Multi-lingual babies

[Syrinx]

If you happen to find yourself with an extra baby, if you expose her to language tapes and foreign tv shows, will she naturally be multi-lingual?

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. Not necessarily

some studies demonstrate that infants who are exposed to multiple languages when learning to speak actually start talking later than children taught a single language first.

[Syrinx]

4. Hmm, that's interesting

I never thought of that. I don't have a baby. This is stuff I've wondered about a long time. Like, I was mad at my parents that they didn't show me Spanish movies, etc. :)

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

7. I think the kid has to have a handle on the concept of language first

Just transferring cries and other noises to a single language and connecting the structural to the abstract naming of everything is hard enough.

Ideally, the kid gets A LANGUAGE and once a language is conceptually understood then another language can be added.

I observed a lot of this with my friend's two children. Her husband was hell bent on speaking French to the first child. She was raised with a French nanny and was also spoken English to. She was very bright and had great motor skills and everything progressed on target with her but for her ability to speak, and later to speak in sentences.

That was when I read up on the subject.

She then had another child..was separated from her husband for a couple years so the other kid didn't have the interference of another language. She then reconciled with the husband but the other kid was 3 years old by then. He can speak both French and English but her other child ( the earlier one) doesn't.

[sasquatch]

2. You have to learn to walk before you can win the 100 yard dash

execising a babies right side of the brain when it is younger could work.

[Syrinx]

6. How do you excerise it?

Classical and jazz music and colors and that kind of stuff?

[ILeft]

3. Maybe, in a "Chance the gardener" sort of way

I think the real live interactive human element is important. I wondered the same thing, but I couldn't stand the idea of my babies watching tv, so I never tried it.

[Syrinx]

5. I wasn't "being there" when I asked the ?

That's a great movie. I want to see it now!

[SOteric]

8. Not necessarily,

but much research shows that infants and very young children who are exposed to another language regularly (even if never taught to speak it) will develop an 'ear' for language at a much higher rate than does the unexposed population.

That is to say that these children will have a higher likelihood of distinguishing subtle tones and inflections, a better grasp of natural differences of syntax and grammatical structure.

For what it's worth, English is not technically my first language.

[Syrinx]

9. well

what is it?

thanks to everyone. interesting stuff.

[SOteric]

13. My parents

were born and raised in Parma, Italy. While they picked up much of the language, they couldn't read or speak more than conversational English until I was 10 or 11 years of age.

[Gringo]

10. My kids have been "bi" since birth

Japanese and English. And they are indeed a bit behind in both languages, but not terribly so, and I'm very proud of their proficiency in both languages, and I'm happy that they won't have to struggle later on with one of the languages as I did with Japanese.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. The most effective way to make children multilingual

is to have different people speak different languages to them.

Missionaries in Japan typically enforce "English only" in their homes but encourage their children to play with Japanese kids and even to attend local schools.

Prepubescent children can pick up a new language (at a child's level, of course) within three to six months, simply by associatimg with natiev speakers.

However, they also forget languages as easily as they pick them up. Maybe you've run into the phenomenon of the child who was adopted from a foreign country at age six or eight, came over speaking no English, but can now no longer speak his or her first language after a year in the States living with an English-speaking household.

Children are also terrible conformists, so even those who become proficient in a second language while living abroad will purposely forget it once they're back in the States. It just doesn't seem useful to them anymore. This may be the situation with the two children described in a previous post. The older child had a gap in her exposure to French, so she promptly forgot it.

After puberty, your language learning ability freezes, so that an adult would never forget his or her native language that rapidly. Your command of your native language can deteriorate, however, if you never have a chance to speak or read it. You also inevitably lose touch with the culture and have trouble understanding current slang and buzzwords.

As many of you know, I'm a language buff. I think I got that way because I grew up in a tri-lingual environment, even though I never actually learned to speak a second language until I was about 13. My mother's relatives were mostly bilingual in German and English, and my grandfather was the only Latvian-speaking attorney in Minneapolis, so my grandparents' living room was often full of the sounds of the German and Latvian languages.

However, all of these people could at least get along in English, so I had no motivation to learn. It wasn't until a non-English-speaking relative from Germany came to spend the summer that I was forced to activate what I had known passively. (I never had enough exposure to Latvian to learn more than a few words.)

Children learn language through human interaction, so don't bother with forcing your chlid to sit through Univision programs. You might want to teach your child songs in the language of your choice--I knew Christmas carols and chlidren's songs in German long before I learned to speak it.

If you have a family member who is a native speaker of a foreign language, you might want to encourage that relative to speak to your chlid in that language consistently. Consistency is the key. What you don't want to do is speak sort of a half-and-half mishmash of English and some other language.

[DemExpat]

12. My children are bilingual English-Dutch

but as babies I made sure that I spoke my mother-tongue English with them with intimate interactions, book reading, songs.....

They would hear Dutch when people came over, when we went shopping, at playgrounds, etc., and later, on tv.

I agree with those here who say it is the interaction with another human being which will teach the language, not sitting a child in front of a tv. That works later when kids are a bit older, but not when they are little IMO.

DemEx

[Kellanved]

14. I doubt it

The kids next door are bilingual (Arabic/German). But it took a great deal of work; their mother talks with them in Arabic, their father in German. I very much doubt, that TV-shows could have done the job.
They do understand both languages (and speak them), but prefer German.

[zizzer]

15. A joke...

What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Bi-lingual

What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Tri-lingual

What do you call someone who speaks four or more languages?

A poliglot (sp)

What do you call someone who speaks only one language?


Scroll for it...


You kow you want to...


Just a little further...


An American.

Rim shot please...

Zizzer

[Nikia]

16. A friend of mine babysat for one

He was two years old and fluent in English and Spanish.

[brook]

17. My daughter...

was trilingual when she was 3 and 4 years old. We lived in South America and her playmate next door was French. It usually resulted in things like;" No, Mommy, I don't quiero lechuga, sil vous plait."

My son was bilingual (Spanish & English) and one night -(he was about 31/2 and we were temporarily living in NYC)- was grimacing and rubbing his head. When I asked him what was wrong, he said "I gotta headache. I been 'terping' all day." He'd been helping the nanny buy some winter clothes. Their Dad was Greek - but didn't teach them his language.

[catzies]

18. What's an extra baby?

:shrug:

[jmm]

19. I have a friend who claims Sesame Street taught her English.

I believe she was 5 when she moved to the US. She didn't start school for another year and most of her exposure to English was through tv. So yeah, in some cases I think tv can help a child learn another language but not as an infant.

[DemBones DemBones]

20. Interesting topic! I know a couple who are raising their kids to

be bilingual. The father speaks his native Spanish to them and the mother speaks her native English to them. The older child (I think she's 8 now) is fluent in both languages, has studied Spanish in school since she began, but will not speak Spanish to her Spanish-speaking father! My hypothesis is that she thinks he needs to learn English so she's trying to help him.

Another couple I know also have bilingual kids and I have heard him speak French to the older child and insist on being answered in French. Maybe that's important, to insist from the beginning on what is spoken when.