Raising a Truly Bilingual Child • Hacker News Board

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#201

Post by ThomPete » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#202

Post by yaantc » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 2:29 PM UTC

Manishearth wrote: post #105

Tade0 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Define "territory". Does India count? China? Russia? Spain? France? India has tons of mutually unintelligible languages. China does too (some call them dialects). Spain has multiple partially mutually intelligible languages -- and Basque is an isolate (and mutually unintelligible). IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.

> IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.

Maybe you're thinking about the Basque language instead? I'm from the south of France, Occitanie really. Occitan is certainly different from French, but not completely alien. It's a bit similar to Spanish in closeness. Basque on the other hand is very different and is an isolated language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#203

Post by jaclaz » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 2:41 PM UTC

barry-cotter wrote: post #54

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.

You were closer to being right than joeyspn. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible. There's a lot of complex vocabulary and grammar that's different and plenty of simple stuff too but if you speak slowly you can communicate on day 0. French is further from mutual intelligibility but you still have an enormous leg up learning it if you speak any Western Romance language. Catalan is pro…

>Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are more or less mutually intelligible.

And Romanian, with only some more difficulty.

The big problems I see (as an Italian) when speaking with people from France, Spain, Portugal and Romania is mostly about the pronounciation, admittedly I have studied a little bit of French (that makes the "slightly more distant" language on par with the others).

When it is written, I can usually understand like 90% or more of most text and there are "sinergies", i.e. there is a given word that is different from Italian but is very similar to another word in another of the Latin languages or that is actually directly or almost directly a Latin word.

The issue is with "false pairs", i.e.words that exist (or sound alike or almost alike) in two languages but that have completely different meanings.

Like, to mention a couple reknown ones, "burro" which is "butter" in Italian and "donkey/ass" in Spanish or the Spanish "aceite" which most Italians will instinctively translate into "aceto" (vinegar) while it means "oil".

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#204

Post by mjn » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 3:10 PM UTC

orless wrote: post #169

mjn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Mostly just at home. My dad is American and mom is Greek, so they each spoke to me primarily in their native language and I grew up speaking both natively to some extent. The Greek side's grandparents also lived with us for about a year when I was aged 3-4, which I think helped a lot. I'm told my Greek was better than my English up until I started going to school, and then my English rapidly got better and I started using Greek less often even with my mom— she'd speak to me in Greek and I'd often reply in English.

I did take some lessons from the local Greek Orthodox church's after-school courses, but most of the kids spoke less Greek than I did (many were 2nd or 3rd generation Greek-Americans) so I don't think I learned a lot there as far as spoken fluency goes. I did learn the basics of reading and writing from there, but this didn't seem interesting to me at the time so I didn't really put much effort into it. Now as an adult I put a little more effort into reading Greek newspapers now and then, but I still approach it as mainly an oral language and read very very slowly due to lack of practice.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#205

Post by resf » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

sumedh wrote: post #184

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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-runni…

> 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 afte…

I think by "better" you mean "more properly" ;)

I'm sure IELTS doesn't cover important life skills such as "use of the word innit".

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#206

Post by arde » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #172

arde wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, th…

> there's practically no time conflict in learning two languages except maybe at the very start. // This can't be true, otherwise you'd learn all languages and it would take, practically, no longer than learning one. At school if a child is learning 2 languages (L2, L3) then do you think they can do that with no more time commitment than learning one additional language - if you can explain how then you can revolutio…

Of course I referred to the language learning process in toddlers. By the time they reach school it's a different process, and they learn a lot of other subjects too.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#207

Post by arde » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

aqsalose wrote: post #196

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…

"Screen time" is also a great motivator to learn any language, if the fancy entertainment on the screen you'd like to understand is in a language you don't yet understand. (Similar effects apply to the written communication, of course.) However, this is coming from my "learning a new language as a teenager / adult" experience than "raising bilingual kid" viewpoint, but it seems sensible that it would be also a powerf…

It is a very good incentive for small kids as long as they are interested in watching TV and in the particular content shown. But not all kids like to stay quiet watching TV, some really need physical exertion and can't sit down.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#208

Post by Ice_Walker » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 5:41 PM UTC

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.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#209

Post by Manishearth » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #170

Manishearth wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, however my French is primarily writing/reading, so I personally never do that.

In fact my pronunciation is horrible and I struggle to understand spoken French (this is improving).

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#210

Post by Manishearth » Sun, Jul 23, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

yaantc wrote: post #202

Manishearth wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "territory". Does India count? China? Russia? Spain? France? India has tons of mutually unintelligible languages. China does too (some call them dialects). Spain has multiple partially mutually intelligible languages -- and Basque is an isolate (and mutually unintelligible). IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.

> IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either. Maybe you're thinking about the Basque language instead? I'm from the south of France, Occitanie really. Occitan is certainly different from French, but not completely alien. It's a bit similar to Spanish in closeness. Basque on the other hand is very different and is an isolated language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language

I mentioned Basque, but Basque is in Spain.

No, I know that Occitan and French are not that different, but they're still pretty different. Like you say, similar to Spanish in closeness -- I would definitely consider them distinct languages that take effort to learn.