The short version

A Japanese grandparent who speaks no English is, on paper, the perfect language partner for a child abroad. They are motivated, patient, available, free, and — crucially — they cannot switch to English. That last property is the one thing a parent can never offer, because your child knows perfectly well that you understand them either way.

And yet in most families this relationship produces almost no language at all. The reason is not distance or time zones. It is that the standard grandparent call is built like a performance: the child is brought to the screen, asked a series of questions, praised for one-word answers, and interpreted for by a parent standing behind them. Nothing about that resembles a conversation, and children who are shy about their Japanese learn within three calls that the safest strategy is to say as little as possible.

Almost everything in this guide comes down to one change: stop staging a performance and give your child and their grandparent something to do together. The language follows the activity. It almost never follows the question “so, how is school?”

What is actually at stake

It helps to name this precisely, because “keep up their Japanese” is too abstract to motivate anybody and it is not really what parents are worried about.

What is at stake is whether your child will ever have a relationship with these people that belongs to them — one that is not mediated by you. There is an enormous difference between a child who knows their grandmother and a child who is polite to their grandmother for fifteen minutes while a parent interprets. The second child, at twenty-five, will remember a kind person they could not talk to. The first will remember a person.

There is also a second loss, which is the grandparents’. They almost never mention it. Japanese grandparents in this situation tend to say “仿方ないね” and change the subject, and that silence is routinely misread by parents as acceptance. It is usually politeness.

And there is a third, which is yours. Lily Wong Fillmore’s work on language-minority families in the United States — around a thousand families, 690 in the main sample and 311 in a comparison group — looked at what happened when children were schooled in English only. As reported at the time, about 51% of parents in the main sample said their home language was being displaced by English, against just over 10% in the comparison group whose children were in primary-language programmes, and around 12% said their children now spoke the home language poorly or not at all, against 1.6%.

Her point, which is the reason that paper is still cited more than thirty years later, was not about vocabulary scores. It was that when the home language goes, families lose the ability to discuss anything complicated — advice, values, worry, humour, the things grandparents are actually for. The conversation does not get shorter. It gets shallower.

Why the standard call fails

Almost every family runs the same call, and it has five design faults. None of them are anybody’s fault; they are just what happens when two people who love each other are nervous.

The interpreting one is worth sitting with, because it is done out of kindness and it is the most damaging. When you interpret, you are solving the problem the call exists to create. Every time you supply the sentence, you remove the two seconds of struggle in which your child would have found a worse, slower, entirely sufficient way to say it themselves. Those two seconds are the whole product.

Why a grandparent is the best language partner you are not using

Put the options side by side and the case is obvious.

Grandparents sit in a sweet spot that nothing else occupies. Peers produce the fastest gains because they will not wait — but they are hard to find, and for a child who is embarrassed about their Japanese, peers can be frightening. A grandparent is the opposite: completely safe, completely patient, and still structurally unable to let the child off the hook. For a child in the self-conscious years, that combination is often the only door that is open.

There is one more thing grandparents have that no school can manufacture. They have stories the child cannot get anywhere else — what their parent was like at that age, what the town used to look like, a war, a job, a disaster, a love affair. Children will work surprisingly hard in a second language for information they genuinely want and cannot obtain any other way.

How to design a call that actually works

This is the practical core of the guide. Change these six things and most families see a difference within a month.

A note you can forward to the grandparents

Grandparents almost always want to help and are rarely told how. Most of the damage in these calls is done by two things done out of pure love: correcting, and praising too much. If it is useful, send them this.

One addition for the Japanese parent, which is harder to say to your own mother or father: if a grandparent persistently tests, corrects, or compares, you will have to ask them to stop, and it is worth the awkward conversation. Children vote with their feet, and a child who associates the weekly call with being assessed will find reasons to be busy within a month.

When the grandparent is unwell, shy, or hard of hearing

The advice above assumes a grandparent who is well and willing. Often they are not, and the call needs redesigning rather than abandoning.

One more, which families rarely plan for and almost always regret not planning for: the window is not open indefinitely. We are not going to use that to pressure you, because guilt is a poor motivator and most parents reading this are already carrying enough of it. But it is a fact worth holding in view when the weekly call feels like one more thing. The cost of starting this year is twenty minutes a week. The cost of starting later is sometimes that it cannot be started at all.

Visits: the two weeks that do most of the work

A fortnight in Japan with grandparents can be worth more than a year of calls — or almost nothing. The difference is whether the child is left alone with them.

The usual trip has a bilingual parent present at every moment, interpreting out of habit, and the child spends two weeks being talked about in the third person. The useful trip has, somewhere in it, a few days or even a few afternoons where the child and the grandparent have to manage without you.

And the same rule as always: when a grandparent asks your child a question, do not answer it. Count to five. It will feel rude to everybody in the room and it is the only way the child ever starts.

When your child refuses to call

At some point, usually between eight and twelve, many children start resisting. They are busy, they are shy, they say it is boring. Taken at face value this looks like rejection of the grandparent, and parents often respond with pressure, which reliably makes it permanent.

It is almost never about the grandparent. The three real reasons, in order of frequency:

They are embarrassed. The call exposes the gap between what they can think and what they can say, in front of someone whose opinion matters enormously. Avoidance is a sensible response to predictable humiliation. The fix is not encouragement; it is lowering what the call demands — an activity instead of questions, five minutes instead of twenty, a sibling alongside them for the first few.

They have no role. A child who is brought to the screen to be looked at has nothing to do. A child who is showing someone something, teaching them something, or helping them decide something has a job, and children with jobs do not get bored.

It is scheduled badly. Japanese evening is often a child’s morning or their one free hour. A call that costs them something they wanted will always be resisted, and the resistance will be interpreted as being about the language.

If your child has gone silent across settings rather than specifically on these calls — at school, with friends, in both languages — that is a different question, and our guide to selective mutism in a bilingual child covers how to tell the two apart.

What it costs if nothing changes

Beyond the relationship itself, there is a practical cost that arrives later and is easy to miss while the children are small.

If your family ever moves to Japan, the Japanese government’s own figures describe what happens to children who arrive without usable Japanese. As of 1 May 2025, 84,759 children in Japanese public schools needed Japanese-language instruction, and 11,446 of them were Japanese nationals — overwhelmingly children who grew up overseas and came back. Among students needing that instruction, the rate of going on to upper secondary education was 91.5% against 98.9% for students overall, and the rate of going on to university and similar institutions was 41.2% against 75.0%.

A child who has spent four years talking to their grandmother every week does not arrive in that category. The weekly call is not only sentimental; it is the cheapest insurance available against a problem that is extremely expensive to fix at fifteen.

If a move is realistic for you, our guides on Japanese public elementary school for foreign children and returnee children struggling after arrival cover what happens next. If your child understands Japanese but will not speak it, the core guide to that pattern is the place to start, and if only one parent in your household speaks Japanese, the guide for that configuration goes into it properly.

Twenty things to do on a call that are not “how was school?”

The hardest part for most families is not the principle but the blank screen on a Sunday morning. Here is a bank to work through. Pick one, do it for three weeks, then change.

Two of these are worth singling out because families report them working far beyond expectation.

The photo thread between calls. A simple message thread where the child sends one photo a day of something ordinary — lunch, the dog, the weather — and the grandparent replies. It takes ten seconds, it requires almost no Japanese to start, and it turns a weekly event into a continuous relationship. Many families find the calls improve dramatically once the pair already has an ongoing conversation to continue.

The teenager interviewing a grandparent. Give a fourteen-year-old a real assignment — find out what their grandmother’s childhood was like, write it down, keep it — and something changes. They stop being a child performing their Japanese and become a person collecting something that matters. Families who have done this almost always say the same thing afterwards: that it became about the grandparent rather than about the language, which is precisely why it worked.

What to say when a call goes badly

Some calls are eight minutes of silence, and what happens in the five minutes afterwards decides whether there is a call next week.

The thread through all six is that the call should never have a verdict attached to it. The moment a child senses that someone is grading the conversation — even approvingly — it stops being a relationship and becomes an assessment, and children manage assessments by doing less.

What a grandparent cannot do

Honesty about the limits, because a weekly call will not on its own produce a fluent child, and families who expect it to end up disappointed in something that was working.

That last row is the one that decides what else you need. Children are a different kind of language partner from adults: faster, less forgiving, much funnier, and completely uninterested in making allowances. A child who only ever speaks Japanese to patient adults develops a particular profile — polite, slow, oddly formal, visibly uncomfortable around Japanese children their own age. The grandparent call is the foundation. It is rarely the whole building.

Where an online Japanese school fits — and where it does not

The gap the grandparent call leaves is peers, and peers are the hard thing to find from abroad.

TOMODACHI JAPAN (ともだちじゃぱん) is an online Japanese school built by NIJIN for children growing up abroad, and it is aimed at exactly that gap:

Who this is not right for

• If the grandparents speak English comfortably. Then the structural advantage — being unable to switch — is gone, and the call will drift into English. Lovely for the relationship; not a language plan.
• If your child’s Japanese is already strong. Keep the calls, and spend your effort on reading and writing instead.
• If the family relationship is strained. Do not use a child as the repair mechanism. Fix what needs fixing between the adults first.
• If your child needs an exam — GCSE, HSC, VCE, AP Japanese — use a specialist tutor for that.
• If you need something this month. TOMODACHI JAPAN does not open until December 2026.

A 60-day plan

One last thought, for the week when the call is eight minutes of silence and you wonder whether any of it is working. Your child is not learning Japanese on those calls so much as learning that Japanese is how you talk to someone you love. That is the thing that survives the years when nothing else does — and it is the thing that brings children back to the language at seventeen, when they suddenly want to read a letter, or go on their own, or say something that cannot be said in English.

Frequently asked questions

Sources used for this article

Safe with a grandparent, fast with other children

A weekly call keeps your child’s Japanese alive and gives it a person. What it cannot give them is speed, or friends their own age. TOMODACHI JAPAN puts children abroad in classes of eight with peers in Japan who do not speak English, grouped by what each child can actually say. The pilot opens in December 2026 and the school guide is free.

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