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Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

nytimes.com

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Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#121

Post by vacri »

joeyo wrote: post #12
kutkloon7 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, R…

> basically the _lingua franca_ of the Western world. [emphasis mine] You're not wrong, but for some reason I always find it hilarious to refer to English as the language of the Franks.

To be fair, the original term lingua franca didn't refer to the actual language of the Franks either...

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#122

Post by vacri »

Manishearth wrote: post #110
matthewaveryusa wrote: post #96

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…

> 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 potenti…

I used to work with a Thai office manager, who'd speak bilingually on the phone to her parents. I noticed that she'd switch to English when the comment was about something negative. Not necessarily severe, but things like "oh, we have to wait until wednesday?". Maybe she switched to English for 'negative idioms'?

Her Thai sounded light and bubbly, so the effect was magnified. I have no idea if she also said negative things in Thai, but almost all the English speech was in some way negative. She got on well with her parents and was never in a poor mood after speaking with them, so it's unlikely she was wholly negative in both languages. Curious.

Similarly on idioms, many years ago I knew a woman who spent a year of high school in Finland. She said that it was apparently common to use the English phrase for "I love you", because the Finnish phrase was harsh and tended to 'kill the mood' a bit.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#123

Post by arde »

> 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).

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#124

Post by geomark »

veidr wrote: post #108
geomark wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was thought provoking for me since I am raising a child in Thailand and there seem to be many parallels. Surprising to me is that despite being surrounded by the local language my child has chosen English as his first language. It seems to be due to my constant interaction with him plus he gravitated to English media at a very early age, particularly YouTube videos of American kids unboxing and playing with toys…

That's interesting. There are many toy unboxing videos in Japanese, so although my kids were as addicted as many 2-4 years olds are, it didn't bias them toward English. That is a fascinating genre of product, BTW; at first it freaked me out how many grown men were making toy unboxing videos obviously aimed at preliterate 2-year-olds. Then I saw the view counts, which are upwards of 100 million in some cases...

An eye opener for me as well. But lately my kid has been watching some really dumb channels, like the one where American teenagers build toilet paper forts at Costco. I'm not happy that he thinks that is cool, or that he thinks the guy whose "career" is skateboarder is someone to look up to. I don't care how many views that guy gets or how much he is making from YouTube adveritising. That's not a career to aspire to.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#125

Post by 80211 »

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.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#126

Post by geomark »

arde wrote: post #123

> 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 k…

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.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#127

Post by GolDDranks »

arde wrote: post #123

> 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 k…

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.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#128

Post by Berobero »

hkmurakami wrote: post #2

>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…

Nice to hear from someone like you; my daughters are currently going along your same path with Japanese. Japanese is a second language to me, but our family has always been Japanese-only despite living in the states.

It's honestly exhausting on all parties involved to try to commit to developing "true" bilingualism; my wife (Japanese) in particular seems to wonder if this level of commitment and effort is really necessary. After all, it's not like our daughters won't be able to speak Japanese if we stop, it's just that the "expected" level of literacy isn't going to be there (sans further effort on our daughters' part, anyway), and we're living in the US, so how important is that in the end?

I too know people who "lost" their chance to keep up with Japanese and regret it now, but there's a real price to pay in developing that, it feels. If nothing else, our daughters "lose" their Saturday, as well as other time to the homework. The saving grace is that our older daughter says she likes the people at the Japanese school better than the her regular American school (which is still a fine school to being with, and a Japanese/English bilingual program to boot).

I'm realizing it's really difficult to know what's best for your kids in the end, and there's some many potential tradeoffs...

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#129

Post by jessaustin »

jfaucett wrote: post #55
p1esk wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I thought Spanish and Portuguese are extremely similar, so that a native speaker of one should understand most of the other.

In my experience Brasilian Portuguese is much easier to understand and I've actually been able to have conversations with Brasilian speakers where we knew about 80-90% of what the other person was saying. But in Europe I've been sitting on trains directly next to Portuguese speakers and had a very difficult time even understanding say 40% of what they were talking about. It was as if in Portugal they just chew up the…

That seems like English? Anyone from any part of the English-speaking world can understand anyone else from any other part, except there are lots of people from England that none of us can understand.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#130

Post by akhilcacharya »

arde wrote: post #123

> 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 k…

I'm with you there. I grew up in America but had almost no exposure to English outside of watching PBS (parents refused to speak English with me or my sister). I was fine by the time I entered pre-school when I was 4.
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