Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds

Most asian parents speak to their children in their native tongue, most likely the same for all immigrants, including hispanic. I know many friends whose kids spoke only their asian language until they hit preschool where they learned english. Kids pick up languages very fast when they are immersed in it.

I was raised trilingual: born in America to a Colombian dad and Lithuanian mom, so I speak English, Spanish, and Lithuanian. My Lithuanian has gotten a bit rusty since my younger days (mostly out of lack of practice--it's not a language you hear every day), but otherwise I'm fine with all three. Though I can't quite put my finger on it, I have no doubt in my mind that being raised with three languages has had a significant positive impact in how I think. And it's only as I've gotten older that I've realized what a gift that was. When I was young everyone would tell me that, but I didn't believe them because it seemed so natural!

If anything, knowing more than one language makes you better appreciate the commonalities of all langauges. For example English and Spanish are heavily rooted in Latin (English mostly in vocabulary), so you see a lot of words inbetween. Likewise Lithuanian also has a surprising amount of vocabulary lifted directly from Latin. Knowing all three and how these seemingly completely disparate languages are in fact related in many ways fills me with wonder.

Of course they are. You learn a language as a first language (L1) until the critical age (well, according to the critical age hypothesis, anyways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Age_Hypothesis ).

I was raised in such an environment. Spanish at home, English at school. I did learn Spanish before English, and I remember a time when I couldn't understand English, around age five or six. Now, however, I am bilingual, fully bicultural, I code switch, and it feels like a superpower I only share with relatively few other people (at least for the specific dialects of English and Spanish that I speak). I can adapt to either language and be idiomatic in each, but my most "natural" mode of speech is the one I grew up with: quickly code switching between two very specific dialects of American English and Mexican Spanish, and there are very few people I can do that with.

Actually, multilingualism is far more common than some Angloamericans are usually aware of. The "norm" worldwide, roughly, is for there to be many intertwined languages within a small geographic region, such as in Europe and Asia. America (the whole continent, not just the US) is the odd one out to be such a large expanse with relatively little linguistic variety besides differing dialects, and that's because the only way to impose languages over such vast geographic expanses is by force and conquest. This is what happened in America.

    CWinApp theApp;

    using namespace std;

    unsigned long cnt=0;

    void ThreadProc()
    {
      while (TRUE)
        cnt++;
    }

    int _tmain(int argc, TCHAR* argv[], TCHAR* envp[])
    {
	    unsigned long i,nRetCode = 0;
	    CreateThread(0,65536,(LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE)ThreadProc,0,0,0);
	    while (TRUE) {
  	      printf("Press \r\n");
	      getchar();
	      i=cnt;
	      printf("Line:%20u %6u\r\n",i,i%100000);
	    }
	    return nRetCode;
    }

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400Mhz counter (Not human!)

http://www.losethos.com/files/BIBLE.TXT

God says...

23:24 When thou comest into thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any in thy vessel.

23:25 When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn.

24:1 When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.

24:2 And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be another man's wife.

----

God's in a bad mood.

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Me as well, having Romanian parents, being born in Thailand (where they taught me English) and coming to Sweden at age two. Romanian, being the last language I learned well, is the rustiest of course.

But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages, and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years, Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).

For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they were raised to be, but still.