Yes and no. Contact between Zenjirou and Zenchiki (spelling I know) is carefully monitored. The ONLY reason is language.
Zenjirou uses the magic of language to speak. No one else does. So Zenjirou speaking in front of Zenchiki can present issues. He’ll be king one day, and while he WILL likely need to learn BOTH languages (remember all the tech Zenjirou brought with him including the PC and the accounting softwares) you don’t want the leader of a nation speaking every other word, or every fourth word in French instead of say English. You might end up feeling like you’ve just read that OTHER groups translation of this same chapter. Or worse.
Zenjirou only has like 2 or 3 words (phrases?) he can say when he spends time with his kid.
Could YOU limit yourself to an the same 2-3 phrases (or words) for more than 15-60 minutes with your child?
in the light novel, it’s ‘painful’ to see him use the same words over and over…
yeah, the kid doesn’t know… but there’s a line too… my niece when she came to live with us… I think we used dozens of expressions.
doing so here, would ‘retard’ or slow his growth in his first native language.
Very interesting.
Seems to me like they over-thought this in the LN. While it makes for good drama, it feels like it's edging a little too far into that overwrought soap opera zone.
Which leads me to believe that the manga-ka made the right call here by relying a bit more on the Translation Convention trope. They definitely seem to have a much better grasp on story telling.
Thinking further on this...
This is actually pretty BS now that I'm thinking about it. Reason being?
Plenty of children grow up in multi-lingual households... At least that's the case here in the USA where you've got a huge multi-ethnic melting pot going on (current issues of racism and classism notwithstanding). And you only ever see them mixing the languages in a weird sort of linguistic mash-up when they're speaking casually with their family... at the furthest relations, you may see this done with their closest friends, but these would be the people who they practically grew up with and have been picking up on it since they were younger.
Otherwise, these kids simply wind up being interchangeably fluent in these languages. So long as Zenkichi is able to differentiate between Japanese and his mother's native language, then he would be just fine. Which means this may be the case of the LN author unintentionally letting a bit of that good old Japanese xenophobia creep in - that they're so unfamiliar with the concept of multilingual families that it never even occurs to them that it would be a non-issue.
(This is kind of an unfortunate cultural blind spot the Japanese have as a whole, and mainly because they have such a huge thing for conformity that it wound up just becoming part of the indoctrination. This is why words like "gaijin", which are actually incredibly racist, still get dropped in conversation in casual and professional settings alike. It's only been in the recent generation or two that they've begun to realize this, along with other things like "Being a father who is active in their children's upbringing is actually pretty fun" and "We really haven't changed much since the Taisho Era, have we?")
There would even be a bonus that if Aura were to learn Japanese, then they'd have a "Secret Language" that they can use and no one else would understand. The only weakness being that its useless to Zenjirou because of the magic that makes it so everyone automatically understand him - to the point that they don't even realize that he's using a language that is entirely unknown to them.
