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Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

nytimes.com

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Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#211

Post by School-Cotton »

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?

“Swallowed” isn’t the right way to describe it. That implies that in people’s heads they think they’re saying “ne” but they don’t because they’re speaking too fast, or whatever.

In reality, “pas” (without “ne”) is simply the unmarked, natural way of forming negation in spoken French. The extra “ne” is relatively uncommon (except in writing which is a whole different ball game) and normally signifies a slightly higher level of formality.

As an aside, “pas” was originally a noun meaning “step” (and still does have this meaning) – quite an odd etymology for a negative particle!

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#212

Post by School-Cotton »

geomark wrote: post #124
veidr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When my brother was little he desperately wanted to be a garbage truck driver – now he’s a teacher. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#213

Post by Tade0 »

Ngunyan wrote: post #161
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.

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.

I was taught German in school and back when my memory of it was fresh I could, with some help, understand articles written in Norwegian, so yeah.

This sort of explains why Germans and Scandinavians in general are so proficient in english.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#214

Post by jessaustin »

DanBC wrote: post #189
jessaustin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Anyone from any part of the English-speaking world can understand anyone else from any other part, Try watching an English person ask an American (in the US) for water or where the herbs are.

Yes my point was precisely that many people from England are incomprehensible.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#215

Post by wenc »

k_sze wrote: post #138
chj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't necessarily need 10x effort (depending on your definition of "effort"). I'm a Hongkonger. I had lived in Montreal since I was 10 until I finished my bachelor's degree. I didn't really do Saturday schools. I tried that for one or two years but those really had no effect on my proficiency in Chinese. Yet, I can confidently say that I'm fluent in four languages, if you count Mandarin and Cantonese as separate…

I mean this in the nicest possible way (as a former Montrealer who also belongs to a minority ethnic group), but it would seem that the way you write English is discernibly non-native and therefore there was a trade-off in fluency that was incurred in your language acquisition.

Unfortunately in North America, there is a subtle social price that is paid for lack of complete fluency in English (French in Quebec). Imperfect fluency is often perceived differently in different ethnic groups. If a Western European person (say a French or Italian person) makes mistakes in their English, it is exotic, but if an East Asian person makes mistakes, they are foreign.

Things being what they are, it actually makes sense for certain minority groups to optimize for 100% fluency in English, and merely satisfactory fluency in other languages. I grappled with the same issues the OP did, and ultimately came to the same conclusion. It doesn't have to be 10x effort however, I agree with you there, but any effort needs to not be at the expense of proficiency in English.

p.s. some Asian children tend to overoptimize and aim for better-than-the-average-native-speaker's fluency in English. Their investment generally pays off. Arthur Chu of Jeopardy fame talks about this.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#216

Post by vacri »

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…

I should say to take my comments with a grain of salt - that's how I heard her English parts. I really have no idea if there were just as many negative comments in her Thai. Just a bit of curious anecdata, please salt well.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#217

Post by KayEss »

MattConfluence wrote: post #174
KayEss wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders Given that Norwegian and German have three I would expect Danish to also have three. French has two (le + la).

Danish (and Swedish) used to have three grammatical genders, but the feminine and masculine merged at some point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

Ah. I'm a norwegian speaker, and didn't know that about the other two languages. Actually the norwegian dialect I speak also features a merged masculine and feminine, but it is non-standard.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#218

Post by hueving »

sliverstorm wrote: post #118
hueving wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled. It depends on what you mean by 'travel'. I think spending anything less than a month in a place just makes it more like a visit to a theme park than anything enlightening.

Ok, but by that definition, virtually no one travels.

Well some people do, but my point was that to truly get the benefits of travel that Mark Twain was referring to, you can't just dabble.

Back when he traveled, this was before airlines and even the Titanic. "Traveling" required spending months to get places far away so you certainly didn't spend just a week in a single place and then return.

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#219

Post by jknightco »

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…

Well that's just patently untrue. Catalan and Spanish are as different as Spanish and French, German and Dutch, or Norwegian and Swedish. The two are further apart, lexically, than Catalan and French. They use very different perifrastic tenses, the main one would confuse the hell out of an unaware Spanish speaker (conjugate "to go" + unconjugated verb == simple past in Spanish, e.g. "vaig naixer" == "nací" == "i was born"). Not to mention spelling and pronunciation rules are drastically different ("vaig" is pronounced "vatch").

Re: Raising a Truly Bilingual Child

#220

Post by jknightco »

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…

Well that's just patently untrue. Catalan and Spanish are as different as Spanish and French, German and Dutch, or Norwegian and Swedish. The two are further apart, lexically, than Catalan and French. They use very different perifrastic tenses, the main one would confuse the hell out of an unaware Spanish speaker (conjugate "to go" + unconjugated verb == simple past in Spanish, e.g. "vaig naixer" == "nací" == "i was born"). Not to mention spelling and pronunciation rules are drastically different ("vaig" is pronounced "vatch").
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