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Interesting! Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with
by kowen 17y ago
Interesting!
Three of my siblings are bi-lingual Russian/English. At first they mixed things up terribly, but after their Russian grandmother spent a year with them they were suddenly able to completely separate the two. Grandma doesn't speak a word of English, whereas both parents speak both languages, so we speculated that what they were doing was 'the easiest thing that works'.
When I speak in Norwegian I toss in English words all the time (because I can get away with it - all Norwegians seem to speak English). In French I don't leak English into it. In English, I rarely (if ever) slip Norwegian or French into it.
Where I really get into trouble is when I'm in a conversation with Norwegians, French, and English-speakers at the same time, because I end up trying to translate Norwegian to French, French to English, etc, and end up speaking the wrong language to pretty much everyone involved.
- yannis 17y agoIf you want to raise your kids bilingually one way is for you to only speak to them say in Norwegian and your wife to speak to them only in English. It is a very interesting subject especially fro an evolutionary point of view - what's happening to you when you speak to your friends is normal it happens to all my friends an myself. You can imagine if your friends and you and your families were isolated say in Island for 200 years your descendants would have been speaking a new language composed of Norwegian, French and English.
- johkra 17y agoYeah, I know this, it's horrible. My problem is with speaking French, Spanish and Italian. Only one of the languages is fine, but once there are two or more, I start mixing words together really badly. I think it's because those languages are so close to each other - like C++, C# and Java - which was probably the reason I could become reasonably fluent in each of them in the first place. I actually learned Italian by "prototypal inheritance", gradually substituting Spanish words and grammar as I learned their Italian equivalents while living there.