14 ms·

Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

161 points by wallflower 9y ago

jeena 9y ago
I was born in Poland then at age 11 I moved to Germany and later at age 27 I moved to Sweden. My sister is two years younger, she had it easier to learn German but she doesn't want to speak Polish if sho doesn't need to. I don't have that. I had also big problems learning English at school, because I had to learn English in German which I didn't understand in the beginning, and later I was always behind. I was really bad in English when I moved to Sweden which helped me to learn Swidish faster because people wouldn't use English to communicate with me, which swedes do all the time if you speak English but not Swedish. I learned English later by mostly watching TV, which is only subtitled in Sweden, because I wasn't able to read that fast in Swedish, I started listening to the English original. Later most of the studies here at university were in English (at least in Computer Science), so I was forced to use my English and improve it. And later at work the office language was English too. Anyway, I do even have an anegdote from my Grandfather who was captured by the Russians during WW2. He was in the Wehrmacht, but because he was from Silecia he spoke some polish too, which helped him during his time in captivity in Siberia. Because he could translate, they gave him bigger portions of food, so he always said: "You never know where life leads you and every language you speak is like an extra hand."
hkmurakami 9y ago
>But if a child grows up speaking that second language — Korean, say — with cousins and grandparents, attending a “Saturday School” that emphasizes the language and the culture, listening to music and even reading books in that language, and visits Korea along the way, that child will end up with a much stronger sense of the language. Did this from Kindergarten through 10th grade. "Saturday School" was a full program that followed the Japanese Ministry of Education's requirements for accreditation (since in my era, most students went back to Japan after their parents' 4-6 year stint in the US office). I do notice that my Japanese is stronger than that of my peers who stopped going to these schools at a much earlier age. >“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. For me, this was a big problem since my English vocabulary remained quite weak compared to my peers all the way through high school (mainly because I had a strong preference for reading Japanese material at home). The general lack of confidence in a broad range of English skills is a long lasting effect that is orthogonal to my actual knowledge or skills. I'm a "true bilingual" but I don't know if I'd want my imaginary children to be the same. If you're committed to living in the States, maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. My personal feeling is that being highly proficient at English and being "okay" at a second language works out well, but at the same time I know many friends of Asian descent who are self conscious of their "child-like" use of their second language. A conundrum.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  My oldest was 3 when we moved to the US my youngest was born there. Every year they spend 6-8 weeks in Denmark with their grandparents and at home we speak Danish and only occasionally do we speak english with them. They both have less vocabulary but the oldest can read both Danish and English. We never taught him to read danish but believe that spending time in Denmark for that amount of time still exposes them to enough Danish to internalize some of the language constructs and general orientation of language. It's been quite interesting to follow.
- nneonneo 9y ago
  My parents are Chinese but I grew up in Canada. Consequently, I am fully fluent in English, but my Chinese is quite poor by comparison. I am "okay" by your standard, in that I can converse comfortably on day-to-day topics with native speakers, but my vocabulary falls apart with complex subjects. I am indeed fairly self-conscious of my "child-like" use of Chinese; on a recent visit, I was shocked that I could not read a 3-year-old cousin's picture book completely without stumbling on words. I have since redoubled my efforts to learn the written language :) I did Saturday school, cultural programs, and got involved with the community. Consequently, I do feel closer to my Chinese heritage than most people of a similar "CBC" background. However, there is just so much cultural background that I will never see or experience, and that saddens me somewhat. There's always a compromise. Had I been more fully immersed in Chinese, I can fully expect that my English would not be so good - and for my academic work, that would be a detriment. So, perhaps I should be happier, as you say, that I ended up maximizing my English skill.
  - chj 9y ago
    Regarding your Chinese, you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid. I can't imagine how it could be of use to your career, but once you grasp the language, there are so many interesting and subtle things to discover that you probably won't regret the time.
    - mikekchar 9y ago
      > you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid I really don't think this is the case. An ordinary Chinese kid is learning Chinese 24x7 -- for decades. If you start learning a new language when you are an adult, the expectation seems to be that you'll be both fluent and proficient in a few years. There is a myth that children are able to do this. It's just not true. Talk to a 5 year old. They have mediocre fluency, and very little proficiency. The average English speaking 5 year old only has a vocabulary of 5000 word families. Contrast that to the average high school student with over 15,000 and the average university graduate of over 20,000. Even by 10 years old, try plonking them down in front of the news and ask them to summarise what was said. Most 10 year olds can't do it, because they lack both vocabulary and grammar. Look at English text books for junior high school students. Note how basic the English is. And still many students struggle to comprehend (though by the time a child is 10, they have pretty amazing fluency because that's what they practice all day, every day). I guarantee that you can vastly outperform a child in learning a second language if you spend comparable amounts of time and effort. I say this having taught English as a second language. Now you may ask why, after years of study and frustration in classes that most students can produce no language. The main reason: if you don't review every day, you will hit a ceiling pretty fast. Students usually have class 1-3 times a week for 1-2 hours per class. This is literally useless. 5 minutes a day, every day, will give you dramatically better results. The next biggest reason: teaching fluency is unpopular because historically many teachers never achieved any real fluency (and they inflict the poor teaching they received on the next generation). Also, fluency is virtually impossible to test objectively and takes a huge amount of teacher time to even evaluate. I worked it out one day. I was expected to work in classes where my opportunity for 2 way conversation in the class worked out to less than 30 seconds per student per hour. Pretty much guaranteed failure. Next biggest reason: Students are told that 2000 words of vocabulary will make them fluent, and so limit themselves to this level (that is surpassed by 3 year old native speakers -- talk to a 3 year old and judge for yourself). Students also forget the frustration of being a child and not understanding what's going on. Children frequently burst out in tears and tantrum all over the place because they are so frustrated. We have this idea that the acquisition of our first language was effortless, and so wonder why we need to spend so much effort in the next language. Next time you talk to a child, question why they don't understand what you are saying. Very often the surprising answer is because they don't speak English very well! And finally (finally for this already long email, not because I ran out of reasons): Adult speakers are unwilling to act like children. They are unwilling to put themselves in situations where they do not understand what's going on and where they have no control over their surroundings. They are unwilling to be silly, and to make mistakes and to interact with language resources that are aimed at their level (like cartoons). Again, watch a 4 year old. Copy them. (The same Spongebob episode 500 times in a row until you are repeating the lines to yourself as it is playing). It's not because it is harder as an adult. Just the opposite. As adults we are so used to having thing be so easy that we are reluctant to put in the effort of a 4 year old.
lordnacho 9y ago
This is really, really hard to do properly. I'm native in two languages, neither of them my first. By this I mean native-accented speech, and able to do a degree in these language. The only way it was possible was that I went to school in one language and lived in a society that spoke another. So school was teaching me English, meaning I learned all of math/science/history through high school with English vocabulary. But I was only able to learn the local language because I kept local friends and my cousins spoke it with me. And I read the papers and watched the TV, as well as socialising with people who showed up at my parents' restaurant. So now as an adult there are only two languages in which I could do a degree. What happened to my other languages? It's like I'm tourist when I speak the old with my parents. Oddly enough there are two of those, as they were also a minority where they grew up. I can ask them for various kinds of food, but I can barely explain to them what I do for a living. I can read a paper in French or German too, and get along ok, but nothing too deep. The absolute most that I know of (personally) is to be able to do a degree in three languages, a few friends of mine who'd lived in two countries while learning English. Even so they were identifiably non native accented. I still tend to think most multilingual people are slightly deficient in one of their languages. If you expand "language" to mean "culture", even more so. You just aren't going to know all the minor celebrities of multiple language zones. For instance I met a young guy in Switzerland who'd been taught Danish by his dad. He spoke with a native accent, but wobbled when it came to common language and cultural idioms. Like an English aristocrat who'd apologise in perfect RP at not knowing what happens at the Ascot, or what wrapping your head around something means. Being Swiss, he spoke Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish. I'm guessing with that level of skill: high in all, but wobbly when you dig a little.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  Some countries have true bilingual culture, where being a bilingual is a necessary part of life and not something to achieve. Meaning that it's not uncommon to see a group of people discussing something in two languages like it's a single language and not bothering to switch to other peoples language, because everyone automatically assumes that everyone else understand them in either one.
  - 9y ago
ivanbakel 9y ago
>The ones who are sucessful bilinguals as adults are still much better in English than they are in Spanish Sadly true. Probably the biggest challenge of a bilingual childhood (or I imagine, bilinguality anywhere) is the lack of exposure to a massive amount of second-language vocabulary that you'd normally learn by use. At least it's good to know that not having equal proficiency isn't a failure. Interestingly, I've had discussions in the past where the other side suggested that immigrant parents have a duty to speak the native language in the household, to encourage their children to learn it better. This article does a nice job of explaining why that's already unnecessary, and maintaining a second language in the face of native schooling, media, and what else, is hard enough. One thing that helps, in my experience, is reading fairy tales. They have some of the most common use of language, and can take a conversational tone that's missing from regular reading.
ldd 9y ago
>True bilingualism is a relatively rare and a beautiful thing(...) Highly competent bilingualism is probably more common in other countries, since many children growing up in the United States aren’t exposed to other languages. I acknowledge that this article is aimed at Americans, but I don't really think that bilingualism is rare in the world, or for that matter, in certain parts of the USA. Perhaps this is not relevant to the article, but it seems that bilingualism is a forgotten issue these days in the USA. Yet, it is actually a very important issue. One time a person simply told me that they couldn't see the point in Junot Díaz work because it used so many 'foreign' words. At the time of writing this reply, there were already plenty of other replies that suggested that we should all speak English exclusively or at least that speaking English proficiently should be prioritized. I think that they are probably at least partially right, but it surprises me that there is really not a lot of controversy on this topic. All I am saying is that here we have a perfect topic in which humans are not entirely rational, and instead of being puzzled and talking about it, we just simply forget about it. [edited for clarity. Like Celia said, my English is not very good looking, so I'd appreciate corrections :D]
- throwmeunderbus 9y ago
  Came here to say the exact same thing. I grew up in India and I can speak 4 languages with full proficiency and 3 more relatively well. And I have seen atleast 30% of every classroom, in every school I went to speak multiple languages. Also, right in my family, we speak three languages on an everyday basis, it's interesting because, say we speak languages A, B, C; dad, mom and me speak language B with my brother, and dad, mom and myself communicate in A and all four of us switch to C whenever we wish to.
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- kutkloon7 9y ago
  True. People from Switzerland or Luxembourg often speak 3 or more languages fluently. A lot of other people in Europe speak their native language and a bit of English as well. I don't feel Americans appreciate the luxury of speaking a language that is basically the lingua franca of the Western world. Also, sometimes I feel that many people don't realize that there is a wealth of information that is in Latin, Greek, Russian, or Mandarin. What's not English doesn't exist for them. In this way, the world is still divided in some sense.
freyfogle 9y ago
It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas. I live in Catalonia, it is very normal for locals to be fully fluent in Catalan and Spanish, I've seen the same in the Basque region. Go to India and almost every person you meet at all levels of society speaks several languages. In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm. I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.
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- bousaid 9y ago
  In Tunisia everyone grows up learning French and Arabic. Additionally most learn English in school.
- jfaucett 9y ago
  As a US spanish speaker, saying Catalan is another language is kind of debateable at least IMHO and gets into the interesting difference between a dialect and a language, namely - a flag and an army :) Still, though I think true bilingualism is extremely rare, If by "True" you mean being able to do anything you can in one language in the other language without any hiccups and word-searching and at the same speed and eloquence and precision in all possible situations and contexts. I've studied at a university level in 3 different languages and am highly fluent in all of them, still there are a lot of contexts where I don't know the specific vocabulary in one particular language or might have problems finding the right word in one language because I'm getting interference from the other ones. Also, I've known a lot of bi/tri/quad linguals in my life (whole family, extended family, friends, etc), and in my studies and I have yet to encounter even one truely bilingual person as I defined it above.
  - joeyspn 9y ago
spraak 9y ago
Somewhat related is an experiment I've been doing with my child, where the only media I've introduced to them (since birth) is in a language other than English (we live in the US). Usually this is Swedish or German, which are the languages I know best besides English, but sometimes Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean etc. etc. What I've found is that they have a play/babble language of their own that sounds like a mix of mostly Swedish and German. We talk together in this language at times, too. Sometimes they even have asked me what the English word for an idea/thing they've learned or experienced in German or Swedish. Another time they asked me what "zum Beispiel and till Eksempel" mean! which amazed me because they obviously connected that they both mean the same thing ("for example"). In real life (i.e. not at home watching movies) they can hold conversations with Germans and Swedes, too. At this point they're not truly bilingual, but it's been really fun and interesting to see how much they have learned, and makes available for them in the future, as with deeper study and practice they could be truly multilingual.
- wingerlang 9y ago
  > till Eksempel In Swedish it should be "till exempel".
  - spraak 9y ago
    Thanks! I meant to edit that but I think it was too late. I've learned some Danish and Norwegian as well and get them mixed up sometimes.
kutkloon7 9y ago
While I'm not exactly bilingual, I would like to teach my children (when I have them) multiple languages, just because I think that the potential for learning (and especially for learning languages) is at its maximum during childhood. However, I'm not quite sure what the best languages would be. I want to give them some exposure to a broad spectrum of languages. I know that the best way to learn a language is to actually use it. In this light, I'm wondering what the best balance between casually exposing them to a huge number of languages and learning them just one extra language really well would be.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  I'm weak in French, German and Chinese and have even worse Spanish. Pick one language and let the child watch tv in it and only in it. Ditto for video games. If I was in the US I'd probably pick Spanish. It's one of the easiest languages to learn as a speaker of English. Pick one language.
JohnGB 9y ago
> “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. That is rubbish. It depends on how the child is exposed to the various languages and how much exposure they get. My daughter speaks 3 languages at home (one to each adult). We were told exactly this that she would be behind language wise, but we made sure that she was read stories in each of the languages, and had good exposure. She has just started at a bilingual school, and her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise. Yes, this may be an outlier, but every family that I know that has bilingual or more children and who expose the children to enough of each language have children that are ahead of the norm in each of those languages. If however you simply split the time that you would give in language related activities or conversation between multiple languages, then of course the child will be behind in each one, as you've only exposed them to half the language in each. This is true up to about 7 years old, and non-existent after that anyway.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Yeah there are lots of monolinguists with poor vocabularies. It's because they never read books, not because they've divided their vocabulary time in too many different language slices.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  >her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise // How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Like I've of the languages could have buoyed it up but the other overloaded her and reduced her overall vocabulary. Or many other possibilities. Surely the truth is you hypothesise it had no effect but without re-running her life you can't know one way or the other? What do you mean with your last sentence, it's entirely incoherent to me?
  - sumedh 9y ago
    > How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Not OP. I can speak 3 Indian languages and English. My English is better than native English speakers, I know that because I got above average points in IELTS. Yes when you are learning as a kid things will be little show at first but most kids (sample size of my Indian friends who are trilinguals as well) will be fine after some years.
joshaidan 9y ago
Bilingualism in Canada is very common among French-English languages, and depending on what part of the country you live in, your exposure to both languages can be fairly even. My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly. Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.
- coredog64 9y ago
  > I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. French speakers from France might blanch at calling it "perfect"
  - RodericDay 9y ago
    He said qc accent not fr accent. Unnecessary comment.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - umanwizard 9y ago
    What's your point? Nobody is asking them...
- pacaro 9y ago
  Probably from Wales, although depending on where in the principality he lived, the accent may be quite interesting, and while British, certainly not most people's stereotypical idea of a British accent. If he lived in Whales, then (if Octonauts is to be believed) the accent could be Texan (Bowhead Whales), English RP (Orca Whales or Sperm Whales), stereotypical Slavic accented English (Narwhals)
danieltillett 9y ago
One thing I wish us native English speakers did was work on fixing English - spelling in particular, but also the irregular grammar. English is so much harder to learn that it needs to be.
- ygaf 9y ago
  Not on-topic, but definitely. English is like C++, it's a monster. Apparently Germans managed to revamp their own written language very recently.
j_s 9y ago
What are the best technologies to help an English-speaking household even introduce other languages?
- k-mcgrady 9y ago
  Try Duolingo. I use it mostly on the web but they also have really great apps and at least a dozen languages supported.
  - j_s 9y ago
    Thanks! At what minimum age is Duolingo usable?
  - njloof 9y ago
    I really like Mango for two reasons: it has Québécois French (since I'm in Montreal now) and it has a feature where you can compare your pronunciation to a native speaker. It's really helped me learn the unvoiced consonants that lurk at the end of French words.
- yourapostasy 9y ago
  If you can find an IPTV product exists that supports your target language, then only allow your children to watch TV in that language. A lot of non-native English speakers report picking up a lot of vocabulary and culture through English TV, so hopefully this works in other languages and cultures as well.
  - 21 9y ago
    As somebody which picked up a lot of Italian and Spanish by watching TV I can tell you about a problem of this method - you will understand it pretty well, but when you'll try to speak it the words just won't come out. You'll immediately recognize the word for "car", but you'll struggle to come up with the same word on demand. I think this shows that there is a need to also speak/write a language, not just listen/read.
- j_s 9y ago
geff82 9y ago
I also think that in all the 4 languages I speak, I exhibit a slightly different personality, as you usually not only learn to speak in a language, but also how to behave in another culture.
- Paul_S 9y ago
  I thought that was strange, glad to see I'm not the only one! And the differences aren't slight for me, crossing the border I seem to revert to the person I used to be 10 years ago when I left. It's strange to talk about but feels natural when it happens.
gnicholas 9y ago
> It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, Dr. Hoff said, and that, again, comes back to the exposure. “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. This is the first time I've seen an expert go on record saying that there is some downside (perhaps temporary) of raising a child bilingual. It's all the rage to do so (and I am currently doing so, I'll admit), and everyone loves to talk about how a study showed that bilingual speakers are better at this or that. But it's important to consider that there is some downside, and for some children - perhaps those without a huge vocabulary to begin with - it might not be the best thing to do.
cletus 9y ago
I'm a native English speaker and not bilingual so feel like an outsider looking in here but this is an area I find interesting. For one, I kind of wish I was bilingual. I suspect this is much easier to achieve as a non-English speaker for several reasons: - The pervasiveness of English as a first or second language - As much as people complain about English, in the transition from Old English to Middle English when English was not the court language of England, English lost a lot of what I like to call the grammatical bullshit (eg gender of nouns, cases, agreement of case, number, adjective and article and so on). Anyway, this article made one claim that resonates with my observations: > But parents should not assume that young children’s natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort. How many people do you know that have done 12 years of Italian or French or German or Spanish through school and can maybe remember how to count to 10? I know quite a few. Another claim the article makes is that bilingual children are less fluent in each language than a child who only knows one language. I've often wondered if this is the case for a similar reason: language ability seems to largely be a function of exposure and there's only so much time to go around. If true, I wonder how this has affected the development of English-speaking countries, which are particularly mono-lingual. Is it an advantage? A disadvantage? A bit of both?
- arde 9y ago
  > language ability seems to largely be a function of exposure and there's only so much time to go around. There's an important shortcoming in that reasoning: it assumes that time is fully dedicated to learning whichever language is being used. Furthermore, it doesn't consider the possibility that learning a language may benefit from learning a different one. Based on my observations while raising my kid bilingual, that's probably not the case. When she learnt a new word in a language, she usually asked for it in the other language too so she could learn both. At 6 years old, she now has much better language skills in both languages compared to her peers. There may have been a period at about 2 or 3 years old that her skills weren't outstanding but she was still perfectly fine by her age's norm (which accounts for quite a bit of variance). My guess is that, after learning a few basics, new language is learnt sporadically with lots of "waiting" time in between, and thus there's practically no time conflict in learning two languages except maybe at the very start.
orless 9y ago
We're native Russians and live in Germany for quite a while (17+ years). My children (8 and 5yo) were born here and we're raising them bilingual. They went/go to normal kindergarden/school and have natural exposure to the German language. At home, we speak Russian with children, unless there is a non-Russian-speaker present. The older son additionally goes to the Russian school on Saturdays. We often talk to our parents (who live in Russia) over videochat. Me and my wife are fluent in German, my wife is even Master of Arts in German language and literature studies). We parents also speak English and some French. A few years ago we even had a habit to speak a different language (Russian/German/English) each day, just for practice. We dropped the habit when we got children, completely switching to Russian at home. I would say that our experience largely overlaps with what I read in the article. Raising bilingual child is hard, "truly bilingual" (whatever the measure for "truly" is) is even harder. But it is probably easier if you're living in a foreign country. Judging from the older son - yes, his vocabulary in German is somewhat smaller compared to his German peers, but not significantly. His Russian vocabulary is probably also smaller compared to Russian kids, but more than that - it is different. He learned the language primarily from us parents, there are almost no Russian friends around, so his language is very adult, I'd even say academic. For instance, he normally does not use the word "круто", Russian equivalent for "cool", he'd rather say "remarkable". His grammar in Russian, is, however, heavily influenced by German. Prime example are reflexive verbs. For instance, for "I'm wrong" you'd probably say "ich habe mich geirrt" in German - literally "I have erred myself". Note the usage of the reflexive pronoun "mich" ("myself"). You don't use it in Russian as reflexion is encoded in the verb suffix itself - "я ошибся". But my son sometimes still uses the reflexive pronoun in Russian, saying something like "я меня ошибся" which is not correct and sounds pretty funny. Over the years we've estabilished a small set of rules for language. Speak Russian in the family, unless a non-Russian-speaker is present. Answer in the language in which you were addressed. Do not mix languages. It seems to work pretty well for us. The article seems to take mixing of languages quite easy. We see this as one of the biggest challenges. It is way too easy to start using German words where Russian translations are cumbersome or unusual. (Prime example is "Termin" - "appointment". In Russian there's just no good translation for this word. The closest is probably "назначенное время" - "the appointed time", but that has a completely different connotation.) It may be not sound so bad if you mix Romance/Germanic languages, but if you mix Russian and German, the result is absolutely horrible. You end up with a language which neither "pure" Russian nor "pure" German speaker will understand. You'll need to know both languages to understand the mixture. So this is probably the rule where we are most strict and persistent. Do not, never, mix languages. If you don't know a word, ask, we'll help. If it's too complicated, say it in German, we'll help to translate. It is hard to keep the language and it is easy to loose it. We know families which lost Russian in the next generation. Their children understand some Russian but answer and German. I think this is a pity. Second language has great value, it takes so much effort to learn it as an adult, so it is unforgivable to loose this opportunity in the childhood.
quickthrower2 9y ago
My wife is truly trilingual in Arabic, English and French. Coming from a 80s Lebanon childhood. I.e. you wouldn't know that she isn't native in each language. It's probably less rare outside of UK/US/etc.
cheesedoodle 9y ago
"Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability" I have to agree with one of the Indian commentator that this does not signal language abillity but rather the lack of vocabulary. Me and my wife are doing our best trying to raise our children multilingual (three mother tongues). The use of drop in words only means to us that we dont know the right word in the current speaking language. That aside, I think that you are truly bi/multi-lingual when you can express feelings effortless in any of your languages equally.
- geomark 9y ago
  I agree that this is often the case. But it is also true that when you know more than one language well you often find that words in one language are more expressive than in the other. So it becomes convenient to mix the languages in conversation by chosing a single word in one language that would be an entire phrase in the other.
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    As I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685, there is a major difference between deliberately mixing languages when talking to a fellow bilingual as an adult, and the accidental mixing of languages when talking to anyone that kids do because they aren't fluent enough.
    - cheesedoodle 9y ago
      Yes I have to agree with this also. Of course, it can in some situations be applied to both adults and kids. My wife speaks Tagalog and English, which combined is the official language of Taglish. Sometimes she does not know the actual word for something in Tagalog so she substitutes it with English. This can fir example involve words for colours. More often though, the substitution is purely to emphasize. For me, as we only speak Swedish in Sweden, I do not have this habit of mixing and substition. That being said, my English is of curse much worse then my Swedish... I'm hoping that our kids can speak all three languages natively, and I'm sure they will naturally mix it in between them self. And that in other settings, that they uses the current locale with out thinking about it. I'm also hoping the knowledge of many languages makes them more susceptible to even more languages and cultures. :)
shioyama 9y ago
> “There is certainly no research to suggest that children need to have languages lined up with speakers or they get confused.” This goes against the mantra that each parent should speak to their child in their native language, which I hear all the time but I've always thought was complete bs. As parents we're both fairly proficient in each other's language and speak to our children in both languages depending on context. I find the "rule" that you speak to your child in your native language to actually be very bad because it artificially splits conversations across languages, and also gives the kid the impression that you should speak your native language, whereas the whole point is that they should be comfortable speaking any language.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  I think the anecdotes I've mostly heard use that tactic as a way of forcing the kid to speak both languages - "with mom you speak this language, with dad you speak this one" - otherwise the kid will be exposed to both languages but will gravitate to only speaking one. This is what happened to me when I grew up, living in the US my parents would speak Swedish at home, but I'd pretty much just speak English all the time and when we moved to Sweden I had a lot of work catching up. It was still all in there somewhere since I had been exposed to it, but I would never have become bilingual if we hadn't moved back to Sweden to force the issue.
  - shioyama 9y ago
    Even so, I find "forcing" a kid to speak a language via any sort of artificial "rules" (i.e. one language with one parent, etc) is counter-productive, and can have potentially negative consequences if the kid learns to dislike a language. My rule of thumb is we never force our kids to speak one language or another, we just try to give them opportunities and motivations to do so. Going to a different country happens to be a particularly effective one, although obviously not feasible for everyone. I am also ok with the possibility that they will not speak my native language (English) very well. I think if as a parent you are not okay with that possibility, you will end up putting undue burden on the kids and probably make things worse in the end. Just my two cents.
- 9y ago
Cyph0n 9y ago
As a person fluent in both Arabic and English, I always wonder if Arabic dialects count as "languages". Note that basically no one speaks "written" Arabic; everyone uses a dialect based on their region. For example, North African dialects are basically unintelligible to Middle Easterners. Even within North Africa, the dialects are vastly different: for instance, Tunisians have trouble understanding the general Algerian dialect. You can go even further: people within Tunisia can find trouble understanding each other's dialects (e.g., north vs. south)! The linguistic variations are enormous. I was raised in the UAE, so I can understand (at a high level) basically all Arabic dialects. In Tunisia, I speak Tunisian; in the UAE, I speak the dialect closest to who I'm talking to (if applicable), or a form of Emirati Arabic otherwise (e.g., in the case of Sudanese Arabic).
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  Whether something is a language or a dialect is a political question, not a linguistic one. The Arabic dialects are as varied as the Romance languages in grammar and vocabulary.
  - uiri 9y ago
    While this is true to some extent, I think the question is mostly one of mutual intelligibility; that is, whether a speaker of dialect A and dialect B can understand each other by each speaking their own dialect. This is obviously a spectrum - there can be no mutual intelligibility at all, some amount of mutual intelligibility (like among some of the romance languages), near full mutual intelligibility, and full mutual intelligibility. So, where the line is drawn depends upon political factors. Despite all of the PRC's claims to the contrary, Chinese is not a single language but a language family. There isn't really much you can do politically when mutual intelligibility is low.
guytpearson1 9y ago
This article is a fluff piece for the doctors interviewed. Awful research, brief interviews, and so vague you have to laugh. The entire thing screams "Yeah, no shit."
jayhuang 9y ago
The easiest way to learn a language is simply to put a child in that environment, an environment where they have no other option but to learn. Granted, it's can be immensely stressful, but having been in a similar situation, I can attest that it works. I grew up in Canada my whole life, but was taken to Taiwan towards the end of my elementary years and enrolled in the normal school system there without so much as knowing the alphabet. Spending 3.5 years there allowed me to pick up the language fluently, at a fluent, accent-less level (reading, writing, speaking, listening). While there I also learned "Taiwanese" at a fluent, accent-less level while visiting produce and night markets. Now when I interact with Mandarin speakers in Mandarin, they assume I grew up in Asia, and vice versa with English. On the flip side, many Asian friends who grew up here attended Saturday Chinese schools, and although it helps allow you to communicate on a basic level, most hate learning Mandarin, and thus fight it. Speak with classmates in English the second the teacher isn't hounding them, speak in English during breaks, etc. Many end up not even being capable of conversing
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  I read your comment and assumed you had no exposure to Mandarin before moving to Taiwan. Then I saw your username and am now assuming you did. But I could be wrong :) I'm curious to know how early you were exposed to hearing Mandarin sounds (from birth?) and whether you spoke Mandarin at all with your family before you moved to Taiwan. I ask because one of the toughest things getting started for many foreigners learning Chinese is being able to distinguish the tones when listening and speaking, and AI read some report of some research that said that early exposure to hearing another language (I think at under 12 months old) allows you to distinguish the sounds that occur in that language, even if you only learn that language later in life. If you went from zero to fluent in 3.5 years, that's awesome. I can imagine the second half being hard but doable. I can't imagine how you got through day 1 and month 1 at all!
  - jayhuang 9y ago
    I'm actually of mixed origin (half Caucasian/Asian) (: I was born in Taiwan, so I assume the exposure was there, at least from the staff at the clinic if not anything else. That said, my first language was English as we came to Canada immediately after my birth. English was the language at home, and while I had a few Asian classmates, all of us only spoke English, and there weren't many immigrants from Asia (mostly Taiwan/Hong Kong) at all. So despite exposure at birth, hearing Mandarin for me at the time was much like hearing someone speak Spanish or Russian now. In fact, I had no interest in relocating to Taiwan and losing contact with my friends. I'd be lying if I said it was not hell; the school administration strongly suggested I be put in kindergarten so I could learn the language from the beginning just like the locals, but my mother insisted I be put in 5th grade, where I belonged. It was a major hit to my ego, to go from top of the class throughout my young life, to a bottom feeder. It was also a culture shock to many kids to see someone "white", so bullying was a huge part of my life there, but I digress. Being forced into an environment like that is incredibly stressful, but I can't say it doesn't work. I'd say it took about 6 or 7 months before I was consistently not the bottom performer in class, and another year or so till I was consistently top 3. So while there was technically some exposure, and probably some learning going on in my infant brain, none of it was apparent to me.
karaokeyoga 9y ago
My son spent his first six years in San Francisco. Canadian dad, Japanese mom. He went to Japanese preschool and spent close to two years (kindergarten, most of grade one) in a Mandarin immersion public school. We moved to Japan after that. His younger sister (three years his junior) began French immersion in Japan. Actually, a truly French school, started by French parents living in Japan. Since our son was working on three languages, and there were limited options for being immersed in Mandarin here, we decided on French for her. Fast-forward eight years, six of which were spent in Japan, and two in the UK and France. Our son is bilingual, but his English is short of native. Japanese took over as the dominant language for him. His Mandarin is as good as gone, in spite of three extended trips to China and the (intermittent) use of native Mandarin tutors while living in Japan. I gave up on Mandarin for him when I realized how much his English was deteriorating. Our daughter is native-level Japanese and English, and just short of native in French. She speaks without an accent but is short on a lot of vocabulary, for example. (Similar to my son and his English.) Looking back at the experience of raising these children with multiple languages, my main observation is that, although children are superior at learning languages compared to their adult selves, there are starkly different levels of language acquisition ability from child to child. My daughter is truly a language monster. She is shockingly impressive in all three of her languages, and is constantly trying out new words and getting them absolutely right (context, etc.). My son is, not surprisingly, much like his parents. Language is hard for us. He is stronger in other areas (music, visual art, writing ability), and we work hard to let him know that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. He's jealous of his younger sister's French (and her English, too), but we tell him that we're jealous, too! My second observation is that raising children like this is a substantial amount of work. Last but not least, I have come to appreciate the joy and magic of being truly, madly, deeply native in a language. Having that final 1% of ability adds untold richness and closeness. There's nothing quite like it. Being truly bilingual is fantastic, but not the same as being dual-native, and it doesn't come close, in my opinion. And, as an afterthought, there are all the non-spoken aspects of another culture, such as behaviour, body language, and even the volume of your voice, that are, in my opinion, as important as language fluency in terms of feeling "close" within a society.
- rtx 9y ago
matthewaveryusa 9y ago
Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability I'm trilangual and that statement is complete BS. I would trade the decent mastery of three languages for complete mastery of one any day of the week. No one cares that I'm fluent in French or Polish expect for when I pronounce French words properly or can order two beers at a bar on a biz trip. People do notice that I tend to reel for pretty basic words in English. I guess it's always a matter of perspective.
- ice109 9y ago
  I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
- ice109 9y ago
  I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
- ice109 9y ago
  I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  > Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability I think I'll caveat that with "in the presence of other bilinguals". I am trilingual (formerly bilingual) and I, as well as people I share >1 languages with, freely switch when talking. It's quite liberating since you get access to idioms from multiple languages, and certain phrasings work out better. (There's also a lot more potential for great humor) None of the adult bilinguals I know accidentally switch in the presence of non-bilinguals, however I have seen bilingual kids a few years younger than me do this (and I suspect I did it too). In the context of kid mistakes, that quote was rather jarring to me; adult bilinguals do not switch languages the same way kids do; it's a completely different thing.
wvh 9y ago
I'm raising my 3-year-old bilingually – I speak 6 languages myself, although 2 are somewhat rusty. It's hard, because my native language is the underdog as it's pretty much just me talking with her. She understands what I say, but replies always in mommy's language. It forces you to switch languages if you want to have a fluent back-and-forth conversation instead of something that just peters out. If you want true bilinguality, as the minority language speaker, you have to be willing to push and fight, and sometimes feel on the outside yourself. When she was younger, it was sometimes heartbreaking to read a picture book where she knew some words in one language, and then the other parent comes in and all the words change. Kids' minds are amazing though. I sometimes speak some English or French (not our native languages) with her as a game, and the speed with which those words stick is unbelievable – their minds are just sponges. Last week she threw some random French words at guests, confusing them to no end.
noisy_boy 9y ago
I think a good mix is when your family speaks one language, you speak another in your school with friends and you still have to learn English because one must learn English. That was the setting I grew up in and it allowed enough exposure/practice for me to become very fluent in all three.
hiyer 9y ago
A minimum of bilingualism is probably the norm in India and trilingualism is very common (I myself speak Hindi, Tamil, and English fluently, and a smattering of Kannada). It is not all that unusual to find people who speak 4-5 languages fluently also.
- sumedh 9y ago
  It's kind of weird reading all these comments about bilingualism while here I am with fluency in 3 Indian languages + English. Am I special :)
arde 9y ago
> screen time doesn't count Absolutely false. Screen time is an excellent way of exposing the child to a language and thus learning to distinguish the phonemes that make it up. It can be argued that screen time alone doesn't help too much in learning to speak a language (if by screen we mean a non-interactive one, of course). But it's great for listening comprehension. Source: starting when she was a baby, I let my kid watch as much TV as she wanted as long as it was in English and not in our language (Spanish). She watched about 2 hours a day, on average. Her mother and I are quite fluent in English and, even though we rarely speak it among us, we encouraged our child to learn it this way, occasionally answering her questions or translating the words that she couldn't figure out by herself. She's now 6 and speaks it pretty well, she can easily maintain a conversation and she is very good at identifying the correct phonemes while listening (even in the cases when she may not know the word). Actually, she's better at listening comprehension than what her mother and I could ever hope to achieve ourselves. Differentiating phonemes is a crucial ability that is learnt optimally at an early age and after only a few years old it cannot be learnt that well (I remember reading an article about this limitation in Scientific American more than 20 years ago, I don't have a link for that).
- geomark 9y ago
  Agree. My kid started watching toy unboxing videos by American kids on an iPad at a very early age. The recommender system kept new ones in front of him. Even though we don't live in an English speaking country he chose English as his first language quite early. Now the challenge is limiting his screen time and improving his skills in the local language.
- GolDDranks 9y ago
  I agree with you but I'm also familiar with the original research the claim about screen time stems from. The claim is that screen time is not effective for "bootstrapping" a different language for very small children - having human interaction does a much better job at that.
  - arde 9y ago
    Regarding that research, I can see that human interaction should more efficient but that doesn't imply that screen time should be ineffective. And my kid is a counterexample, because it did bootstrap her English. She had no other source since we live in Argentina and we practically didn't talk to her in English. For a while she had some serious British accent because she was hooked on Peppa Pig, but now she sounds mostly American.
80211 9y ago
With bi-lingual parents (Yiddish, English), I grew up bilingual. In school and some courses at Yivo, I was able to finish off full literacy in Yiddish. I grew up reading/writing Hebrew, too, but it took spending a year in Israel to lose the "Yiddish" accent and speak like an Israeli. So, if parents are bilingual and you have friends/school where both languages are spoken, it's very easy.
pacaro 9y ago
My sister is bilingual, but because she only lived in the U.K. as a child and teenager, there is vocabulary that is used more commonly in adult conversations that she knows, but has a hard time with. So while she is bilingual by any useful definition, there are common scenarios in which she sounds like a foreigner with "very good English" rather than a native speaker. Our grandfather had the opposite problem. He lived in the U.K. from age 18, and only had the very faintest accent, but in his 60s and beyond would be frequently complimented that his German was "very good for an Englishman"
foobaw 9y ago
Not trying to brag, but due to my background I ended up trilingual (Korean, Spanish and English). It all depends on circumstance - I spent a few years growing up in Korea, Latin America and the U.S - and went to school in all three countries where I was forced to learn the native language. It's been a few years but I still speak all those languages due to friends and family so I haven't lost the ability yet. It's not a very useful skill for my job - but I just wanted to point out that I can attest that immersion as a child is one of the best ways to learn languages.
jasonkester 9y ago
We pulled this off by moving to France when our first kid was 2 years old. He went in the local village school at age 3 and was happily speaking French to our adult friends at age 5. A year later, French is just the language that Kids and Strangers speak, so he pulls it out in those situations then falls back to English if that doesn't work. It's fascinating to watch. I'm trying to gauge when will be a good time to up sticks and move to a Spanish speaking country for a year or two.
guftagu 9y ago
A very significant part of the population in most 'third world' countries is actually trilingual. Fir example, Pakistan is divided into 4 provinces, each with its own language and culture. So people there end up learning their local language and the national language Urdu. Most children who go through schools also learn English as a core subject in their curriculum which makes them trilingual. Well, now the government is also pushing Arabic language in schools as a core subject which would make most children in Pakistan tetra-lingual?
GnarfGnarf 9y ago
In Montreal, panhandlers on the street are bilingual. It's all about what you are exposed to growing up.
Ice_Walker 9y ago
In some areas of the world bilingualism is quite common. I'm bilingual myself and I'm also quite high on the English proficiency scale. My kids will probably grow up to be at least trilingual. Of course it's hard to say, but I intend to speak West Frisian with my kids, my girlfriend and her family will talk in Bulgarian to them. We communicate in English with each other and depending on the country where we live by the time, they will also learn that language. To say that they will become truly bilingual or trilingual (or quadrilingual) is quite a stretch, but they will take in at least something.

161 points by wallflower 9y ago

I was born in Poland then at age 11 I moved to Germany and later at age 27 I moved to Sweden. My sister is two years younger, she had it easier to learn German but she doesn't want to speak Polish if sho doesn't need to. I don't have that. I had also big problems learning English at school, because I had to learn English in German which I didn't understand in the beginning, and later I was always behind. I was really bad in English when I moved to Sweden which helped me to learn Swidish faster because people wouldn't use English to communicate with me, which swedes do all the time if you speak English but not Swedish. I learned English later by mostly watching TV, which is only subtitled in Sweden, because I wasn't able to read that fast in Swedish, I started listening to the English original. Later most of the studies here at university were in English (at least in Computer Science), so I was forced to use my English and improve it. And later at work the office language was English too. Anyway, I do even have an anegdote from my Grandfather who was captured by the Russians during WW2. He was in the Wehrmacht, but because he was from Silecia he spoke some polish too, which helped him during his time in captivity in Siberia. Because he could translate, they gave him bigger portions of food, so he always said: "You never know where life leads you and every language you speak is like an extra hand."

hkmurakami 9y ago

>But if a child grows up speaking that second language — Korean, say — with cousins and grandparents, attending a “Saturday School” that emphasizes the language and the culture, listening to music and even reading books in that language, and visits Korea along the way, that child will end up with a much stronger sense of the language. Did this from Kindergarten through 10th grade. "Saturday School" was a full program that followed the Japanese Ministry of Education's requirements for accreditation (since in my era, most students went back to Japan after their parents' 4-6 year stint in the US office). I do notice that my Japanese is stronger than that of my peers who stopped going to these schools at a much earlier age. >“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. For me, this was a big problem since my English vocabulary remained quite weak compared to my peers all the way through high school (mainly because I had a strong preference for reading Japanese material at home). The general lack of confidence in a broad range of English skills is a long lasting effect that is orthogonal to my actual knowledge or skills. I'm a "true bilingual" but I don't know if I'd want my imaginary children to be the same. If you're committed to living in the States, maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. My personal feeling is that being highly proficient at English and being "okay" at a second language works out well, but at the same time I know many friends of Asian descent who are self conscious of their "child-like" use of their second language. A conundrum.

ThomPete 9y ago
My oldest was 3 when we moved to the US my youngest was born there. Every year they spend 6-8 weeks in Denmark with their grandparents and at home we speak Danish and only occasionally do we speak english with them. They both have less vocabulary but the oldest can read both Danish and English. We never taught him to read danish but believe that spending time in Denmark for that amount of time still exposes them to enough Danish to internalize some of the language constructs and general orientation of language. It's been quite interesting to follow.
nneonneo 9y ago
My parents are Chinese but I grew up in Canada. Consequently, I am fully fluent in English, but my Chinese is quite poor by comparison. I am "okay" by your standard, in that I can converse comfortably on day-to-day topics with native speakers, but my vocabulary falls apart with complex subjects. I am indeed fairly self-conscious of my "child-like" use of Chinese; on a recent visit, I was shocked that I could not read a 3-year-old cousin's picture book completely without stumbling on words. I have since redoubled my efforts to learn the written language :) I did Saturday school, cultural programs, and got involved with the community. Consequently, I do feel closer to my Chinese heritage than most people of a similar "CBC" background. However, there is just so much cultural background that I will never see or experience, and that saddens me somewhat. There's always a compromise. Had I been more fully immersed in Chinese, I can fully expect that my English would not be so good - and for my academic work, that would be a detriment. So, perhaps I should be happier, as you say, that I ended up maximizing my English skill.
- chj 9y ago
  Regarding your Chinese, you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid. I can't imagine how it could be of use to your career, but once you grasp the language, there are so many interesting and subtle things to discover that you probably won't regret the time.
  - mikekchar 9y ago
    > you will need to spend 10x effort than an ordinary Chinese kid I really don't think this is the case. An ordinary Chinese kid is learning Chinese 24x7 -- for decades. If you start learning a new language when you are an adult, the expectation seems to be that you'll be both fluent and proficient in a few years. There is a myth that children are able to do this. It's just not true. Talk to a 5 year old. They have mediocre fluency, and very little proficiency. The average English speaking 5 year old only has a vocabulary of 5000 word families. Contrast that to the average high school student with over 15,000 and the average university graduate of over 20,000. Even by 10 years old, try plonking them down in front of the news and ask them to summarise what was said. Most 10 year olds can't do it, because they lack both vocabulary and grammar. Look at English text books for junior high school students. Note how basic the English is. And still many students struggle to comprehend (though by the time a child is 10, they have pretty amazing fluency because that's what they practice all day, every day). I guarantee that you can vastly outperform a child in learning a second language if you spend comparable amounts of time and effort. I say this having taught English as a second language. Now you may ask why, after years of study and frustration in classes that most students can produce no language. The main reason: if you don't review every day, you will hit a ceiling pretty fast. Students usually have class 1-3 times a week for 1-2 hours per class. This is literally useless. 5 minutes a day, every day, will give you dramatically better results. The next biggest reason: teaching fluency is unpopular because historically many teachers never achieved any real fluency (and they inflict the poor teaching they received on the next generation). Also, fluency is virtually impossible to test objectively and takes a huge amount of teacher time to even evaluate. I worked it out one day. I was expected to work in classes where my opportunity for 2 way conversation in the class worked out to less than 30 seconds per student per hour. Pretty much guaranteed failure. Next biggest reason: Students are told that 2000 words of vocabulary will make them fluent, and so limit themselves to this level (that is surpassed by 3 year old native speakers -- talk to a 3 year old and judge for yourself). Students also forget the frustration of being a child and not understanding what's going on. Children frequently burst out in tears and tantrum all over the place because they are so frustrated. We have this idea that the acquisition of our first language was effortless, and so wonder why we need to spend so much effort in the next language. Next time you talk to a child, question why they don't understand what you are saying. Very often the surprising answer is because they don't speak English very well! And finally (finally for this already long email, not because I ran out of reasons): Adult speakers are unwilling to act like children. They are unwilling to put themselves in situations where they do not understand what's going on and where they have no control over their surroundings. They are unwilling to be silly, and to make mistakes and to interact with language resources that are aimed at their level (like cartoons). Again, watch a 4 year old. Copy them. (The same Spongebob episode 500 times in a row until you are repeating the lines to yourself as it is playing). It's not because it is harder as an adult. Just the opposite. As adults we are so used to having thing be so easy that we are reluctant to put in the effort of a 4 year old.

lordnacho 9y ago

This is really, really hard to do properly. I'm native in two languages, neither of them my first. By this I mean native-accented speech, and able to do a degree in these language. The only way it was possible was that I went to school in one language and lived in a society that spoke another. So school was teaching me English, meaning I learned all of math/science/history through high school with English vocabulary. But I was only able to learn the local language because I kept local friends and my cousins spoke it with me. And I read the papers and watched the TV, as well as socialising with people who showed up at my parents' restaurant. So now as an adult there are only two languages in which I could do a degree. What happened to my other languages? It's like I'm tourist when I speak the old with my parents. Oddly enough there are two of those, as they were also a minority where they grew up. I can ask them for various kinds of food, but I can barely explain to them what I do for a living. I can read a paper in French or German too, and get along ok, but nothing too deep. The absolute most that I know of (personally) is to be able to do a degree in three languages, a few friends of mine who'd lived in two countries while learning English. Even so they were identifiably non native accented. I still tend to think most multilingual people are slightly deficient in one of their languages. If you expand "language" to mean "culture", even more so. You just aren't going to know all the minor celebrities of multiple language zones. For instance I met a young guy in Switzerland who'd been taught Danish by his dad. He spoke with a native accent, but wobbled when it came to common language and cultural idioms. Like an English aristocrat who'd apologise in perfect RP at not knowing what happens at the Ascot, or what wrapping your head around something means. Being Swiss, he spoke Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish. I'm guessing with that level of skill: high in all, but wobbly when you dig a little.

zzzcpan 9y ago
Some countries have true bilingual culture, where being a bilingual is a necessary part of life and not something to achieve. Meaning that it's not uncommon to see a group of people discussing something in two languages like it's a single language and not bothering to switch to other peoples language, because everyone automatically assumes that everyone else understand them in either one.
- 9y ago

ivanbakel 9y ago

>The ones who are sucessful bilinguals as adults are still much better in English than they are in Spanish Sadly true. Probably the biggest challenge of a bilingual childhood (or I imagine, bilinguality anywhere) is the lack of exposure to a massive amount of second-language vocabulary that you'd normally learn by use. At least it's good to know that not having equal proficiency isn't a failure. Interestingly, I've had discussions in the past where the other side suggested that immigrant parents have a duty to speak the native language in the household, to encourage their children to learn it better. This article does a nice job of explaining why that's already unnecessary, and maintaining a second language in the face of native schooling, media, and what else, is hard enough. One thing that helps, in my experience, is reading fairy tales. They have some of the most common use of language, and can take a conversational tone that's missing from regular reading.

ldd 9y ago

>True bilingualism is a relatively rare and a beautiful thing(...) Highly competent bilingualism is probably more common in other countries, since many children growing up in the United States aren’t exposed to other languages. I acknowledge that this article is aimed at Americans, but I don't really think that bilingualism is rare in the world, or for that matter, in certain parts of the USA. Perhaps this is not relevant to the article, but it seems that bilingualism is a forgotten issue these days in the USA. Yet, it is actually a very important issue. One time a person simply told me that they couldn't see the point in Junot Díaz work because it used so many 'foreign' words. At the time of writing this reply, there were already plenty of other replies that suggested that we should all speak English exclusively or at least that speaking English proficiently should be prioritized. I think that they are probably at least partially right, but it surprises me that there is really not a lot of controversy on this topic. All I am saying is that here we have a perfect topic in which humans are not entirely rational, and instead of being puzzled and talking about it, we just simply forget about it. [edited for clarity. Like Celia said, my English is not very good looking, so I'd appreciate corrections :D]

throwmeunderbus 9y ago
Came here to say the exact same thing. I grew up in India and I can speak 4 languages with full proficiency and 3 more relatively well. And I have seen atleast 30% of every classroom, in every school I went to speak multiple languages. Also, right in my family, we speak three languages on an everyday basis, it's interesting because, say we speak languages A, B, C; dad, mom and me speak language B with my brother, and dad, mom and myself communicate in A and all four of us switch to C whenever we wish to.
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kutkloon7 9y ago
True. People from Switzerland or Luxembourg often speak 3 or more languages fluently. A lot of other people in Europe speak their native language and a bit of English as well. I don't feel Americans appreciate the luxury of speaking a language that is basically the lingua franca of the Western world. Also, sometimes I feel that many people don't realize that there is a wealth of information that is in Latin, Greek, Russian, or Mandarin. What's not English doesn't exist for them. In this way, the world is still divided in some sense.

freyfogle 9y ago

It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas. I live in Catalonia, it is very normal for locals to be fully fluent in Catalan and Spanish, I've seen the same in the Basque region. Go to India and almost every person you meet at all levels of society speaks several languages. In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm. I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.

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bousaid 9y ago
In Tunisia everyone grows up learning French and Arabic. Additionally most learn English in school.
jfaucett 9y ago
As a US spanish speaker, saying Catalan is another language is kind of debateable at least IMHO and gets into the interesting difference between a dialect and a language, namely - a flag and an army :) Still, though I think true bilingualism is extremely rare, If by "True" you mean being able to do anything you can in one language in the other language without any hiccups and word-searching and at the same speed and eloquence and precision in all possible situations and contexts. I've studied at a university level in 3 different languages and am highly fluent in all of them, still there are a lot of contexts where I don't know the specific vocabulary in one particular language or might have problems finding the right word in one language because I'm getting interference from the other ones. Also, I've known a lot of bi/tri/quad linguals in my life (whole family, extended family, friends, etc), and in my studies and I have yet to encounter even one truely bilingual person as I defined it above.
- joeyspn 9y ago

spraak 9y ago

Somewhat related is an experiment I've been doing with my child, where the only media I've introduced to them (since birth) is in a language other than English (we live in the US). Usually this is Swedish or German, which are the languages I know best besides English, but sometimes Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean etc. etc. What I've found is that they have a play/babble language of their own that sounds like a mix of mostly Swedish and German. We talk together in this language at times, too. Sometimes they even have asked me what the English word for an idea/thing they've learned or experienced in German or Swedish. Another time they asked me what "zum Beispiel and till Eksempel" mean! which amazed me because they obviously connected that they both mean the same thing ("for example"). In real life (i.e. not at home watching movies) they can hold conversations with Germans and Swedes, too. At this point they're not truly bilingual, but it's been really fun and interesting to see how much they have learned, and makes available for them in the future, as with deeper study and practice they could be truly multilingual.

wingerlang 9y ago
> till Eksempel In Swedish it should be "till exempel".
- spraak 9y ago
  Thanks! I meant to edit that but I think it was too late. I've learned some Danish and Norwegian as well and get them mixed up sometimes.

kutkloon7 9y ago

While I'm not exactly bilingual, I would like to teach my children (when I have them) multiple languages, just because I think that the potential for learning (and especially for learning languages) is at its maximum during childhood. However, I'm not quite sure what the best languages would be. I want to give them some exposure to a broad spectrum of languages. I know that the best way to learn a language is to actually use it. In this light, I'm wondering what the best balance between casually exposing them to a huge number of languages and learning them just one extra language really well would be.

barry-cotter 9y ago
I'm weak in French, German and Chinese and have even worse Spanish. Pick one language and let the child watch tv in it and only in it. Ditto for video games. If I was in the US I'd probably pick Spanish. It's one of the easiest languages to learn as a speaker of English. Pick one language.

JohnGB 9y ago

> “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. That is rubbish. It depends on how the child is exposed to the various languages and how much exposure they get. My daughter speaks 3 languages at home (one to each adult). We were told exactly this that she would be behind language wise, but we made sure that she was read stories in each of the languages, and had good exposure. She has just started at a bilingual school, and her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise. Yes, this may be an outlier, but every family that I know that has bilingual or more children and who expose the children to enough of each language have children that are ahead of the norm in each of those languages. If however you simply split the time that you would give in language related activities or conversation between multiple languages, then of course the child will be behind in each one, as you've only exposed them to half the language in each. This is true up to about 7 years old, and non-existent after that anyway.

jessaustin 9y ago
Yeah there are lots of monolinguists with poor vocabularies. It's because they never read books, not because they've divided their vocabulary time in too many different language slices.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise // How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Like I've of the languages could have buoyed it up but the other overloaded her and reduced her overall vocabulary. Or many other possibilities. Surely the truth is you hypothesise it had no effect but without re-running her life you can't know one way or the other? What do you mean with your last sentence, it's entirely incoherent to me?
- sumedh 9y ago
  > How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Not OP. I can speak 3 Indian languages and English. My English is better than native English speakers, I know that because I got above average points in IELTS. Yes when you are learning as a kid things will be little show at first but most kids (sample size of my Indian friends who are trilinguals as well) will be fine after some years.

joshaidan 9y ago

Bilingualism in Canada is very common among French-English languages, and depending on what part of the country you live in, your exposure to both languages can be fairly even. My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly. Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.

coredog64 9y ago
> I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. French speakers from France might blanch at calling it "perfect"
- RodericDay 9y ago
  He said qc accent not fr accent. Unnecessary comment.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- umanwizard 9y ago
  What's your point? Nobody is asking them...
pacaro 9y ago
Probably from Wales, although depending on where in the principality he lived, the accent may be quite interesting, and while British, certainly not most people's stereotypical idea of a British accent. If he lived in Whales, then (if Octonauts is to be believed) the accent could be Texan (Bowhead Whales), English RP (Orca Whales or Sperm Whales), stereotypical Slavic accented English (Narwhals)

danieltillett 9y ago

One thing I wish us native English speakers did was work on fixing English - spelling in particular, but also the irregular grammar. English is so much harder to learn that it needs to be.

ygaf 9y ago
Not on-topic, but definitely. English is like C++, it's a monster. Apparently Germans managed to revamp their own written language very recently.

j_s 9y ago

What are the best technologies to help an English-speaking household even introduce other languages?

k-mcgrady 9y ago
Try Duolingo. I use it mostly on the web but they also have really great apps and at least a dozen languages supported.
- j_s 9y ago
  Thanks! At what minimum age is Duolingo usable?
- njloof 9y ago
  I really like Mango for two reasons: it has Québécois French (since I'm in Montreal now) and it has a feature where you can compare your pronunciation to a native speaker. It's really helped me learn the unvoiced consonants that lurk at the end of French words.
yourapostasy 9y ago
If you can find an IPTV product exists that supports your target language, then only allow your children to watch TV in that language. A lot of non-native English speakers report picking up a lot of vocabulary and culture through English TV, so hopefully this works in other languages and cultures as well.
- 21 9y ago
  As somebody which picked up a lot of Italian and Spanish by watching TV I can tell you about a problem of this method - you will understand it pretty well, but when you'll try to speak it the words just won't come out. You'll immediately recognize the word for "car", but you'll struggle to come up with the same word on demand. I think this shows that there is a need to also speak/write a language, not just listen/read.
j_s 9y ago

geff82 9y ago

I also think that in all the 4 languages I speak, I exhibit a slightly different personality, as you usually not only learn to speak in a language, but also how to behave in another culture.

Paul_S 9y ago
I thought that was strange, glad to see I'm not the only one! And the differences aren't slight for me, crossing the border I seem to revert to the person I used to be 10 years ago when I left. It's strange to talk about but feels natural when it happens.

gnicholas 9y ago

> It does take longer to acquire two languages than one, Dr. Hoff said, and that, again, comes back to the exposure. “A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said. This is the first time I've seen an expert go on record saying that there is some downside (perhaps temporary) of raising a child bilingual. It's all the rage to do so (and I am currently doing so, I'll admit), and everyone loves to talk about how a study showed that bilingual speakers are better at this or that. But it's important to consider that there is some downside, and for some children - perhaps those without a huge vocabulary to begin with - it might not be the best thing to do.

cletus 9y ago

I'm a native English speaker and not bilingual so feel like an outsider looking in here but this is an area I find interesting. For one, I kind of wish I was bilingual. I suspect this is much easier to achieve as a non-English speaker for several reasons: - The pervasiveness of English as a first or second language - As much as people complain about English, in the transition from Old English to Middle English when English was not the court language of England, English lost a lot of what I like to call the grammatical bullshit (eg gender of nouns, cases, agreement of case, number, adjective and article and so on). Anyway, this article made one claim that resonates with my observations: > But parents should not assume that young children’s natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort. How many people do you know that have done 12 years of Italian or French or German or Spanish through school and can maybe remember how to count to 10? I know quite a few. Another claim the article makes is that bilingual children are less fluent in each language than a child who only knows one language. I've often wondered if this is the case for a similar reason: language ability seems to largely be a function of exposure and there's only so much time to go around. If true, I wonder how this has affected the development of English-speaking countries, which are particularly mono-lingual. Is it an advantage? A disadvantage? A bit of both?

arde 9y ago
> language ability seems to largely be a function of exposure and there's only so much time to go around. There's an important shortcoming in that reasoning: it assumes that time is fully dedicated to learning whichever language is being used. Furthermore, it doesn't consider the possibility that learning a language may benefit from learning a different one. Based on my observations while raising my kid bilingual, that's probably not the case. When she learnt a new word in a language, she usually asked for it in the other language too so she could learn both. At 6 years old, she now has much better language skills in both languages compared to her peers. There may have been a period at about 2 or 3 years old that her skills weren't outstanding but she was still perfectly fine by her age's norm (which accounts for quite a bit of variance). My guess is that, after learning a few basics, new language is learnt sporadically with lots of "waiting" time in between, and thus there's practically no time conflict in learning two languages except maybe at the very start.

orless 9y ago

We're native Russians and live in Germany for quite a while (17+ years). My children (8 and 5yo) were born here and we're raising them bilingual. They went/go to normal kindergarden/school and have natural exposure to the German language. At home, we speak Russian with children, unless there is a non-Russian-speaker present. The older son additionally goes to the Russian school on Saturdays. We often talk to our parents (who live in Russia) over videochat. Me and my wife are fluent in German, my wife is even Master of Arts in German language and literature studies). We parents also speak English and some French. A few years ago we even had a habit to speak a different language (Russian/German/English) each day, just for practice. We dropped the habit when we got children, completely switching to Russian at home. I would say that our experience largely overlaps with what I read in the article. Raising bilingual child is hard, "truly bilingual" (whatever the measure for "truly" is) is even harder. But it is probably easier if you're living in a foreign country. Judging from the older son - yes, his vocabulary in German is somewhat smaller compared to his German peers, but not significantly. His Russian vocabulary is probably also smaller compared to Russian kids, but more than that - it is different. He learned the language primarily from us parents, there are almost no Russian friends around, so his language is very adult, I'd even say academic. For instance, he normally does not use the word "круто", Russian equivalent for "cool", he'd rather say "remarkable". His grammar in Russian, is, however, heavily influenced by German. Prime example are reflexive verbs. For instance, for "I'm wrong" you'd probably say "ich habe mich geirrt" in German - literally "I have erred myself". Note the usage of the reflexive pronoun "mich" ("myself"). You don't use it in Russian as reflexion is encoded in the verb suffix itself - "я ошибся". But my son sometimes still uses the reflexive pronoun in Russian, saying something like "я меня ошибся" which is not correct and sounds pretty funny. Over the years we've estabilished a small set of rules for language. Speak Russian in the family, unless a non-Russian-speaker is present. Answer in the language in which you were addressed. Do not mix languages. It seems to work pretty well for us. The article seems to take mixing of languages quite easy. We see this as one of the biggest challenges. It is way too easy to start using German words where Russian translations are cumbersome or unusual. (Prime example is "Termin" - "appointment". In Russian there's just no good translation for this word. The closest is probably "назначенное время" - "the appointed time", but that has a completely different connotation.) It may be not sound so bad if you mix Romance/Germanic languages, but if you mix Russian and German, the result is absolutely horrible. You end up with a language which neither "pure" Russian nor "pure" German speaker will understand. You'll need to know both languages to understand the mixture. So this is probably the rule where we are most strict and persistent. Do not, never, mix languages. If you don't know a word, ask, we'll help. If it's too complicated, say it in German, we'll help to translate. It is hard to keep the language and it is easy to loose it. We know families which lost Russian in the next generation. Their children understand some Russian but answer and German. I think this is a pity. Second language has great value, it takes so much effort to learn it as an adult, so it is unforgivable to loose this opportunity in the childhood.

quickthrower2 9y ago

My wife is truly trilingual in Arabic, English and French. Coming from a 80s Lebanon childhood. I.e. you wouldn't know that she isn't native in each language. It's probably less rare outside of UK/US/etc.

cheesedoodle 9y ago

"Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability" I have to agree with one of the Indian commentator that this does not signal language abillity but rather the lack of vocabulary. Me and my wife are doing our best trying to raise our children multilingual (three mother tongues). The use of drop in words only means to us that we dont know the right word in the current speaking language. That aside, I think that you are truly bi/multi-lingual when you can express feelings effortless in any of your languages equally.

geomark 9y ago
I agree that this is often the case. But it is also true that when you know more than one language well you often find that words in one language are more expressive than in the other. So it becomes convenient to mix the languages in conversation by chosing a single word in one language that would be an entire phrase in the other.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  As I mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685, there is a major difference between deliberately mixing languages when talking to a fellow bilingual as an adult, and the accidental mixing of languages when talking to anyone that kids do because they aren't fluent enough.
  - cheesedoodle 9y ago
    Yes I have to agree with this also. Of course, it can in some situations be applied to both adults and kids. My wife speaks Tagalog and English, which combined is the official language of Taglish. Sometimes she does not know the actual word for something in Tagalog so she substitutes it with English. This can fir example involve words for colours. More often though, the substitution is purely to emphasize. For me, as we only speak Swedish in Sweden, I do not have this habit of mixing and substition. That being said, my English is of curse much worse then my Swedish... I'm hoping that our kids can speak all three languages natively, and I'm sure they will naturally mix it in between them self. And that in other settings, that they uses the current locale with out thinking about it. I'm also hoping the knowledge of many languages makes them more susceptible to even more languages and cultures. :)

shioyama 9y ago

> “There is certainly no research to suggest that children need to have languages lined up with speakers or they get confused.” This goes against the mantra that each parent should speak to their child in their native language, which I hear all the time but I've always thought was complete bs. As parents we're both fairly proficient in each other's language and speak to our children in both languages depending on context. I find the "rule" that you speak to your child in your native language to actually be very bad because it artificially splits conversations across languages, and also gives the kid the impression that you should speak your native language, whereas the whole point is that they should be comfortable speaking any language.

kalleboo 9y ago
I think the anecdotes I've mostly heard use that tactic as a way of forcing the kid to speak both languages - "with mom you speak this language, with dad you speak this one" - otherwise the kid will be exposed to both languages but will gravitate to only speaking one. This is what happened to me when I grew up, living in the US my parents would speak Swedish at home, but I'd pretty much just speak English all the time and when we moved to Sweden I had a lot of work catching up. It was still all in there somewhere since I had been exposed to it, but I would never have become bilingual if we hadn't moved back to Sweden to force the issue.
- shioyama 9y ago
  Even so, I find "forcing" a kid to speak a language via any sort of artificial "rules" (i.e. one language with one parent, etc) is counter-productive, and can have potentially negative consequences if the kid learns to dislike a language. My rule of thumb is we never force our kids to speak one language or another, we just try to give them opportunities and motivations to do so. Going to a different country happens to be a particularly effective one, although obviously not feasible for everyone. I am also ok with the possibility that they will not speak my native language (English) very well. I think if as a parent you are not okay with that possibility, you will end up putting undue burden on the kids and probably make things worse in the end. Just my two cents.
9y ago

Cyph0n 9y ago

As a person fluent in both Arabic and English, I always wonder if Arabic dialects count as "languages". Note that basically no one speaks "written" Arabic; everyone uses a dialect based on their region. For example, North African dialects are basically unintelligible to Middle Easterners. Even within North Africa, the dialects are vastly different: for instance, Tunisians have trouble understanding the general Algerian dialect. You can go even further: people within Tunisia can find trouble understanding each other's dialects (e.g., north vs. south)! The linguistic variations are enormous. I was raised in the UAE, so I can understand (at a high level) basically all Arabic dialects. In Tunisia, I speak Tunisian; in the UAE, I speak the dialect closest to who I'm talking to (if applicable), or a form of Emirati Arabic otherwise (e.g., in the case of Sudanese Arabic).

barry-cotter 9y ago
Whether something is a language or a dialect is a political question, not a linguistic one. The Arabic dialects are as varied as the Romance languages in grammar and vocabulary.
- uiri 9y ago
  While this is true to some extent, I think the question is mostly one of mutual intelligibility; that is, whether a speaker of dialect A and dialect B can understand each other by each speaking their own dialect. This is obviously a spectrum - there can be no mutual intelligibility at all, some amount of mutual intelligibility (like among some of the romance languages), near full mutual intelligibility, and full mutual intelligibility. So, where the line is drawn depends upon political factors. Despite all of the PRC's claims to the contrary, Chinese is not a single language but a language family. There isn't really much you can do politically when mutual intelligibility is low.

guytpearson1 9y ago

This article is a fluff piece for the doctors interviewed. Awful research, brief interviews, and so vague you have to laugh. The entire thing screams "Yeah, no shit."

jayhuang 9y ago

The easiest way to learn a language is simply to put a child in that environment, an environment where they have no other option but to learn. Granted, it's can be immensely stressful, but having been in a similar situation, I can attest that it works. I grew up in Canada my whole life, but was taken to Taiwan towards the end of my elementary years and enrolled in the normal school system there without so much as knowing the alphabet. Spending 3.5 years there allowed me to pick up the language fluently, at a fluent, accent-less level (reading, writing, speaking, listening). While there I also learned "Taiwanese" at a fluent, accent-less level while visiting produce and night markets. Now when I interact with Mandarin speakers in Mandarin, they assume I grew up in Asia, and vice versa with English. On the flip side, many Asian friends who grew up here attended Saturday Chinese schools, and although it helps allow you to communicate on a basic level, most hate learning Mandarin, and thus fight it. Speak with classmates in English the second the teacher isn't hounding them, speak in English during breaks, etc. Many end up not even being capable of conversing

rahimnathwani 9y ago
I read your comment and assumed you had no exposure to Mandarin before moving to Taiwan. Then I saw your username and am now assuming you did. But I could be wrong :) I'm curious to know how early you were exposed to hearing Mandarin sounds (from birth?) and whether you spoke Mandarin at all with your family before you moved to Taiwan. I ask because one of the toughest things getting started for many foreigners learning Chinese is being able to distinguish the tones when listening and speaking, and AI read some report of some research that said that early exposure to hearing another language (I think at under 12 months old) allows you to distinguish the sounds that occur in that language, even if you only learn that language later in life. If you went from zero to fluent in 3.5 years, that's awesome. I can imagine the second half being hard but doable. I can't imagine how you got through day 1 and month 1 at all!
- jayhuang 9y ago
  I'm actually of mixed origin (half Caucasian/Asian) (: I was born in Taiwan, so I assume the exposure was there, at least from the staff at the clinic if not anything else. That said, my first language was English as we came to Canada immediately after my birth. English was the language at home, and while I had a few Asian classmates, all of us only spoke English, and there weren't many immigrants from Asia (mostly Taiwan/Hong Kong) at all. So despite exposure at birth, hearing Mandarin for me at the time was much like hearing someone speak Spanish or Russian now. In fact, I had no interest in relocating to Taiwan and losing contact with my friends. I'd be lying if I said it was not hell; the school administration strongly suggested I be put in kindergarten so I could learn the language from the beginning just like the locals, but my mother insisted I be put in 5th grade, where I belonged. It was a major hit to my ego, to go from top of the class throughout my young life, to a bottom feeder. It was also a culture shock to many kids to see someone "white", so bullying was a huge part of my life there, but I digress. Being forced into an environment like that is incredibly stressful, but I can't say it doesn't work. I'd say it took about 6 or 7 months before I was consistently not the bottom performer in class, and another year or so till I was consistently top 3. So while there was technically some exposure, and probably some learning going on in my infant brain, none of it was apparent to me.

karaokeyoga 9y ago

My son spent his first six years in San Francisco. Canadian dad, Japanese mom. He went to Japanese preschool and spent close to two years (kindergarten, most of grade one) in a Mandarin immersion public school. We moved to Japan after that. His younger sister (three years his junior) began French immersion in Japan. Actually, a truly French school, started by French parents living in Japan. Since our son was working on three languages, and there were limited options for being immersed in Mandarin here, we decided on French for her. Fast-forward eight years, six of which were spent in Japan, and two in the UK and France. Our son is bilingual, but his English is short of native. Japanese took over as the dominant language for him. His Mandarin is as good as gone, in spite of three extended trips to China and the (intermittent) use of native Mandarin tutors while living in Japan. I gave up on Mandarin for him when I realized how much his English was deteriorating. Our daughter is native-level Japanese and English, and just short of native in French. She speaks without an accent but is short on a lot of vocabulary, for example. (Similar to my son and his English.) Looking back at the experience of raising these children with multiple languages, my main observation is that, although children are superior at learning languages compared to their adult selves, there are starkly different levels of language acquisition ability from child to child. My daughter is truly a language monster. She is shockingly impressive in all three of her languages, and is constantly trying out new words and getting them absolutely right (context, etc.). My son is, not surprisingly, much like his parents. Language is hard for us. He is stronger in other areas (music, visual art, writing ability), and we work hard to let him know that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. He's jealous of his younger sister's French (and her English, too), but we tell him that we're jealous, too! My second observation is that raising children like this is a substantial amount of work. Last but not least, I have come to appreciate the joy and magic of being truly, madly, deeply native in a language. Having that final 1% of ability adds untold richness and closeness. There's nothing quite like it. Being truly bilingual is fantastic, but not the same as being dual-native, and it doesn't come close, in my opinion. And, as an afterthought, there are all the non-spoken aspects of another culture, such as behaviour, body language, and even the volume of your voice, that are, in my opinion, as important as language fluency in terms of feeling "close" within a society.

rtx 9y ago

matthewaveryusa 9y ago

Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability I'm trilangual and that statement is complete BS. I would trade the decent mastery of three languages for complete mastery of one any day of the week. No one cares that I'm fluent in French or Polish expect for when I pronounce French words properly or can order two beers at a bar on a biz trip. People do notice that I tend to reel for pretty basic words in English. I guess it's always a matter of perspective.

ice109 9y ago
I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
ice109 9y ago
I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
ice109 9y ago
I don't understand this. as long as it's obvious that you're multilingual people don't hold it against you when you make mistakes. on the other hand I have a friend whose bilingual with no accent in English and has trouble some times. people must think there's something wrong with him.
Manishearth 9y ago
> Adult bilinguals mix their languages all the time; it’s a sign of language ability I think I'll caveat that with "in the presence of other bilinguals". I am trilingual (formerly bilingual) and I, as well as people I share >1 languages with, freely switch when talking. It's quite liberating since you get access to idioms from multiple languages, and certain phrasings work out better. (There's also a lot more potential for great humor) None of the adult bilinguals I know accidentally switch in the presence of non-bilinguals, however I have seen bilingual kids a few years younger than me do this (and I suspect I did it too). In the context of kid mistakes, that quote was rather jarring to me; adult bilinguals do not switch languages the same way kids do; it's a completely different thing.

wvh 9y ago

I'm raising my 3-year-old bilingually – I speak 6 languages myself, although 2 are somewhat rusty. It's hard, because my native language is the underdog as it's pretty much just me talking with her. She understands what I say, but replies always in mommy's language. It forces you to switch languages if you want to have a fluent back-and-forth conversation instead of something that just peters out. If you want true bilinguality, as the minority language speaker, you have to be willing to push and fight, and sometimes feel on the outside yourself. When she was younger, it was sometimes heartbreaking to read a picture book where she knew some words in one language, and then the other parent comes in and all the words change. Kids' minds are amazing though. I sometimes speak some English or French (not our native languages) with her as a game, and the speed with which those words stick is unbelievable – their minds are just sponges. Last week she threw some random French words at guests, confusing them to no end.

noisy_boy 9y ago

I think a good mix is when your family speaks one language, you speak another in your school with friends and you still have to learn English because one must learn English. That was the setting I grew up in and it allowed enough exposure/practice for me to become very fluent in all three.

hiyer 9y ago

A minimum of bilingualism is probably the norm in India and trilingualism is very common (I myself speak Hindi, Tamil, and English fluently, and a smattering of Kannada). It is not all that unusual to find people who speak 4-5 languages fluently also.

sumedh 9y ago
It's kind of weird reading all these comments about bilingualism while here I am with fluency in 3 Indian languages + English. Am I special :)

arde 9y ago

> screen time doesn't count Absolutely false. Screen time is an excellent way of exposing the child to a language and thus learning to distinguish the phonemes that make it up. It can be argued that screen time alone doesn't help too much in learning to speak a language (if by screen we mean a non-interactive one, of course). But it's great for listening comprehension. Source: starting when she was a baby, I let my kid watch as much TV as she wanted as long as it was in English and not in our language (Spanish). She watched about 2 hours a day, on average. Her mother and I are quite fluent in English and, even though we rarely speak it among us, we encouraged our child to learn it this way, occasionally answering her questions or translating the words that she couldn't figure out by herself. She's now 6 and speaks it pretty well, she can easily maintain a conversation and she is very good at identifying the correct phonemes while listening (even in the cases when she may not know the word). Actually, she's better at listening comprehension than what her mother and I could ever hope to achieve ourselves. Differentiating phonemes is a crucial ability that is learnt optimally at an early age and after only a few years old it cannot be learnt that well (I remember reading an article about this limitation in Scientific American more than 20 years ago, I don't have a link for that).

geomark 9y ago
Agree. My kid started watching toy unboxing videos by American kids on an iPad at a very early age. The recommender system kept new ones in front of him. Even though we don't live in an English speaking country he chose English as his first language quite early. Now the challenge is limiting his screen time and improving his skills in the local language.
GolDDranks 9y ago
I agree with you but I'm also familiar with the original research the claim about screen time stems from. The claim is that screen time is not effective for "bootstrapping" a different language for very small children - having human interaction does a much better job at that.
- arde 9y ago
  Regarding that research, I can see that human interaction should more efficient but that doesn't imply that screen time should be ineffective. And my kid is a counterexample, because it did bootstrap her English. She had no other source since we live in Argentina and we practically didn't talk to her in English. For a while she had some serious British accent because she was hooked on Peppa Pig, but now she sounds mostly American.

80211 9y ago

With bi-lingual parents (Yiddish, English), I grew up bilingual. In school and some courses at Yivo, I was able to finish off full literacy in Yiddish. I grew up reading/writing Hebrew, too, but it took spending a year in Israel to lose the "Yiddish" accent and speak like an Israeli. So, if parents are bilingual and you have friends/school where both languages are spoken, it's very easy.

pacaro 9y ago

My sister is bilingual, but because she only lived in the U.K. as a child and teenager, there is vocabulary that is used more commonly in adult conversations that she knows, but has a hard time with. So while she is bilingual by any useful definition, there are common scenarios in which she sounds like a foreigner with "very good English" rather than a native speaker. Our grandfather had the opposite problem. He lived in the U.K. from age 18, and only had the very faintest accent, but in his 60s and beyond would be frequently complimented that his German was "very good for an Englishman"

foobaw 9y ago

Not trying to brag, but due to my background I ended up trilingual (Korean, Spanish and English). It all depends on circumstance - I spent a few years growing up in Korea, Latin America and the U.S - and went to school in all three countries where I was forced to learn the native language. It's been a few years but I still speak all those languages due to friends and family so I haven't lost the ability yet. It's not a very useful skill for my job - but I just wanted to point out that I can attest that immersion as a child is one of the best ways to learn languages.

jasonkester 9y ago

We pulled this off by moving to France when our first kid was 2 years old. He went in the local village school at age 3 and was happily speaking French to our adult friends at age 5. A year later, French is just the language that Kids and Strangers speak, so he pulls it out in those situations then falls back to English if that doesn't work. It's fascinating to watch. I'm trying to gauge when will be a good time to up sticks and move to a Spanish speaking country for a year or two.

guftagu 9y ago

A very significant part of the population in most 'third world' countries is actually trilingual. Fir example, Pakistan is divided into 4 provinces, each with its own language and culture. So people there end up learning their local language and the national language Urdu. Most children who go through schools also learn English as a core subject in their curriculum which makes them trilingual. Well, now the government is also pushing Arabic language in schools as a core subject which would make most children in Pakistan tetra-lingual?

GnarfGnarf 9y ago

In Montreal, panhandlers on the street are bilingual. It's all about what you are exposed to growing up.

Ice_Walker 9y ago

In some areas of the world bilingualism is quite common. I'm bilingual myself and I'm also quite high on the English proficiency scale. My kids will probably grow up to be at least trilingual. Of course it's hard to say, but I intend to speak West Frisian with my kids, my girlfriend and her family will talk in Bulgarian to them. We communicate in English with each other and depending on the country where we live by the time, they will also learn that language. To say that they will become truly bilingual or trilingual (or quadrilingual) is quite a stretch, but they will take in at least something.