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Negative side of growing up multilingual?

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
20 messages over 3 pages: 1 2
dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4665 days ago

1185 posts - 1513 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 17 of 20
15 December 2012 at 8:32pm | IP Logged 
My parents spoke Italian at home; I picked up English from school and friends and so
on. To be honest, it would have been virtually impossible not to pick up
English.

French at school was never very hard, I suspect mostly because I already "knew" that
there was more than one way of expressing anything (plus the similarities in structure
between Italian and French would have helped too).

I'm sure other people have had other experiences, but I'd never swap having a second
(or third ...) language at home for anything. It's going to take me a lot of effort to
get my French up to the point where it feels "natural" and I can have French TV on and
not have to work at it. I can't imagine how hard it's going to be to do that in
Japanese.

A multilingual background is such a boon.

2 persons have voted this message useful



dampingwire
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4665 days ago

1185 posts - 1513 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian*, French
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 18 of 20
15 December 2012 at 8:55pm | IP Logged 
(I've no idea how I posted this twice ... I'll wipe the second one ...)

Edited by dampingwire on 16 December 2012 at 1:06pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Tsopivo
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4471 days ago

258 posts - 411 votes 
Speaks: French*, English
Studies: Esperanto

 
 Message 19 of 20
16 December 2012 at 4:46am | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
I don't think so. Some people are just better at getting input, being extraverts or voracious readers or both. But some of it will be just luck: will the kid's best friend be a fellow immigrant or someone who speaks his new language natively? Will the voracious reader's friends recommend him books in his new language or will he continue reading mostly in his native one? etc.


I agree with you that luck will play a big part but you can still control some of that. For example, we plan to raise our children bilingually and reading them books in both languages and making sure that we present them with books adapted to their age and taste in both languages is certainly something we would do.

I have read many times that multilingual children's language acquisition is delayed and that on average, they know less vocabulary in each language than monolingual children of the same social background. I think the advantages of native multilinguism outweight the negative sides but that's definitively something I would pay attention to.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6597 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 20 of 20
16 December 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged 
Well, kudos to you! But remember that most parents aren't that keen AND informed at the same time. They may want but not know what to do, or even worse, they might not even want:(
Best of luck!


1 person has voted this message useful



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