Raising a Truly Bilingual Child
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Did this from Kindergarten through 10th grade. "Saturday School" was a full program that followed the Japanese Ministry of Education's requirements for accreditation (since in my era, most students went back to Japan after their parents' 4-6 year stint in the US office). I do notice that my Japanese is stronger than that of my peers who stopped going to these schools at a much earlier age.
>“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said.
For me, this was a big problem since my English vocabulary remained quite weak compared to my peers all the way through high school (mainly because I had a strong preference for reading Japanese material at home). The general lack of confidence in a broad range of English skills is a long lasting effect that is orthogonal to my actual knowledge or skills.
I'm a "true bilingual" but I don't know if I'd want my imaginary children to be the same. If you're committed to living in the States, maximizing your English skill is imo a better investment of finite cognitive resources. My personal feeling is that being highly proficient at English and being "okay" at a second language works out well, but at the same time I know many friends of Asian descent who are self conscious of their "child-like" use of their second language. A conundrum.
I did Saturday school, cultural programs, and got involved with the community. Consequently, I do feel closer to my Chinese heritage than most people of a similar "CBC" background. However, there is just so much cultural background that I will never see or experience, and that saddens me somewhat.
There's always a compromise. Had I been more fully immersed in Chinese, I can fully expect that my English would not be so good - and for my academic work, that would be a detriment. So, perhaps I should be happier, as you say, that I ended up maximizing my English skill.
I'm a Hongkonger. I had lived in Montreal since I was 10 until I finished my bachelor's degree.
I didn't really do Saturday schools. I tried that for one or two years but those really had no effect on my proficiency in Chinese.
Yet, I can confidently say that I'm fluent in four languages, if you count Mandarin and Cantonese as separate languages.
What you really need is motivation and environment.
For me, I was motivated to become good in English and French because I found Québécoises girls really attractive, so I naturally paid attention in English and French classes. I also had the environment because I was introduced, by my cousin, to play with Québécois kids early on in elementary school. I simply did not stick with other Hongkonger kids.
I also liked Chinese literature like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Jinyong's wuxia novels. So I just grabbed a Chinese dictionary and continued to learn Chinese on my own. I liked watching imperial court drama produced in Mainland China, so I watched a lot and learned my Mandarin accent that way. I don't regard that as "spending effort".
I still spoke Cantonese with my family so I got my mother tongue covered. Again, that's not effort.
Unfortunately in North America, there is a subtle social price that is paid for lack of complete fluency in English (French in Quebec). Imperfect fluency is often perceived differently in different ethnic groups. If a Western European person (say a French or Italian person) makes mistakes in their English, it is exotic, but if an East Asian person makes mistakes, they are foreign.
Things being what they are, it actually makes sense for certain minority groups to optimize for 100% fluency in English, and merely satisfactory fluency in other languages. I grappled with the same issues the OP did, and ultimately came to the same conclusion. It doesn't have to be 10x effort however, I agree with you there, but any effort needs to not be at the expense of proficiency in English.
p.s. some Asian children tend to overoptimize and aim for better-than-the-average-native-speaker's fluency in English. Their investment generally pays off. Arthur Chu of Jeopardy fame talks about this.
I really don't think this is the case. An ordinary Chinese kid is learning Chinese 24x7 -- for decades. If you start learning a new language when you are an adult, the expectation seems to be that you'll be both fluent and proficient in a few years. There is a myth that children are able to do this.
It's just not true. Talk to a 5 year old. They have mediocre fluency, and very little proficiency. The average English speaking 5 year old only has a vocabulary of 5000 word families. Contrast that to the average high school student with over 15,000 and the average university graduate of over 20,000. Even by 10 years old, try plonking them down in front of the news and ask them to summarise what was said. Most 10 year olds can't do it, because they lack both vocabulary and grammar. Look at English text books for junior high school students. Note how basic the English is. And still many students struggle to comprehend (though by the time a child is 10, they have pretty amazing fluency because that's what they practice all day, every day).
I guarantee that you can vastly outperform a child in learning a second language if you spend comparable amounts of time and effort. I say this having taught English as a second language.
Now you may ask why, after years of study and frustration in classes that most students can produce no language. The main reason: if you don't review every day, you will hit a ceiling pretty fast. Students usually have class 1-3 times a week for 1-2 hours per class. This is literally useless. 5 minutes a day, every day, will give you dramatically better results.
The next biggest reason: teaching fluency is unpopular because historically many teachers never achieved any real fluency (and they inflict the poor teaching they received on the next generation). Also, fluency is virtually impossible to test objectively and takes a huge amount of teacher time to even evaluate. I worked it out one day. I was expected to work in classes where my opportunity for 2 way conversation in the class worked out to less than 30 seconds per student per hour. Pretty much guaranteed failure.
Next biggest reason: Students are told that 2000 words of vocabulary will make them fluent, and so limit themselves to this level (that is surpassed by 3 year old native speakers -- talk to a 3 year old and judge for yourself). Students also forget the frustration of being a child and not understanding what's going on. Children frequently burst out in tears and tantrum all over the place because they are so frustrated. We have this idea that the acquisition of our first language was effortless, and so wonder why we need to spend so much effort in the next language. Next time you talk to a child, question why they don't understand what you are saying. Very often the surprising answer is because they don't speak English very well!
And finally (finally for this already long email, not because I ran out of reasons): Adult speakers are unwilling to act like children. They are unwilling to put themselves in situations where they do not understand what's going on and where they have no control over their surroundings. They are unwilling to be silly, and to make mistakes and to interact with language resources that are aimed at their level (like cartoons). Again, watch a 4 year old. Copy them. (The same Spongebob episode 500 times in a row until you are repeating the lines to yourself as it is playing). It's not because it is harder as an adult. Just the opposite. As adults we are so used to having thing be so easy that we are reluctant to put in the effort of a 4 year old.
I think you have to be insane to not travel. The learning opportunities it presents are unparalleled.
The world would be a much better place if every person living in a developed country were forced to spend a year living in a different one during high school, for example.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime
- Mark Twain
It depends on what you mean by 'travel'. I think spending anything less than a month in a place just makes it more like a visit to a theme park than anything enlightening.
That's why I spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, learning Spanish as I went, and am now spending two years driving right around Africa, learning French and Swahili as I make my way around!
I have learned more in the last 12 months of my life in West Africa than I did in the 34 years that came before...
I learned the western media is only a fraction of the truth, and often for various degrees of "truth". There are hundreds of millions of people being impacted by how I choose to live in the western world. Those people want the same things I want. Those people are extremely kind, friendly and generous - about a million times more than people in the western world (yes, West Africans make Canadians look unfriendly)
Self-sufficiency is a great thing. People friendly gets you a long way, even with guys with guns. Being polite is the best way to get ahead. The entire world is severely corrupt, many developed countries just have a different word for it, like lobbying. Many international corporations are evil and severely fuing up the planet and millions of people who live in it. A massive number of foreigners in West Africa are making it worse, not better.
I'll write a book about my trip, which will not be random, and I will flesh out many more points in detail.
Back when he traveled, this was before airlines and even the Titanic. "Traveling" required spending months to get places far away so you certainly didn't spend just a week in a single place and then return.
My wife & I do still get a lot out of our backpacking travels, which nominally last two weeks but feel like a month or more.
Not unless they also were forced to earnestly interact with the different culture. May also need to force them to be curious as well.
Lots of forcing should do the trick. Everyone's "solution" to every problem...
Beyond exposure, it's a matter of individual choice. (i.e. consider when one tries foreign foods for the first time)
I'm far from considering myself multilingual, but if I could somehow trade a part of my English skill for a magical boost in my native language I would gladly take it: half of my English abilities would still be plenty for understanding the occasional stackoverflow post, this place here would be just fine without my contributions and ordering food at a restaurant is actually easier when you can fully embrace the "helpless tourist" level. In my natural language, one level better might be the deciding difference between writing as a necessity and writing as a selling point.
This isn't to say I didn't do well in school -- I was at the top of my class in high school and went to the top ranked university in the country. Still, had I invested more time trading and writing English material during my childhood and adolescence, those skills would have developed much earlier.
And I agree with you about sports. I'm an advanced or white level athlete in 4 or 5 sorts, and it's very easy for me to become producer at a new sport, and I often notice body control, posture, focus, or valance related carryovers.
It's honestly exhausting on all parties involved to try to commit to developing "true" bilingualism; my wife (Japanese) in particular seems to wonder if this level of commitment and effort is really necessary. After all, it's not like our daughters won't be able to speak Japanese if we stop, it's just that the "expected" level of literacy isn't going to be there (sans further effort on our daughters' part, anyway), and we're living in the US, so how important is that in the end?
I too know people who "lost" their chance to keep up with Japanese and regret it now, but there's a real price to pay in developing that, it feels. If nothing else, our daughters "lose" their Saturday, as well as other time to the homework. The saving grace is that our older daughter says she likes the people at the Japanese school better than the her regular American school (which is still a fine school to being with, and a Japanese/English bilingual program to boot).
I'm realizing it's really difficult to know what's best for your kids in the end, and there's some many potential tradeoffs...
But even then, I've experienced a glaring lack of cultural fluency that only comes with spending a lot of time in the society. A lot of unwritten rules and customs that we all take for granted for our native cultures.
A kid might grow up with perfect Japanese and be able to say anything, but choosing what to say can be another matter; how to make or respond to a request, how to deal with an affront, how to present yourself in a hiring interview, or a first meeting with a girlfriend's father...
I'm a white Californian guy, and my wife's Japanese. Our kids are dual-nationality and growing up bilingual, but this was a major factor in the decision to raise them primarily in Japan for the first part of their lives — so they get those things intuitively.
I myself went to university in Japan, and what I saw there convinced me this was a big deal. I was put into the "special Japanese" class, due to my wildly asymmetrical Japanese ability — I could speak Japanese an order of magnitude more effectively than I could understand it being spoken to me (reading/writing was still out of the question, as I'd only been learning for a year).
But the interesting thing about that class was that all of my classmates were Japanese, who had grown up abroad for some/many years during childhood. So I got to witness their struggles with the finer points of the language and writing kanji (which was normal, and what you'd expect) and also with the implicit rules and norms of Japanese culture and interpersonal interaction.
That latter bit was kind of mindblowing to me at the time. Since I was this white kid, nobody ever expected me to speak Japanese, or even be able to use chopsticks. (That's still largely true, incidentally, and it really seems to chafe at some long-term expats here, sometimes causing them to write epic rants about Japan...) In fact, I'd grown to understand, if I were to flawlessly execute the finer points of Japanese etiquette, it would veer into uncanny valley territory and make people uncomfortable — something like a chimpanzee putting on his own bowtie and sitting down to eat a formal meal with a knife and fork.
But through that one class, I got to peek and to see how much different it was if you were Japanese. They had to be very careful when speaking their minds, to avoid sounding insolent, rude, or unqualified.
Where I might get a reaction amounting to "oh, interesting to hear the American opinion", my Japanese buddies expressing the same thing might get "oh, you aren't really Japanese," or even essentially "fuck you, weirdo".
It was interesting for me to see their struggle, and to realize it had nothing much to do with language. Being largely exempted from it, though, it wasn't that interesting to me... until I had kids.
But hopefully they will be "bi-cultural" or whatever we call it, in addition to bilingual. (I am pretty confident that it will take a lot fewer years of practice for them to acquire "full Californian" status than it will to be perceived as "full Japanese".)
Your point about the chimpanzee analogy, if I may say, was saddening to hear given the apparently (to me) growing acceptance of people from different backgrounds and histories joining into various societies. I don't know if I could live with that kind of thinking about me; I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I don't want to be treated specially either. I would prefer to be like everyone else, which for all practical purposes I would be, except where I grew up and my physical characteristics.
I'd appreciate your opinion on whether you think attitudes have changed, or that they might change, especially in Japan? Or will I remain the eternal foreigner if I were to ever live there?
Here's the thing, though. Being 'the foreigner' is not a bad thing.
I grew up as the only white kid 99% of the people I interacted with had ever seen. Some of the smaller villages we travelled through, we had to enter/leave at night, because otherwise our simple presence would draw dangerously large crowds. No hyperbole.
There were times I was sick and tired of it. But being the odd one out opened ten doors for every one it closed, and I got to meet an incredible variety of fascinating folks from around the world. That would have been impossible if I was just another member of the throng, too. There are literally billions of other humans out there, and even in the most different of cultures, you will be able to find friends. Even in places that see you as a permanent outsider. It takes work. But it is 100% worth it.
Many (most?) other cultures have not been subjected to the same pressures. Indeed, purity is a common thread throughout most human civilizations.
I'm Norwegian and grew up bilingual in the UK and I see my daughter doing many of the things that I did as a kid. Effortlessly switching language mid-sentence for example. I do expect her to (and hope she does) end up with stronger English than Thai. I think that'll be far more useful to her in life.
The question of which language is going to serve kids better in the future seems to depend on where they are going to live. I have friends with teenage kids who go to international schools in Thailand and their ability to read and write Thai is pretty weak. How are they going to be successful living here if they can barely read the newspaper or fill out a job application proficiently?
There is a huge amount of business conducted in English in Thailand. I expect that the better jobs (in terms of prospects and pay) will continue to be English speaking ones.
Yes, the international businesses all use English and the better jobs require English. But you still need to be proficient in Thai if you want to do business here, or even just be self sufficient in every day affairs.
Given all that, being an employee in Thailand, even with a good education and strong bilingual skills, doesn't really pay well. The only people in Thailand who make money are the owners of businesses, not employees. There's really nothing like the highly paid high tech jobs of which there are many in the west. Unless that changes in the future I will encourage my kid to go work somewhere else if he doesn't have a business of his own.
That is a fascinating genre of product, BTW; at first it freaked me out how many grown men were making toy unboxing videos obviously aimed at preliterate 2-year-olds. Then I saw the view counts, which are upwards of 100 million in some cases...
I'd like to see more data on this as I don't think it's necessarily true. One thing I've noticed about bilingual people is that they are more expressive... creative in the words and turns of phrases they use.
Also, I'd say people from Iceland have a larger vocabulary and greater command of the English language than the average home grown American. I remember asking a lady "Does everyone here speak English so well" She responded "Of course" with an expression of mild disgust that made me feel like a dunce
I would also like to see the data broken down by how much kids read. I would be surprised if a kid who read 4x more books (fiction, or any kind of book) and spoke 3 languages didn't have a larger vocabulary and better expressiveness than an average-reading TV-watching monolingual kid.
My kids are going through similar education, Saniku Gakuin twice a week after public school. While it's a bit intense in terms of homework and tough to balance with sports, but they find the work far less "meaningless" than the busy work they have to do in public school.
My oldest is somewhat dyslexic, so he has a strong preference to reading japanese books--but I'm just happy to see him reading.
I often struggle myself in finding appropriate words, even though I speak only English.
I'm happy to hear that your children are enjoying the school. I think their Bible Study sessions before class helped me gain some Judao Christian cultural knowledge that serves me well to this day.
Each language essentially has a collection of mostly separate vocabularies that only apply in certain situations, but to avoid communication problems, you need to handle any situation you might encounter. If you have a somewhat diverse set of interests, that can be quite a lot.
They both have less vocabulary but the oldest can read both Danish and English. We never taught him to read danish but believe that spending time in Denmark for that amount of time still exposes them to enough Danish to internalize some of the language constructs and general orientation of language.
It's been quite interesting to follow.
I wonder in which extent this apply to programming languages.
Even then, I don't think the comparison works because programming ecosystems come and go. The rate of change is much faster than in human languages. So whether you specialise or try to be a generalist - you can undo that decision within the next decade.
In many parts of the world bilingualism is the norm.
I don't recall the exact book, but I remember reading a Jared Diamond book about societies in remote Papua New Guinea and meeting indigenous peoples who all spoke several different languages. If I recall correctly he argues that being monolingual is the historic oddity.
"True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing" is a truly bizarre statement for most of the world, I should think. FTR, I was raised "truly bilingual" -- I would go to kindergarten with kinds who spoke X, speak Y with my parents and immediate family, try to speak Y with the butcher until he told me he didn't understand X, then speak X, and be understood. (I think I was 5-7ish, so this is obviously from recollection by my parents.) I'm still fluent in X and Y, although one has suffered in pronunciation terms, but that's mostly through general atrophy from disuse, not because I can't do it, somehow.
I think the exception may be exactly those countries who have some-sort-of-English as their native language (UK/Canada/America/etc.) They can usually afford to not bother with the others.
... though I do think it's a massive shame in terms of general cultural deveolpment. Again, English-speakers don't have this, but the whole "grammtical gender" thing is a massive eye-opener[1], especially is you manage to learn several different languages that not only have different geners for specific things, but also have different numbers of genders. (E.g. Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders -- which, tellingly, don't actually agree across various nouns.)
[1] Not to anything fundamental, just to how absurd language is as a construct.
Given that Norwegian and German have three I would expect Danish to also have three. French has two (le + la).
Danish indeed has "only" two genders, one too many for my taste.
For context, I'm trilingual (used to be bilingual).
I grew up near Boston. A quarter of the kids in my class were bilingual. I don't know how many had native proficiency in their non-English language, but I'm guessing most.
So I thought maybe "true" bilingualism was some hard to attain thing that none of us had. Nope, it just means "native proficiency". AIUI that's a relatively common thing, even in the US, at least in urban areas. And definitely in other countries.
There probably was some local skew in this sample set, but from what I can tell this is definitely not abnormal in cities.
The article seems to be mostly written in the context of unilingual parents who want a bilingual child.
Yes. The core target audience of the article is likely unilingual families who will put their kid in French/Chinese/whatever classes to give them a leg up for Harvard admissions, 15 years later (or, in the NYTime's subtle language: "parents who want to give their kids a bilingual boost").
Obviously if the kid only speaks the language in the context of a classroom, true fluency will never be reached. In a realistic context, true multilingualism is very achievable, and not particularly exceptional throughout most of the world as many other commenters have pointed out.
Implicitly you appear to suggest multilingualism is easy to achieve in [almost] all contexts?
Where parents are monolingual, and the pervading culture is monolingual then there's little opportunity for immersion and few people from whom to learn.
I'd guess that the kids you knew growing up were speaking english in school and another language at home, so they likely don't develop the vocabulary and grammar in their 'home' language that they might have if they were studying it every day in school. From the article regarding kids from bilingual homes who speak english in school: "... they didn’t go to school in Spanish, they don’t read books in Spanish, and when you actually measure the size of their vocabularies, or the grammar they understand, or the coherence of the narrative they produce, they are not as proficient as they are in English".
(Or perhaps I just have a very skewed sample set and even "regular" bilingualism is rare)
Idk. Overall this article didn't sit well with me, for more reason than one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14830685).
Bilingual people are a dime a dozen, but it's fair to say truly bilingual people are pretty rare, and almost invariably learned both languages at a young age.
I'm English and live in Lithuania now, and many of my Lithuanian friends can speak perfectly good English without an 'accent'. It's also not uncommon to speak a third language like Russian or Polish, especially if the family has their roots in that country.
These languages do have some shared sounds, but are definatly not just dialects of each other.
In the UK itself, it's estimated that there's a different regional accent every 25 miles or so.
Still, though I think true bilingualism is extremely rare, If by "True" you mean being able to do anything you can in one language in the other language without any hiccups and word-searching and at the same speed and eloquence and precision in all possible situations and contexts.
I've studied at a university level in 3 different languages and am highly fluent in all of them, still there are a lot of contexts where I don't know the specific vocabulary in one particular language or might have problems finding the right word in one language because I'm getting interference from the other ones.
Also, I've known a lot of bi/tri/quad linguals in my life (whole family, extended family, friends, etc), and in my studies and I have yet to encounter even one truely bilingual person as I defined it above.
A spaniard who doesn't speak catalan won't understand 95% of a normal convo... Catalan [0] is lexically as distant from the spanish as the Portuguese is [1]...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
[1] https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among...
I don't know if I'd go that far. I just youtubed catalan and would say I understood about 75-80% of what this guy is saying. [1]
Also, I mainly meant that statement ironically :) Catalan is its own language, its just funny to me that "dialect" is a negative term, language is not, and usually the big country with the military dictates which provinces speak a "language" and which ones are speaking a "dialect".
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdiVss0X6V0&feature=youtu.be
Spanish speakers will notice a lot of "familiar words", but most of the time it's difficult for them to extrapolate the meaning of what is being said.
And Romanian, with only some more difficulty.
The big problems I see (as an Italian) when speaking with people from France, Spain, Portugal and Romania is mostly about the pronounciation, admittedly I have studied a little bit of French (that makes the "slightly more distant" language on par with the others).
When it is written, I can usually understand like 90% or more of most text and there are "sinergies", i.e. there is a given word that is different from Italian but is very similar to another word in another of the Latin languages or that is actually directly or almost directly a Latin word.
The issue is with "false pairs", i.e.words that exist (or sound alike or almost alike) in two languages but that have completely different meanings.
Like, to mention a couple reknown ones, "burro" which is "butter" in Italian and "donkey/ass" in Spanish or the Spanish "aceite" which most Italians will instinctively translate into "aceto" (vinegar) while it means "oil".
It’s like saying that german, dutch and english (Germanic languages) are extremely similar… =)
[1]https://youtu.be/2OynrY8JCDM?t=6m43s - interesting video overall
But in Europe I've been sitting on trains directly next to Portuguese speakers and had a very difficult time even understanding say 40% of what they were talking about. It was as if in Portugal they just chew up the words and chop them all up, which makes it super difficult to understand. That wasn't the case with the Brasilians I've spoken too. With them I could actually have conversations and know what they were saying.
But thats just my personal experience.
(I think. One of the characters in "Spotlight" was the most recent time I understood almost nothing.)
Try watching an English person ask an American (in the US) for water or where the herbs are.
However the spoken form diverges much faster than the written form, to the point where it's completely impossible to have an oral conversation.
Right now I live in a situation where I use English and a third language exclusively, and my native language has massively atrophied. If I can't even compare my native ability now with 2 years ago, how could anyone have an exactly matched ability in two languages at the same time in all possible situations and contexts?
Hence I reject your definition since it's useless. I just define true bilingualism as native-level fluency in two languages. There's enough variation in native fluency to give a healthy margin there.
Does India count? China? Russia? Spain? France?
India has tons of mutually unintelligible languages. China does too (some call them dialects). Spain has multiple partially mutually intelligible languages -- and Basque is an isolate (and mutually unintelligible). IIRC Occitan and French are not that compatible either.
Maybe you're thinking about the Basque language instead? I'm from the south of France, Occitanie really. Occitan is certainly different from French, but not completely alien. It's a bit similar to Spanish in closeness. Basque on the other hand is very different and is an isolated language.
No, I know that Occitan and French are not that different, but they're still pretty different. Like you say, similar to Spanish in closeness -- I would definitely consider them distinct languages that take effort to learn.
In Africa it's the same thing, but the European language is more likely to be French than Spanish.
This sort of explains why Germans and Scandinavians in general are so proficient in english.
I acknowledge that this article is aimed at Americans, but I don't really think that bilingualism is rare in the world, or for that matter, in certain parts of the USA.
Perhaps this is not relevant to the article, but it seems that bilingualism is a forgotten issue these days in the USA. Yet, it is actually a very important issue. One time a person simply told me that they couldn't see the point in Junot Díaz work because it used so many 'foreign' words.
At the time of writing this reply, there were already plenty of other replies that suggested that we should all speak English exclusively or at least that speaking English proficiently should be prioritized. I think that they are probably at least partially right, but it surprises me that there is really not a lot of controversy on this topic.
All I am saying is that here we have a perfect topic in which humans are not entirely rational, and instead of being puzzled and talking about it, we just simply forget about it.
[edited for clarity. Like Celia said, my English is not very good looking, so I'd appreciate corrections :D]
I don't feel Americans appreciate the luxury of speaking a language that is basically the lingua franca of the Western world.
Also, sometimes I feel that many people don't realize that there is a wealth of information that is in Latin, Greek, Russian, or Mandarin. What's not English doesn't exist for them. In this way, the world is still divided in some sense.
> basically the _lingua franca_ of the Western world. [emphasis mine]
Conversely, there is occasional information that I can only find in Japanese (for example), but that doesn't happen often. Every time it does, it makes me wonder how many of my information sources don't have a direct analog in various other languages.
Learning French doesn't broaden your horizons. Using French does.
But to your larger point about nations speaking other languages on the doorstep of the U.S. -> keep in mind that "on your doorstep (aside from Mexico and Quebec) means a 6 hour flight to South America. Largely depends on where you are, and you'll see in the American SouthWest they do speak a lot more Spanish, but it's not like in Europe where I can live in Germany, drive to France, circle around through Italy, then through a myriad of other countries (all speaking other languages) in a relatively quick amount of time.
The U.S. is fundamentally different that Europe and I think people should just chill out about the language thing.
Also, right in my family, we speak three languages on an everyday basis, it's interesting because, say we speak languages A, B, C; dad, mom and me speak language B with my brother, and dad, mom and myself communicate in A and all four of us switch to C whenever we wish to.
"Highly competent bilingualism is probably more common in other countries, since many children growing up in the United States aren’t exposed to other languages."
At least in Europe and the Middle East, most countries have large minorities that speak the local and native language since early age and learn English on top of it. So trilingual or even more languages is pretty common thing.
When she was younger, it was sometimes heartbreaking to read a picture book where she knew some words in one language, and then the other parent comes in and all the words change.
Kids' minds are amazing though. I sometimes speak some English or French (not our native languages) with her as a game, and the speed with which those words stick is unbelievable – their minds are just sponges. Last week she threw some random French words at guests, confusing them to no end.
That is rubbish. It depends on how the child is exposed to the various languages and how much exposure they get. My daughter speaks 3 languages at home (one to each adult). We were told exactly this that she would be behind language wise, but we made sure that she was read stories in each of the languages, and had good exposure. She has just started at a bilingual school, and her monolingual English teacher has told us that she is far ahead of the rest of her class language wise.
Yes, this may be an outlier, but every family that I know that has bilingual or more children and who expose the children to enough of each language have children that are ahead of the norm in each of those languages.
If however you simply split the time that you would give in language related activities or conversation between multiple languages, then of course the child will be behind in each one, as you've only exposed them to half the language in each. This is true up to about 7 years old, and non-existent after that anyway.
How do you know what her ability in English would be if she'd not had the other 2 languages. Like I've of the languages could have buoyed it up but the other overloaded her and reduced her overall vocabulary. Or many other possibilities.
Surely the truth is you hypothesise it had no effect but without re-running her life you can't know one way or the other?
What do you mean with your last sentence, it's entirely incoherent to me?
Not OP. I can speak 3 Indian languages and English. My English is better than native English speakers, I know that because I got above average points in IELTS.
Yes when you are learning as a kid things will be little show at first but most kids (sample size of my Indian friends who are trilinguals as well) will be fine after some years.
I'm sure IELTS doesn't cover important life skills such as "use of the word innit".
What I've found is that they have a play/babble language of their own that sounds like a mix of mostly Swedish and German. We talk together in this language at times, too. Sometimes they even have asked me what the English word for an idea/thing they've learned or experienced in German or Swedish. Another time they asked me what "zum Beispiel and till Eksempel" mean! which amazed me because they obviously connected that they both mean the same thing ("for example").
In real life (i.e. not at home watching movies) they can hold conversations with Germans and Swedes, too.
At this point they're not truly bilingual, but it's been really fun and interesting to see how much they have learned, and makes available for them in the future, as with deeper study and practice they could be truly multilingual.
In Swedish it should be "till exempel".
Absolutely false. Screen time is an excellent way of exposing the child to a language and thus learning to distinguish the phonemes that make it up. It can be argued that screen time alone doesn't help too much in learning to speak a language (if by screen we mean a non-interactive one, of course). But it's great for listening comprehension.
Source: starting when she was a baby, I let my kid watch as much TV as she wanted as long as it was in English and not in our language (Spanish). She watched about 2 hours a day, on average. Her mother and I are quite fluent in English and, even though we rarely speak it among us, we encouraged our child to learn it this way, occasionally answering her questions or translating the words that she couldn't figure out by herself. She's now 6 and speaks it pretty well, she can easily maintain a conversation and she is very good at identifying the correct phonemes while listening (even in the cases when she may not know the word). Actually, she's better at listening comprehension than what her mother and I could ever hope to achieve ourselves. Differentiating phonemes is a crucial ability that is learnt optimally at an early age and after only a few years old it cannot be learnt that well (I remember reading an article about this limitation in Scientific American more than 20 years ago, I don't have a link for that).
However, this is coming from my "learning a new language as a teenager / adult" experience than "raising bilingual kid" viewpoint, but it seems sensible that it would be also a powerful incentive for small kids, too.
I came out with a bit of an odd accent though, as if I combined all the television accents into one.
I'm trilangual and that statement is complete BS. I would trade the decent mastery of three languages for complete mastery of one any day of the week. No one cares that I'm fluent in French or Polish expect for when I pronounce French words properly or can order two beers at a bar on a biz trip. People do notice that I tend to reel for pretty basic words in English. I guess it's always a matter of perspective.
I think I'll caveat that with "in the presence of other bilinguals". I am trilingual (formerly bilingual) and I, as well as people I share >1 languages with, freely switch when talking. It's quite liberating since you get access to idioms from multiple languages, and certain phrasings work out better. (There's also a lot more potential for great humor)
None of the adult bilinguals I know accidentally switch in the presence of non-bilinguals, however I have seen bilingual kids a few years younger than me do this (and I suspect I did it too).
In the context of kid mistakes, that quote was rather jarring to me; adult bilinguals do not switch languages the same way kids do; it's a completely different thing.
Her Thai sounded light and bubbly, so the effect was magnified. I have no idea if she also said negative things in Thai, but almost all the English speech was in some way negative. She got on well with her parents and was never in a poor mood after speaking with them, so it's unlikely she was wholly negative in both languages. Curious.
Similarly on idioms, many years ago I knew a woman who spent a year of high school in Finland. She said that it was apparently common to use the English phrase for "I love you", because the Finnish phrase was harsh and tended to 'kill the mood' a bit.
For me, French is the language I like to be negative in. It's not a language I'm native-level fluent in, but I'm at the level where I can carry out those mental self-conversations you have with yourself when thinking in French as well.
In french, negating a statement involves two words sandwiched around the verb (usually ne...pas, e.g. "il ne trouve pas"). I think for me this gives the negation a lot more "weight". It's hard to explain (and I'm not even sure if this is the explanation, it's more of a guess). But if I'm thinking a strongly negative statement I'll often think it in French.
There aren't that many things for which this happens for me, most kinda of thoughts get expressed in no particular one of the languages for me. But most strong negatives happen in French (and certain kinds of questions happen in my non-English native language).
I wonder if it's just a coincidence or something special about negative statements going on here.
In reality, “pas” (without “ne”) is simply the unmarked, natural way of forming negation in spoken French. The extra “ne” is relatively uncommon (except in writing which is a whole different ball game) and normally signifies a slightly higher level of formality.
As an aside, “pas” was originally a noun meaning “step” (and still does have this meaning) – quite an odd etymology for a negative particle!
In fact my pronunciation is horrible and I struggle to understand spoken French (this is improving).
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/mar/27/bad-lan...
https://newrepublic.com/article/118191/people-speaking-forei...
I have to agree with one of the Indian commentator that this does not signal language abillity but rather the lack of vocabulary.
Me and my wife are doing our best trying to raise our children multilingual (three mother tongues). The use of drop in words only means to us that we dont know the right word in the current speaking language.
That aside, I think that you are truly bi/multi-lingual when you can express feelings effortless in any of your languages equally.
Of course, it can in some situations be applied to both adults and kids. My wife speaks Tagalog and English, which combined is the official language of Taglish. Sometimes she does not know the actual word for something in Tagalog so she substitutes it with English. This can fir example involve words for colours. More often though, the substitution is purely to emphasize.
For me, as we only speak Swedish in Sweden, I do not have this habit of mixing and substition. That being said, my English is of curse much worse then my Swedish...
I'm hoping that our kids can speak all three languages natively, and I'm sure they will naturally mix it in between them self. And that in other settings, that they uses the current locale with out thinking about it.
I'm also hoping the knowledge of many languages makes them more susceptible to even more languages and cultures. :)
- The pervasiveness of English as a first or second language
- As much as people complain about English, in the transition from Old English to Middle English when English was not the court language of England, English lost a lot of what I like to call the grammatical bullshit (eg gender of nouns, cases, agreement of case, number, adjective and article and so on).
Anyway, this article made one claim that resonates with my observations:
> But parents should not assume that young children’s natural language abilities will lead to true grown-up language skills without a good deal of effort.
How many people do you know that have done 12 years of Italian or French or German or Spanish through school and can maybe remember how to count to 10? I know quite a few.
Another claim the article makes is that bilingual children are less fluent in each language than a child who only knows one language. I've often wondered if this is the case for a similar reason: language ability seems to largely be a function of exposure and there's only so much time to go around.
If true, I wonder how this has affected the development of English-speaking countries, which are particularly mono-lingual. Is it an advantage? A disadvantage? A bit of both?
There's an important shortcoming in that reasoning: it assumes that time is fully dedicated to learning whichever language is being used. Furthermore, it doesn't consider the possibility that learning a language may benefit from learning a different one.
Based on my observations while raising my kid bilingual, that's probably not the case. When she learnt a new word in a language, she usually asked for it in the other language too so she could learn both. At 6 years old, she now has much better language skills in both languages compared to her peers. There may have been a period at about 2 or 3 years old that her skills weren't outstanding but she was still perfectly fine by her age's norm (which accounts for quite a bit of variance). My guess is that, after learning a few basics, new language is learnt sporadically with lots of "waiting" time in between, and thus there's practically no time conflict in learning two languages except maybe at the very start.
This can't be true, otherwise you'd learn all languages and it would take, practically, no longer than learning one.
At school if a child is learning 2 languages (L2, L3) then do you think they can do that with no more time commitment than learning one additional language - if you can explain how then you can revolutionise language learning .. all schools can teach the kids 20 languages within the lesson time they currently only manage one.
In practice what's happening is you're teaching in an open manner, it's not directed learning but it is occupying more time, and mental processing, than learning only one vocabulary and one grammar. There are probably a lot of efficiency gains, but if exposure and use is at all important to language learning and proficiency (they are according to most comments here) then you need more time.
When that time is folded in to social times or family time it appears to be "free". The problem comes when people who have learnt/taught this way get to claim kids in school can learn an additional language because it doesn't take any time (and so, the logic goes, can't negatively impact other learning).
I'm native in two languages, neither of them my first. By this I mean native-accented speech, and able to do a degree in these language. The only way it was possible was that I went to school in one language and lived in a society that spoke another. So school was teaching me English, meaning I learned all of math/science/history through high school with English vocabulary.
But I was only able to learn the local language because I kept local friends and my cousins spoke it with me. And I read the papers and watched the TV, as well as socialising with people who showed up at my parents' restaurant.
So now as an adult there are only two languages in which I could do a degree. What happened to my other languages? It's like I'm tourist when I speak the old with my parents. Oddly enough there are two of those, as they were also a minority where they grew up. I can ask them for various kinds of food, but I can barely explain to them what I do for a living. I can read a paper in French or German too, and get along ok, but nothing too deep.
The absolute most that I know of (personally) is to be able to do a degree in three languages, a few friends of mine who'd lived in two countries while learning English. Even so they were identifiably non native accented.
I still tend to think most multilingual people are slightly deficient in one of their languages. If you expand "language" to mean "culture", even more so. You just aren't going to know all the minor celebrities of multiple language zones. For instance I met a young guy in Switzerland who'd been taught Danish by his dad. He spoke with a native accent, but wobbled when it came to common language and cultural idioms. Like an English aristocrat who'd apologise in perfect RP at not knowing what happens at the Ascot, or what wrapping your head around something means. Being Swiss, he spoke Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish. I'm guessing with that level of skill: high in all, but wobbly when you dig a little.
I saw a video of a Nogales, Arizona city council meeting -- the meeting was being conducted in English, then at some point somebody made a 15 minute speech in Spanish and nobody batted an eye.
My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly.
Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.
If he lived in Whales, then (if Octonauts is to be believed) the accent could be Texan (Bowhead Whales), English RP (Orca Whales or Sperm Whales), stereotypical Slavic accented English (Narwhals)
French speakers from France might blanch at calling it "perfect"
Sadly true. Probably the biggest challenge of a bilingual childhood (or I imagine, bilinguality anywhere) is the lack of exposure to a massive amount of second-language vocabulary that you'd normally learn by use. At least it's good to know that not having equal proficiency isn't a failure.
Interestingly, I've had discussions in the past where the other side suggested that immigrant parents have a duty to speak the native language in the household, to encourage their children to learn it better. This article does a nice job of explaining why that's already unnecessary, and maintaining a second language in the face of native schooling, media, and what else, is hard enough.
One thing that helps, in my experience, is reading fairy tales. They have some of the most common use of language, and can take a conversational tone that's missing from regular reading.
For example, North African dialects are basically unintelligible to Middle Easterners. Even within North Africa, the dialects are vastly different: for instance, Tunisians have trouble understanding the general Algerian dialect. You can go even further: people within Tunisia can find trouble understanding each other's dialects (e.g., north vs. south)! The linguistic variations are enormous.
I was raised in the UAE, so I can understand (at a high level) basically all Arabic dialects. In Tunisia, I speak Tunisian; in the UAE, I speak the dialect closest to who I'm talking to (if applicable), or a form of Emirati Arabic otherwise (e.g., in the case of Sudanese Arabic).
Despite all of the PRC's claims to the contrary, Chinese is not a single language but a language family. There isn't really much you can do politically when mutual intelligibility is low.
It all depends on circumstance - I spent a few years growing up in Korea, Latin America and the U.S - and went to school in all three countries where I was forced to learn the native language. It's been a few years but I still speak all those languages due to friends and family so I haven't lost the ability yet.
It's not a very useful skill for my job - but I just wanted to point out that I can attest that immersion as a child is one of the best ways to learn languages.
I was really bad in English when I moved to Sweden which helped me to learn Swidish faster because people wouldn't use English to communicate with me, which swedes do all the time if you speak English but not Swedish.
I learned English later by mostly watching TV, which is only subtitled in Sweden, because I wasn't able to read that fast in Swedish, I started listening to the English original. Later most of the studies here at university were in English (at least in Computer Science), so I was forced to use my English and improve it. And later at work the office language was English too.
Anyway, I do even have an anegdote from my Grandfather who was captured by the Russians during WW2. He was in the Wehrmacht, but because he was from Silecia he spoke some polish too, which helped him during his time in captivity in Siberia. Because he could translate, they gave him bigger portions of food, so he always said: "You never know where life leads you and every language you speak is like an extra hand."
A year later, French is just the language that Kids and Strangers speak, so he pulls it out in those situations then falls back to English if that doesn't work.
It's fascinating to watch. I'm trying to gauge when will be a good time to up sticks and move to a Spanish speaking country for a year or two.
I grew up in Canada my whole life, but was taken to Taiwan towards the end of my elementary years and enrolled in the normal school system there without so much as knowing the alphabet. Spending 3.5 years there allowed me to pick up the language fluently, at a fluent, accent-less level (reading, writing, speaking, listening). While there I also learned "Taiwanese" at a fluent, accent-less level while visiting produce and night markets.
Now when I interact with Mandarin speakers in Mandarin, they assume I grew up in Asia, and vice versa with English.
On the flip side, many Asian friends who grew up here attended Saturday Chinese schools, and although it helps allow you to communicate on a basic level, most hate learning Mandarin, and thus fight it. Speak with classmates in English the second the teacher isn't hounding them, speak in English during breaks, etc. Many end up not even being capable of conversing
I'm curious to know how early you were exposed to hearing Mandarin sounds (from birth?) and whether you spoke Mandarin at all with your family before you moved to Taiwan.
I ask because one of the toughest things getting started for many foreigners learning Chinese is being able to distinguish the tones when listening and speaking, and AI read some report of some research that said that early exposure to hearing another language (I think at under 12 months old) allows you to distinguish the sounds that occur in that language, even if you only learn that language later in life.
If you went from zero to fluent in 3.5 years, that's awesome. I can imagine the second half being hard but doable. I can't imagine how you got through day 1 and month 1 at all!
I was born in Taiwan, so I assume the exposure was there, at least from the staff at the clinic if not anything else. That said, my first language was English as we came to Canada immediately after my birth. English was the language at home, and while I had a few Asian classmates, all of us only spoke English, and there weren't many immigrants from Asia (mostly Taiwan/Hong Kong) at all. So despite exposure at birth, hearing Mandarin for me at the time was much like hearing someone speak Spanish or Russian now.
In fact, I had no interest in relocating to Taiwan and losing contact with my friends. I'd be lying if I said it was not hell; the school administration strongly suggested I be put in kindergarten so I could learn the language from the beginning just like the locals, but my mother insisted I be put in 5th grade, where I belonged. It was a major hit to my ego, to go from top of the class throughout my young life, to a bottom feeder. It was also a culture shock to many kids to see someone "white", so bullying was a huge part of my life there, but I digress.
Being forced into an environment like that is incredibly stressful, but I can't say it doesn't work. I'd say it took about 6 or 7 months before I was consistently not the bottom performer in class, and another year or so till I was consistently top 3.
So while there was technically some exposure, and probably some learning going on in my infant brain, none of it was apparent to me.
His younger sister (three years his junior) began French immersion in Japan. Actually, a truly French school, started by French parents living in Japan. Since our son was working on three languages, and there were limited options for being immersed in Mandarin here, we decided on French for her.
Fast-forward eight years, six of which were spent in Japan, and two in the UK and France. Our son is bilingual, but his English is short of native. Japanese took over as the dominant language for him. His Mandarin is as good as gone, in spite of three extended trips to China and the (intermittent) use of native Mandarin tutors while living in Japan. I gave up on Mandarin for him when I realized how much his English was deteriorating.
Our daughter is native-level Japanese and English, and just short of native in French. She speaks without an accent but is short on a lot of vocabulary, for example. (Similar to my son and his English.)
Looking back at the experience of raising these children with multiple languages, my main observation is that, although children are superior at learning languages compared to their adult selves, there are starkly different levels of language acquisition ability from child to child.
My daughter is truly a language monster. She is shockingly impressive in all three of her languages, and is constantly trying out new words and getting them absolutely right (context, etc.).
My son is, not surprisingly, much like his parents. Language is hard for us. He is stronger in other areas (music, visual art, writing ability), and we work hard to let him know that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. He's jealous of his younger sister's French (and her English, too), but we tell him that we're jealous, too!
My second observation is that raising children like this is a substantial amount of work.
Last but not least, I have come to appreciate the joy and magic of being truly, madly, deeply native in a language. Having that final 1% of ability adds untold richness and closeness. There's nothing quite like it. Being truly bilingual is fantastic, but not the same as being dual-native, and it doesn't come close, in my opinion.
And, as an afterthought, there are all the non-spoken aspects of another culture, such as behaviour, body language, and even the volume of your voice, that are, in my opinion, as important as language fluency in terms of feeling "close" within a society.
“A child who is learning two languages will have a smaller vocabulary in each than a child who is only learning one; there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re either hearing English or Spanish,” Dr. Hoff said. The children will be fine, though, she said.
This is the first time I've seen an expert go on record saying that there is some downside (perhaps temporary) of raising a child bilingual. It's all the rage to do so (and I am currently doing so, I'll admit), and everyone loves to talk about how a study showed that bilingual speakers are better at this or that.
But it's important to consider that there is some downside, and for some children - perhaps those without a huge vocabulary to begin with - it might not be the best thing to do.
This goes against the mantra that each parent should speak to their child in their native language, which I hear all the time but I've always thought was complete bs. As parents we're both fairly proficient in each other's language and speak to our children in both languages depending on context.
I find the "rule" that you speak to your child in your native language to actually be very bad because it artificially splits conversations across languages, and also gives the kid the impression that you should speak your native language, whereas the whole point is that they should be comfortable speaking any language.
I come from Spanish speaking parents, but half of my family spoke Catalan and my wife is Italian.
I speak always in Catalan to my son, he speaks always to me in Catalan, my wife talks to my son in Italian and he talks in Italian to her. I spoke in Spanish to her.
And the usual thing is change language in the middle of the speak when we change interlocutor. So I can start in Spanish if I look to my wife and end in Catalan when I look at my son.
My friends to the same changing from Catalan to Spanish depending who they are looking at.
This is what happened to me when I grew up, living in the US my parents would speak Swedish at home, but I'd pretty much just speak English all the time and when we moved to Sweden I had a lot of work catching up. It was still all in there somewhere since I had been exposed to it, but I would never have become bilingual if we hadn't moved back to Sweden to force the issue.
My rule of thumb is we never force our kids to speak one language or another, we just try to give them opportunities and motivations to do so. Going to a different country happens to be a particularly effective one, although obviously not feasible for everyone.
I am also ok with the possibility that they will not speak my native language (English) very well. I think if as a parent you are not okay with that possibility, you will end up putting undue burden on the kids and probably make things worse in the end.
Just my two cents.
When you speak different languages to your children do you use the exact same accent?
Do you just mix the words up within a sentence, use grammar structures from one language in the other, etc? How, in your estimation, do the kids know which language a word belongs to at the point they hear it first, or so they learn that later - do they ever mix speech accidentally (can you tell if they do this if you're doing things syncretically)?
I don't really think any of that really matters very much though, honestly. People think of languages as distinct, separate things, but in practice I find that our brains treat them more as collections of words and ideas. If you listen to kids who are bilingual in the same pair of languages, you often see that they freely mix words from both - which is fine since they both understand both. I do this sometimes as well.
The most important thing is learning those collections of words an ideas through exposure. For kids, I find the ideal is to speak with other kids. Speaking with parents/adults is good too, but (as I said) it should be natural and not forced.
So while she is bilingual by any useful definition, there are common scenarios in which she sounds like a foreigner with "very good English" rather than a native speaker.
Our grandfather had the opposite problem. He lived in the U.K. from age 18, and only had the very faintest accent, but in his 60s and beyond would be frequently complimented that his German was "very good for an Englishman"
I would say that our experience largely overlaps with what I read in the article. Raising bilingual child is hard, "truly bilingual" (whatever the measure for "truly" is) is even harder. But it is probably easier if you're living in a foreign country.
Judging from the older son - yes, his vocabulary in German is somewhat smaller compared to his German peers, but not significantly. His Russian vocabulary is probably also smaller compared to Russian kids, but more than that - it is different. He learned the language primarily from us parents, there are almost no Russian friends around, so his language is very adult, I'd even say academic. For instance, he normally does not use the word "круто", Russian equivalent for "cool", he'd rather say "remarkable". His grammar in Russian, is, however, heavily influenced by German. Prime example are reflexive verbs. For instance, for "I'm wrong" you'd probably say "ich habe mich geirrt" in German - literally "I have erred myself". Note the usage of the reflexive pronoun "mich" ("myself"). You don't use it in Russian as reflexion is encoded in the verb suffix itself - "я ошибся". But my son sometimes still uses the reflexive pronoun in Russian, saying something like "я меня ошибся" which is not correct and sounds pretty funny.
Over the years we've estabilished a small set of rules for language. Speak Russian in the family, unless a non-Russian-speaker is present. Answer in the language in which you were addressed. Do not mix languages. It seems to work pretty well for us.
The article seems to take mixing of languages quite easy. We see this as one of the biggest challenges. It is way too easy to start using German words where Russian translations are cumbersome or unusual. (Prime example is "Termin" - "appointment". In Russian there's just no good translation for this word. The closest is probably "назначенное время" - "the appointed time", but that has a completely different connotation.) It may be not sound so bad if you mix Romance/Germanic languages, but if you mix Russian and German, the result is absolutely horrible. You end up with a language which neither "pure" Russian nor "pure" German speaker will understand. You'll need to know both languages to understand the mixture.
So this is probably the rule where we are most strict and persistent. Do not, never, mix languages. If you don't know a word, ask, we'll help. If it's too complicated, say it in German, we'll help to translate.
It is hard to keep the language and it is easy to loose it. We know families which lost Russian in the next generation. Their children understand some Russian but answer and German. I think this is a pity. Second language has great value, it takes so much effort to learn it as an adult, so it is unforgivable to loose this opportunity in the childhood.
As a Greek-American who grew up speaking both, I agree with this, although in my case I'd characterize it to some extent as more "old-fashioned" than "academic". I learned Greek primarily from my mother, but it was especially reinforced by my grandparents (because they didn't speak English, so I had to speak Greek with them). As a result my level of fluency with Greek of the 1930s-70s is better than with contemporary Greek, especially when it comes to colloquial terms and nuances like intonation, pauses, implications, gestures, etc.
I think the first time this really became clear to me is a few years ago when I was on a bus in Crete full of elderly people (mainly 80+), and I realized that listening to their conversations, I felt really 100% fluent in Greek down to the last nuance. Usually, when surrounded by Greeks who are younger, I think of myself as more like 80% fluent and miss many nuances, so being on this bus full of grandparents felt like some kind of fog was lifted and my comprehension went up to near-perfect.
I did take some lessons from the local Greek Orthodox church's after-school courses, but most of the kids spoke less Greek than I did (many were 2nd or 3rd generation Greek-Americans) so I don't think I learned a lot there as far as spoken fluency goes. I did learn the basics of reading and writing from there, but this didn't seem interesting to me at the time so I didn't really put much effort into it. Now as an adult I put a little more effort into reading Greek newspapers now and then, but I still approach it as mainly an oral language and read very very slowly due to lack of practice.
I've noticed that the Taiwanese community in Germany will generally speak Mandarin, except for a handful of words that they borrow from German. "Termin" is one of them :) I'd never have expected that such a little word could be so useful.
Anecdata-ly, speech may be delayed since sign language becomes sufficient for minimal communication.
Also, the following tool has been specifically recommended for teaching toddlers to read English: https://amzn.com/dp/0671631985/
I think this shows that there is a need to also speak/write a language, not just listen/read.
So, if parents are bilingual and you have friends/school where both languages are spoken, it's very easy.
However, I'm not quite sure what the best languages would be. I want to give them some exposure to a broad spectrum of languages. I know that the best way to learn a language is to actually use it. In this light, I'm wondering what the best balance between casually exposing them to a huge number of languages and learning them just one extra language really well would be.