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More than trilingual? | ||
Tags: Children | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 17 of 80 17 October 2010 at 6:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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^^ Lol. I'm not a troll. All I am saying is that Spanish and Italian are closely related. So closely related they could be considered dialects of the same language.
What's wrong with that??? It's true IMHO. I am probably offending some wanna be polyglots here who want to learn lots of related languages in order to boost the number of languages they can speak. Sorry if I am. Edited by John Smith on 17 October 2010 at 6:18am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 18 of 80 17 October 2010 at 9:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
They're closely related, but I have to agree with people comparing it to English/Dutch, or even English-Swedish. Passive knowledge and basic communication come fairly easily, but are nowhere near as close as American vs British vs Australian English, or the Scandinavian languages to each other. If you drop local slang and speak slowly in those varieties of English, people will understand you. That is not true of Spanish or Italian, quite often. I've seen Italians and Spaniards fail to communicate quite often, even when they want to. Can you consider them dialects of the same language? Sure, if you have an expansive definition of dialect. Are they mutually intelligible in spoken form, without at least a bit of work on other romance languages (ideally, each other)? No. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5220 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 19 of 80 17 October 2010 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well a couple of people did answer my question. Thanks guys! Not many examples of truly trilingual which was what prompted me to as in the first place.
I emailed her dad who says she thinks its normal to speak Dad language & mum language & school language and does. She answers questions in whatever language the question is asked in. Her range of vocabularly seems to be pretty much the same in all three languages. Italian mum can read Spanish and generally understand spoken if the vocabulary isn't too obscure but her Spanish output is not yet very good; high intermediate he says. As they are both language teachers I presume they know the research. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6784 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 20 of 80 17 October 2010 at 11:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Aaaaaanyway, to address the OP's topic. Many people have said "yes, maybe" giving
certain conditions. I'm the product of parents trying to keep those kinds of standards in place deliberately. I was bilingual until the age of 11. Then I was enrolled (very enthusiastically on my part) in an English language school. My siblings were younger and were enrolled in that same elementary school from the very beginning. This was known internally as "the big experiment", to start children on 3 languages from the start; the home language Polish, the local language Norwegian and the school language English. The home language was consistently the same, parents never encouraged or suggested we stray from that. And the school language was English, with many international kids who didn't speak Norwegian. So Norwegian was active in the moments when there were only Norwegians present. For me there was a shock of English, which I caught up with in about 2 years. For the siblings it was their Norwegian that suffered, which was a somewhat secondary language at this school. At the age of 13 we started junior high, now back in the Norwegian school system. By this time each of us was quite comfortably trilingual, fluent but not native in all three (by the standards of age 13). I should mention that for us Polish was not merely a home language, we also had (as is customary) supplementary Polish classes through much of elementary school. In junior high the plot thickens, because this is the first time you have a chance to pick a new language (our choices were French or German, all of us picked French). So that brings the tally to four. French was on the menu for two years in junior high, with the option to continue in high school (which I did not, opting for an easier class). By the end of high school (age 19) I would say the first three languages were well on the way to native fluency (by adult standards), the weakest of them being English, neither of home immersion nor local immersion. But French was not a success story, for which I blame mostly the Norwegian school system and its grossly ineffective third language instruction. We were on par with our peers in our lack of achievement on this front. So... more than trilingual native fluency? Not in my case, despite certain favorable conditions. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 80 17 October 2010 at 1:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The 4000-5000 word range for children is an observed average, it is not a physical limit. This means that it is wrong to assume that a bilingual child will have 2000-2500 words in each of two languages. The time it takes for a child to learn a word seems to be a function of how easy the word is (in terms of both concept and physical pronunciation) and how often it is encountered by the child. Obviously in a multilingual environment, the exposure to individual words will be reduced, so it will take longer to learn them. However, as concepts are often shared across languages (the difference between wanting and needing is almost universal; a spaniel is a type of dog, which is a mammal, which is an animal, regardless of language; and a spaniel is playful and has white and brown fur or hair in any language) and the difficulties in articulation are not only related to exposure but just general muscular control that develops naturally through infancy, bilingual children end up knowing more than the 4000-5000 words of a monolingual child. They know less in each language, but to the tune of 10% and the research all suggests that they catch up during early primary school and actually exceed their peers in the main local language before hitting puberty. Edited by newyorkeric on 18 October 2010 at 2:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5220 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 22 of 80 17 October 2010 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Great answer from someone who has actually been there! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 23 of 80 17 October 2010 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Wrong, Wrong and Wrong. Please don't do this to your children!? They need time to be kids for God's sake..... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 24 of 80 17 October 2010 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Growing up in a multilingual environment is very normal in many cultures, or in families with parents/relatives who speak different languages. What's 'wrong' about it? In high school I had a Turkish-Iranian friend who grew up fully trilingual (able to enjoy classic literature, etc.) in Persian, Turkish, and English. In college I had another friend with Ukranian Jewish parents who was fully trilingual in Ukranian, Hebrew, and English. They seemed to think their lives were enriched by this, but I'll have to contact them and let them know they've been horribly abused. ;) I've also enjoyed this blog lately since seeing it recommended on this forum. The author is an Italian woman married to a Belgian (Dutch-speaking) man. They met in America (I believe) and have always spoken English to each other. They are raising their children in France. The mother documents their experiences raising two boys in four languages - the mother speaking only in Italian, the father speaking only in Dutch, the school and environment in French, and the parents speaking to each other (but not to the children) in English. The boys are still young so it's hard to tell, but they seem well on their way to becoming trilingual with a passive English understanding and an active interest in other languages around them. And most importantly, they seem like happy, normal kids! 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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