Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13489730&source=hptextfeature

by wynand • 17 years ago

9 11 17 years ago

jimbokun• 17 years ago

Anyone here have kids, and intentionally raised them bilingual?

I am more interested in anecdotes of trying to raise bilingual kids in a monolingual home. My wife speaks some Italian, and I speak some Japanese, but we are both native English speakers, living in the U.S. My two kids are early elementary school age, and I fear the clock is running for them to have any chance of something approaching native fluency in another language. "Move to another country" is of course one option, but there are many other factors involved in that decision.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

We have brought up our children with two languages, General American English and Taiwan standard Mandarin Chinese. The second of those is not a NATIVE language for either parent, but we both speak it. We have lived overseas during the lifetime of our three older children, and at one time my two oldest sons preferred speaking Mandarin to each other to speaking English.

It's very helpful for parents attempting to maintain bilingualism to find lots of children's books in the less encountered language, and also listen to Internet radio and otherwise keep exposed to the language.

benhoyt• 17 years ago

Yes. My wife's from Namibia and her mother tongue is Afrikaans (but she speaks English as well as we do). We try to speak mostly Afrikaans to our daughter Marica, who's now two. Our theory is that "she'll learn English anyway", and that's definitely what's happening (we speak mostly English to each other).

I've been learning Afrikaans as Marica does -- which is actually a great way to learn, because you start at "kid level" and get tons of practice conversing. Still, I have to resort to English quite a bit.

You'd almost think she'd learn half as fast, because she's learning two languages at the same time. But it's pretty much the opposite -- she's significantly ahead of most kids her age in both languages.

I'm biased, of course, but what I read in that article really matches up to our experience with Marica. So I rate the bilingual thing. But you really have to use that second language -- plan to speak it 100% of the time, and you'll end up with at least 50%. :-)

sgrove• 17 years ago

This works well a lot of the time, but there are cases where raising a child to be bi or tri-lingual can cause all sorts of problems due to difficulty in acquiring fluency in at least one language. The problems can eventually manifest themselves as behavioral issues.

Working in my field linguistics course, we had to do quite a bit of work with these children. Often times, switching to one primary language at home caused the issue to go away within a few months (for children under a certain age).

secret• 17 years ago

I can personally vouch for that theory that "she'll learn English anyway." My parents were both raised in the US and speak fluent English, but I was only spoken to in Spanish. At the time I started school, English as a Second Language programs didn't exist and I nonetheless learned English in class without realizing it in probably a few months.

As for learning both languages faster, I'm not entirely sure, but I only have one data point, so make of it what you will: my younger brother did not start speaking until a much older age than I did, but when he began, he spoke both languages at the same level a child would if he only knew one. (He had been spoken to in English and Spanish all along).

Jem• 17 years ago

My Uncle married a Maltese lady, and they have raised their children to speak English and Maltese over in Malta. Likewise, my Dad re-married a few years back (to a Belgian lady), and my step-sister is being raised speaking Flemish and English.

I think both my Uncle and Dad continue to speak to the children in English, and the wives speak to them in Maltese/Flemish. It's definitely an interesting way to approach it (especially as my Dad didn't speak Flemish, so has also had to learn as he went along).

compay• 17 years ago

The reason why some children from bilingual households stuggle in school probably has more to do with the economic and social challenges immigrants usually face; not because of bilingualism.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

Duplicate submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566190

It's really important when submitting articles from the Economist (which are usually well worth submitting) to search first for duplicates, as HN's automated duplicate detection is flummoxed by the many dissimilar URLs assigned to each Economist story. If you see the link after the Economist print edition has already been delivered, the link has probably already been submitted.

knightinblue• 17 years ago

What if the link is to an older story that was submitted a while back?

I ask because there's plenty of new readers everyday on HN who most probably have never seen the link the first time it was submitted.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

That's why submitting the canonical URL is preferred, because the HN duplicate detector then upvotes the original submission, and takes you (the submitter) to that thread.

But The Economist doesn't make this easy by posting stories with so many different URLs. I've gradually figured out which form of the URL is the main form, and try to submit Economist stories that way. Those tend to be the first-submitted URLs here on HN.

FraaJad• 17 years ago

It would have been interesting to see the study done in an Indian city. Most are multilingual and have near-native fluency in those languages.

Bilingual babies are precocious decision-makers

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