Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 228 posts

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#161

Post by Ngunyan »

Tade0 wrote: post #42
freyfogle wrote: post #6

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 sp…

I don't think it really counts if you speak two languages from the same group that are spoken in the same territory.

Following your logic, any person speaking any two languages from English, Dutch, Icelandic, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and lives in Northern Europe (smaller in land area than India or China) are not bilingual.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#162

Post by wingerlang »

spraak wrote: post #8

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…

> till Eksempel

In Swedish it should be "till exempel".

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#163

Post by pbhjpbhj »

vacri wrote: post #114
geomark wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit OT but the idea of no accent is kind of funny. My kid goes to an international school in Thailand. I hear my kid's classmates speak English with Australian, British, Canadian and northeastern American accents plus an accent we call "international school accent". I'm from California and of course I think I don't have an accent. Same as those kids and their parents. Yet I have a hard time understanding some of th…

Well, you can't literally have no accent. I think that the GP means that there is no 'tell' that the people are eastern european when they speak. In the UK itself, it's estimated that there's a different regional accent every 25 miles or so.

Occasionally I manage to do a "Henry Higgins" and detect a main accent and sub-accent; there are a lot of hints in dialect though, like what you call a bread roll ...

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#164

Post by pbhjpbhj »

joeyspn wrote: post #58
jfaucett wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo I don't know if I'd go that far. I just youtubed catalan and would say I understood about 75-80% of what this guy is saying. [1] Also, I mainly meant that statement ironically :) Catalan is its own language, its just funny to me that "dialect" is a negative term, language is not, and usually the big country with the military dictates which…

Yeah that man speaks slowly what appears to be the variant of catalan spoken in France... I'm referring to something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-OXwRP5A9E Spanish speakers will notice a lot of "familiar words", but most of the time it's difficult for them to extrapolate the meaning of what is being said.

That kinda answered my question whether French and Spanish regions spoke the same Catalan.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#165

Post by School-Cotton »

jfaucett wrote: post #34
freyfogle wrote: post #6

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 sp…

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…

If Catalan is the same language as Spanish then so are Portuguese, Italian, Occitan and several more.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#166

Post by School-Cotton »

khedoros1 wrote: post #37
Pulcinella wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah Bilingualism isn't that rare in America. I live in Texas and there a literally millions of bilingual speakers (largely English & Spanish, but other languages like Vietnamese (~200,000) as well.)

Do they speak both with near-equal proficiency? Most people I've known tend to heavily favor one language over the other. College-level in the first, early high school in the second, or speaking one with a much stronger accent than the other.

Anecdotally, I know many people from Arizona who speak both English and Spanish absolutely perfectly.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#167

Post by School-Cotton »

zzzcpan wrote: post #14
lordnacho wrote: post #3

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.…

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.

There are places in the US where this is true. It's definitely true of most of southern Arizona (i.e., further south than Tucson) and probably other parts of the Southwest as well.

I saw a video of a Nogales, Arizona city council meeting -- the meeting was being conducted in English, then at some point somebody made a 15 minute speech in Spanish and nobody batted an eye.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#168

Post by School-Cotton »

coredog64 wrote: post #22
joshaidan wrote: post #21

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…

> I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. French speakers from France might blanch at calling it "perfect"

What's your point? Nobody is asking them...

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#169

Post by orless »

mjn wrote: post #76
orless wrote: post #64

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 pare…

> 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". As a Greek-American who grew up speaking both, I agree with this, although in my case I'd characterize it to some extent as more "old-fashioned" than "…

How did you learn Greek? Only from parents/grandparents or did you have additional lessons?

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#170

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Manishearth wrote: post #136
vacri wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting! For me, French is the language I like to be negative in. It's not a language I'm native-level fluent in, but I'm at the level where I can carry out those mental self-conversations you have with yourself when thinking in French as well. In french, negating a statement involves two words sandwiched around the verb (usually ne...pas, e.g. "il ne trouve pas"). I think for me this gives the negation a lot mor…

In French doesn't the negation get partially swallowed sometimes/often, like "il trouve pas" or is that my poor listening?
Post reply on HN