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When your child speaks a language you don’t

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Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#31

Post by teirce »

LeonRobrotsky wrote: post #22
ekidd wrote: post #11

My wife is a native French speaker, and she's always spoken French to the kids. Unlike the author of this story, I've never really felt like I was getting left behind. Before the kids were born, I spent a while studying an Assimil course (a fine course, from a French publisher, for people who like to learn mostly through osmosis with some notes). Afterwards, I plowed my way through 450 pages of a French non-fiction b…

> Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt. In high school, I had a German immigrant, fresh out of college as an instructor. The moment one stepped into that classroom to the moment one stepped out, nothing but German. Hell, it didn't stop there. If you tried to talk to him at all, in or out of the classroom, he wouldn't acknowledge you unless you spoke to him in German, and he would only speak German to…

>Immersion (even for ~50min, 5 days a week) is easily the best way to learn. I don't know why anyone wastes their time with anything else.

I think once you're somewhat proficient in the language, this is true.

I'm currently taking Spanish courses in uni, and my professor is from Cuba. She's the sweetest lady, but has a tendency to ramble off in Spanish. About 50-60% of the time I can (vaguely) follow her, but the rest of the time I'm just hopelessly lost. And judging by the silence the rest of the class has a tendency for, I'm not alone.

Anyway, I'm certainly not trying to counteract your point, just to say that there are steps up to 100% immersion that I feel are necessary.

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#32

Post by joshuacc »

DavidSJ wrote: post #7
StevePerkins wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious why you chose to truncate a few lines away from the finish, rather than simply pasting the poem in its entirety? Was it because the last few lines take a vaguely-religious turn, and you thought the audience here would be hostile? I have no strong opinion either way there, I just find the edit interesting.

It's not because I thought the audience would be hostile, but I don't like those last few lines (mainly because of that turn), and think it's a better poem without them. Do you think it's better to leave it intact?

I don't know about StevePerkins, but since I identified the last couple of lines you pasted as derived from The Book of Psalms[1], the poem already seemed to have taken the religious turn. :-)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+127%3A3-5...

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#34

Post by [deleted] »

solve wrote: post #25
therobot24 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately languages other than English are not pushed very hard in American (public) education. It's really quite sad compared to the rest of the world. My first exposure to another language in school was 8th grade, which was the choice of an elective Spanish or French class. To prevent having to take a class at the college level, the minimum requirement (if i remember correctly) was only 2 years of a foreign lan…

I spent 9 years of my teenage life trying to learn languages in US schools. It was a complete waste and I remember none of it. The approach was ineffective.

[deleted]

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#35

Post by [deleted] »

teirce wrote: post #31
LeonRobrotsky wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt. In high school, I had a German immigrant, fresh out of college as an instructor. The moment one stepped into that classroom to the moment one stepped out, nothing but German. Hell, it didn't stop there. If you tried to talk to him at all, in or out of the classroom, he wouldn't acknowledge you unless you spoke to him in German, and he would only speak German to…

>Immersion (even for ~50min, 5 days a week) is easily the best way to learn. I don't know why anyone wastes their time with anything else. I think once you're somewhat proficient in the language, this is true. I'm currently taking Spanish courses in uni, and my professor is from Cuba. She's the sweetest lady, but has a tendency to ramble off in Spanish. About 50-60% of the time I can (vaguely) follow her, but the res…

[deleted]

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#36

Post by jkot »

I know this situation too well. It gets worse when child is asking for pacifier, favorite tv show, playground etc. Also child does not pronounce clearly, and its very hard to understand for non-native speaker.

I wonder why author had not learned German in advance, they had almost 2 years time. English speaker can pickup German in 5 months, very similar and easy language.

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#37

Post by verisimilidude »

teirce wrote: post #31
LeonRobrotsky wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given the right environment, the brain seems to adapt. In high school, I had a German immigrant, fresh out of college as an instructor. The moment one stepped into that classroom to the moment one stepped out, nothing but German. Hell, it didn't stop there. If you tried to talk to him at all, in or out of the classroom, he wouldn't acknowledge you unless you spoke to him in German, and he would only speak German to…

>Immersion (even for ~50min, 5 days a week) is easily the best way to learn. I don't know why anyone wastes their time with anything else. I think once you're somewhat proficient in the language, this is true. I'm currently taking Spanish courses in uni, and my professor is from Cuba. She's the sweetest lady, but has a tendency to ramble off in Spanish. About 50-60% of the time I can (vaguely) follow her, but the res…

Yup, and this is especially true of languages that are completely different than your own.

Immersion and osmosis are going to work a whole lot better if you're going from French to Spanish, or English to German, etc. There's enough shared vocabulary and culture that it's easier to make assumptions about the intent of the speaker.

That will not be the case if you're going from English to, say, Korean. Immersion is important for any language learning, but some prerequisite learning is needed to take advantage of it. I think those prerequisites stack up as you move further away from the foundation of your current languages.

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#38

Post by le_lenny_face »

true_religion wrote: post #15
DavidSJ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not because I thought the audience would be hostile, but I don't like those last few lines (mainly because of that turn), and think it's a better poem without them. Do you think it's better to leave it intact?

I'd agree with you. The last few lines add a completely new agent and change the meaning of the poem.

>change the meaning of the poem

What? Those lines are the poem!

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#39

Post by tonyarkles »

therobot24 wrote: post #17
Spearchucker wrote: post #8

I'm German, and speak that with my son. My son's mother is French, and she uses that with my son. She and I speak English when we converse. He goes to a bilingual French/English nursery school, which has mostly French expats' kids in it, and (happily) four kids that also speak German. We never really discussed this when my son was born - it just happened, because doing it any other way was alien enough to not enter o…

Unfortunately languages other than English are not pushed very hard in American (public) education. It's really quite sad compared to the rest of the world. My first exposure to another language in school was 8th grade, which was the choice of an elective Spanish or French class. To prevent having to take a class at the college level, the minimum requirement (if i remember correctly) was only 2 years of a foreign lan…

In (non-Quebec) Canada, there's often an option to do French Immersion, even though the primary language is English. My parents put me in this program for elementary (K-8) school, and gave me the choice for high school, which I opted out of. There's a few positives and negatives that I found watching myself and my peers:

Pros:

- The 9 years that I spoke French in the classroom for every class except for English was enough to make the language stick. I'm 31 now, and I can still speak, read, and write French. My vocabulary is weak since I don't use French on a regular basis, but when I was in Paris, I had no problem understanding what was going on, ordering food, taking a cab, etc.

- I feel like having the 2nd language has made it easier to pick up other languages. I'm by no means fluent in Spanish, but when I was regularly doing DuoLingo Spanish lessons, I felt like things stuck very quickly.

- I also feel like some kind of structures in my brain from this help me pick up different programming languages. It seems like, compared to most of my peers, switching between new languages and learning new languages is generally a straightforward task for me, including weird ones like Erlang and Haskell. The majority of the effort goes into learning the concepts, not learning the syntax.

Cons:

- After graduating high school doing full immersion all the way through, many of my peers struggled with writing in University. I distinctly remember my first roommate getting an essay back and he was freaking out about the terrible mark he got. He asked me to look over it to see if I could see what was wrong with it. I read through it and just told him "Well... the problem is that you used English words, but you wrote it in French."

- Likewise, many of them had difficulties in math and science, where they understood the concepts very well from high school, but didn't have the English vocabulary to describe what they were doing.

All in all, I'm super happy that my parents made the choices they did, and that I dropped out of immersion before high school. I think, too, it helped a lot that I read a pile of English books growing up, both fiction and non-fiction, which hopefully helped supplement my English vocabulary while I was learning French at school every day. I was the 10 year old who held on tightly to his copy of the Peter Norton pink shirt book :)

Re: When your child speaks a language you don’t

#40

Post by te_platt »

I have a friend who grew up in a home where her mom and grandma spoke to her only in Spanish and her dad only spoke to her in English. She was surprised when she went to Kindergarten and her teacher spoke English. She thought Spanish was what women spoke and that English was for men.
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