationships and interaction. I think the 1 hr per day would be better spend on interacting with your son in the respective language, e.g. by playing memory game etc.
Regarding late development of speaking. We did not experience this with our kids. But they might be a bit delayed when learning to read and write because of different phonetic rules of the respective languages.
> The essential thing is "one person = one language"
I was told this by many people but I am not sure why they say this.
My wife and I always spoke a mixture (German/French) together so of course did so also with our kid (plus English/Spanish outside the house). He had no problem, and in school or was quite orthodox in regards to which language to speak with which person. But at home or with relatives and polyglot friends he would switch back and forth. His classmates seemed to be the same.
I have seen my mother, in her 70s, switch mid sentence when arguing with her brother. Then turn and speak to my father in English.
Artificial neural networks do both supervised and unsupervised learning. While this is a very rough generalization, unsupervised learning is good for building models and encodings of data, while supervised learning is good for minimizing the error rate when answering questions about data. The state of the art for training neural networks is to "initialize" the network with unsupervised learning, then "tune" it with supervised learning.
To me, a child learning from listening to the TV is like a form unsupervised learning. It probably helps them build an internal representation of language structure, but doesn't teach them much if anything about proper use of language. If I had to guess, I'd say it is probably mildly helpful when the child is very young (especially if the alternative is silence), but it probably stops providing any value fairly quickly (by about a year of age for the typical child would be my very uneducated guess). At this point, I'm guessing improvements in language facilities probably require focused interaction (supervised learning).
Thank you for your input. The one person = one language is echoed by eande and wooyi too, so maybe I'll try that. My mom takes care of him half of the week in the day time and speaks Chinese to him, so that's why I was trying to speak some English to him since he doesn't get much exposure to English (no daycare yet). I may be exaggerating a bit on the 40% though, it's probably less than that, mostly just on some vocabulary that doesn't come out naturally in Chinese for me.
Playing memory game is a good idea, we haven't done too much of that.
Majority of Finnish children learns English from TV and knows it quote well before starting school. They learns all from TV, because in Finland they do not voice-over dub[0] TV shows (except children shows), only add subtitles.
When I was child we had re-transmitted children German tv shows, I could speak German a bit without actually learning it for other sources.
Disclaimer: I'm not from Finland, but had discussion with one of the teacher in there.
one person = one language
If you speak both English and Chinese to your son, he might be later confused on what words are from which language.
I would recommend you only speak Chinese to him. For our kids, English is now their strongest language but it was only taught by their 'environment' i.e. kindergarten / school and they started with English only at age 2-3. Now they talk English with each other (before they went through a period in which they talked German or Thai with each other). So you should not underestimate the 'environment language'.
Also, you might consider having some other relatives speaking certain specific languages with your son (e.g. grandparents). This could reinforce their language skills.
Personally, I do not believe that learning languages from TV is effective. Learning languages is about relationships and interaction. I think the 1 hr per day would be better spend on interacting with your son in the respective language, e.g. by playing memory game etc.
Regarding late development of speaking. We did not experience this with our kids. But they might be a bit delayed when learning to read and write because of different phonetic rules of the respective languages.