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Raising a natively multilingual child | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4655 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 9 of 19 26 August 2011 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@oldearth - It's true - many people in 2nd generation don't know the mother tongue of their parents. However, in 9x% examples it's happening because of the incompetence of them. Besides, not so many people care about it, which is simply sad.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5562 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 19 26 August 2011 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's not that easy. Many people care about it but don't know how they could teach their children their heritage language, or they try to and fail because the environment isn't very supportive. I didn't joke when I wrote my comment about 'Bob' being picked on in kindergarten. Even without bullying, many children don't want to be different from their peers and if their family isn't part of a group or subculture where their language is spoken and so it is natural for them to speake that language, the language they speak at school and with their friends is likely to become the dominant one. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6235 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 19 27 August 2011 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If memory serves, he speaks French with them, but also sends/sent them to a French-language preschool environment of sorts. I don't know which order those came about in, and my memory could be flawed on this. I recall him being happy when he heard that they were speaking French with each other spontaneously, in conversations which only involved the two of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4655 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 12 of 19 27 August 2011 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Bao - ah, that's true. Children can be very cruel, I know that very good... But, on the other had, I've chatted once with a girl from Lithuania, who has Russian and Polish origins. While she was a kid her Lithuanian was very weak, but because of the harassment she's learned it very well.
So it's a double-edged sword. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rutabaga Bilingual Pentaglot Newbie Romania Joined 4723 days ago 27 posts - 46 votes Speaks: English*, Slovenian*, French, German, Russian Studies: Portuguese, Uzbek | Message 13 of 19 27 August 2011 at 3:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Teaching and getting children to learn languages is not always as easy as it sounds. I could have grown up fully bilingual. I started speaking only Slovenian first, learned English when I moved to the US, and then refused to people Slovenian, because no one else, other than my mother spoke it. I lost native fluency in the language. Oh how I wish I hadn't, but you can't reason with a three year old.
Having grown up in an international environment and continuing to work in one, where I meet many, many multi-lingual children, I've seen versions of this story many times over. Children also forget languages that they have picked up very easily, so unless there is maintenance for all those languages, it just won't work. So in short, I don't think Bob is possible. It's hard enough with just two. p.s. I would love for any eventual children I have to speak Slovenian. But when I don't speak it perfectly, how exactly am I going to pass it on? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6175 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 19 27 August 2011 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think it's a harder to teach children multiple languages than I expected. My son won't talk in Mandarin
when he hears too much English. I can't imagine trying to get him to speak a third language. It also takes a long time for the language to incubate before kids are ready to mimic it. If you say something to him in Mandarin or English he will try to mimic the sound. When I now and then say something to him in Italian he has never tried to repeat it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Torbyrne Super Polyglot Senior Member Macedonia SpeakingFluently.com Joined 5891 days ago 126 posts - 721 votes Speaks: French, English*, German, Spanish, Dutch, Macedonian, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Catalan, Welsh, Serbo-Croatian Studies: Sign Language, Toki Pona, Albanian, Polish, Bulgarian, TurkishA1, Esperanto, Romanian, Danish, Mandarin, Icelandic, Modern Hebrew, Greek, Latvian, Estonian | Message 15 of 19 27 August 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Funny, but there is a lot of truth in this. I know, I have been around multilingual children for a long time now. OK, we've all been impressed with Wendy Vo. Her abilities are amazing. Sadly she is the exception because she is simply exceptional. There are many factors at play in raising a bilingual or multilingual child. I am aware of many of them because I am raising my daughter to be multilingual. I have written about it on this forum on another thread, which I aim to update every year. Location is key. What do the other kids do? Is it the norm to speak more than one language? Do they hear other people doing it a lot? This is important for the social aspect. Many bilingual kids I know in the UK do refuse to speak the other language because they want to fit in at school. So they just speak English and then the other language when they go to visit family and friends on holiday. Their parents notice an improvement and come back to the UK with all the best intentions only to find the child quickly loses the desire to speak and/or the fluency in the language. This also happens in other countries, where there is a very dominant language spoken/culture. Briefly, my daughter had English, Macedonian and French from day one. We now live in Macedonia and she is surrounded by many people who speak more than one language. She realises that everyone learns and wants to speak Engilsh, so no problem with motivation there. She also plays with kids on occasion with whom she has no language in common. They may only speak Turkish or Albanian. So she has learnt a few words to communicate and expresses a desire to learn Albanian in particular. However she already has German and Spanish too, which she has been exposed to for almost three years now. She can understand both languages and speaks them to some degree too. She loves German TV shows for example. Does she sound foreign or have less ability than a native English speaker? Nope. If anything knowing French gives her a wider vocabulary than her counterparts in the UK. She can hold a decent conversation for a four year old in English, Macedonian and French. It is not possible to tell that she speaks other languages if you communicate with her in English. She sounds like every other monolingual child from the island. Has she rejected speaking a language? She has questioned why she speaks other languages and I just explain to her that it is a benefit to her when she is older and she can study other things instead and then will have more choice to work or live wherever she wants. I also tell her that she can use whichever words she feels comfortable using and that the important thing is for her to understand at the moment. She is happy with this and has never really refused to speak a language. In fact she readily repeats and learns words from other languages she hears, like Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Albanian and Welsh. She has expressed a desire to learn a few other languages, but I have told her that she can when she is older if she likes. For now, I think she has enough to be going on with. OK, so why is she doing this willingly? I am very pleased that my experience has been so positive and that my daughter has reacted so well to languages. It think this is to do, in part, with our location. Even granny in Macedonia watches TV in Serbian and TV is subtitled, so Turkish and Spanish can be heard a lot too from the soaps. I also think that listening to me speak to people in different languages gives her a positive image of multilingualism. She is also aware that daddy uses languages for work too. She also know that daddy works to get money and that money buys nice things! ;) Kids can be incredibly smart! ;) 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6811 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 19 27 August 2011 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am grateful for all your replies, but I don't think that I was very clear with the purpose of this thread, sorry!
I realise that it is very difficult to be brought up even truly bilingually so twelve languages are probably a no-no. However, I was only letting my imagination run free. I did not mean for this thread to be taken as seriously as it appears to have been. It was only meant as a bit of fun, i.e. getting people to give an account of how, in some fantasy parallel universe, they would like to be raised to speak all the languages they want without "working" for it. I will start another, less serious, thread in the General Discussion sub-forum and leave this one for purely "academic" purposes. P.S. Bao, you forgot that, apart from all the languages, Bob is also well versed in multiple martial arts (Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, etc) so he wouldn't have had any problem in school :) Edited by patuco on 27 August 2011 at 12:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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