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Native bilingual people mix up languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5090 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 9 of 11 15 March 2013 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm just taking a shot in the dark here, but I feel like Quebec in particular might be difficult for a bilingual child. In some bilingual situations you have very distinct splits between the two (e.g. They always speak Chinese at home and they always speak English at school), where as in Quebec it's sort of a constant hybrid of the two. In Montreal at least it seemed like people would switch languages almost mid-sentence. So for a child it seems logical to me that they would have trouble establishing them as separate languages.
On the other hand, living in Russia right now in a bilingual environment, the children of coworkers are very aware of the split. There are 4 or 5 year old kids who will ask you to switch to their preferred language (even though they might know the basics of the other), and 8 or 9 year old kids who will translate words if you ask them (although they do need to think about it for longer than the diglottal adults). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FELlX Diglot Groupie France Joined 4774 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 10 of 11 16 March 2013 at 11:17am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4448 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 11 of 11 17 March 2013 at 5:55am | IP Logged | ||
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In the Chinese community in the US & Canada it is common for the second & third generation to mix in
English words when you come to a term you don't know. Since the Chinese in N. America were brought up and educated outside of Asia, it is expected that the younger generations would not know many expressions commonly used in that part of the world. People would get credits for having some ability to speak Chinese as opposed to none at all. Recently I was listening to a local multi-cultural radio station in Canada broadcasting a commercial in Chinese having an interesting mix of context. Someone was talking about an item being 20% off. In English you use the number 20% but in the Chinese version you would say 八折 bāzhé. 八 for the number 8 and 折 for 1/10 discount. In other words in Chinese you'd say: the price is "8/10 discounted" for "20% off". Instead, someone on the radio program said: 百分之二十折 bǎifēnzhīèrshízhé translated as "20% discounted" similar to the English way of saying. A bit unusual... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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