Bilingual brain boost: Two tongues, two minds
ronbarak.tumblr.com
ronbarak.tumblr.com
If anything, knowing more than one language makes you better appreciate the commonalities of all langauges. For example English and Spanish are heavily rooted in Latin (English mostly in vocabulary), so you see a lot of words inbetween. Likewise Lithuanian also has a surprising amount of vocabulary lifted directly from Latin. Knowing all three and how these seemingly completely disparate languages are in fact related in many ways fills me with wonder.
But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages, and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years, Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).
For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they were raised to be, but still.
I was bilangual as well. I grew up speaking Lithuanian, and moved to the US at around 7, picking up English surprisingly quickly. My lithuanian is also very rusty, as yes, the only people I ever encounter that speak it are my family (and apparently you).
I was going to come on here and make a very similar point. A few years after moving to the United States, I was involved in a "vocabulary bee", won in my school and did very well at the state competition. This despite the fact that I had been speaking English for less than 3 years, and had no training for the competition, instead answering largely on intuition. I realize now how much knowing Lithuanian helped me largely because of its latin backgrounds.
Later I went on to take several years of spanish, and I had the experience, and noticed it amongst my classmates that the people that picked up the language the fastest were the ones that already spoke more than one language.
Although we see all of these awesome benefits in our friends who are bilingual, like I say, it's hard to get her to understand this. Instead, we just tell her how good it will be that pretty soon she will be able to talk with her cousin and our son (who are both about to start school the same way) without parents understanding what it is they're talking about. She likes that idea.
Of course, my wife and I are feverishly trying to learn it ourselves, too!
Oddly, the first language I ever spoke to my wife was actually Japanese, the usual Japanese greeting for a first-time meeting, "はじめまして. どうぞよろしく." Over the years, we have grown strongly to prefer speaking English with each other (from initially mostly speaking Mandarin with each other) because she finds it more congenial to speak what is really on her mind when speaking English. That's a cultural difference between American culture and Taiwanese culture--greater frankness in family conversations in America.
We were quite resolute in speaking Mandarin whenever we were together, whether living in the United States or in Taiwan, as our two older sons were growing up. I would speak to them in English if I was alone with one or both of them. They switched effortlessly from English to Chinese or back as my wife was present or not.
Literacy is HARD to maintain in languages in which the relationship between speech and writing is more remote than in English, as is surely the case in Chinese. I know many, many, many native speakers of Chinese who received their primary, secondary, and even higher educations in Chinese-speaking countries who forget how to write many Chinese characters if they spend a lot of time abroad. Computer input used to be nasty for Chinese, but it is coming along now even in American versions of Windoze. Literature is also more interesting to read if it is uncensored by the government, which gives English-language literature an enormous worldwide draw. But it is definitely life-enriching and thought-provoking to know two or more languages to reasonably high proficiency, and I have enjoyed spending the majority of my life able to communicate in Chinese.
One considerable advantage for the child who grows up bilingual is learning yet more languages as second languages when an adult more readily than do adults who grew up speaking only one language. By diligent study of linguistics, after having some foreign language study (German) that began in elementary school, I acquired enough Chinese to work professionally as an interpreter and a translator, and have enough reading German to be able to do research in that language, and smatterings of other languages. But all the native bilingual members of my family do much better than I do per unit of time in learning languages, so they have many choices before them as occasion arises to learn other languages for various purposes. That helps with second-language acquisition of an understandable pattern of pronunciation, too.
I've spoken to a couple of people here who have one Polish parent, one non-Polish parent, and all seem to agree that it's easy enough to keep up the "Mum speaks Polish, Dad speaks language X" game for the first few years. Both said, though, that the real challenge was keeping interested during their teenage years.
That appears to be the challenge; thinking long-term, does anyone have any experience being raised in bilingual households? Did you keep interested past a certain age, and if so, how?
If you live in Britain, make sure to back up the exposure to the Polish with films, books, trips to Poland, etc. (If you live in Poland, the opposite, obviously.) Your child needs to get the whole cultural experience, not just your wife speaking.
Great point about culture; we're in Poland right now (that might change in a couple of years), and aim to continue visiting both countries for a long time yet. We'll be trying to mix and match as much as possible, so hopefully some from both cultures will rub off :)
In any case, I don't think that the amount of time spent learning matters much, immersion is what is really important. If I ever go somewhere where I'm forced to speak a language for 2 weeks or so, I will learn much more than 6 months studying alone.
Again, if you're a prodigy it can work.
Or is this all a parallel to learning technical languages?
Also, I don't like planning too far ahead. Usually, I draw the limit at about 1 month, so 12 years is a very very long period of time.
This is the one skill that is so raw and fundamental that it beats hands down everything else a person can ever learn, be it athletics, flying a jet or mastering business management. I worked with a tech support intern who was just starting in the business. He was white, in his early 20s and seemed like of an Irish descent. Then at some point he casually mentioned he spoke Chinese. What blew me away is how instantaneously my opinion of him changed. He jumped from being a smart guy, of which there's a metric ton, to someone I started to respect. Weird stuff, but perhaps it's just me.
I seem to have have better than average graphic memory (I remember taking tests and picturing a page in the textbook or a page of my notes in my head, then picturing where the information was on the page, then seeing the info itself on the page).
I have no idea if this is because of learning 2k Kanji characters though.
The pronunciation of kanji is more difficult than their visual layout, and arguably where most of the burden is in Japanese. A single kanji can have pronunciations it's picked up from several periods in history. In practice, it just means that it might have a handful of different pronunciations in different contexts. Learning all these contexts takes time.
in that case they are not considered bilingual
EDIT: not sure about the downvotes, it's a fact that if you learn a second language at 4 or 5 you are not considered bilingual. Nothing wrong with it, its just the definition
I was raised in such an environment. Spanish at home, English at school. I did learn Spanish before English, and I remember a time when I couldn't understand English, around age five or six. Now, however, I am bilingual, fully bicultural, I code switch, and it feels like a superpower I only share with relatively few other people (at least for the specific dialects of English and Spanish that I speak). I can adapt to either language and be idiomatic in each, but my most "natural" mode of speech is the one I grew up with: quickly code switching between two very specific dialects of American English and Mexican Spanish, and there are very few people I can do that with.
Actually, multilingualism is far more common than some Angloamericans are usually aware of. The "norm" worldwide, roughly, is for there to be many intertwined languages within a small geographic region, such as in Europe and Asia. America (the whole continent, not just the US) is the odd one out to be such a large expanse with relatively little linguistic variety besides differing dialects, and that's because the only way to impose languages over such vast geographic expanses is by force and conquest. This is what happened in America.
The challenge I'm having now is doing the same with my kids. My older child has had no problem, and spoke only Spanish until preschool, but my younger one speaks in English to her sister and is having a more difficult time with Spanish...
Here in Poland, I've often overheard Vietnamese parents speaking Polish to their child when walking down the road, whether it's a single parent on their own, or both together. I really like it, but do wonder if I'll be looked down on for speaking English to our child when the time comes.
Is that fair?
You underestimate the ability of children to absorb knowledge from their environment.
As a matter of fact, if anything, it has been a net positive. Kids at a young age have a huge curiosity about languages and having bilingual kids in the classroom encourages the other kids to learn. My first graders class begged to have my daughter teach them some Spanish, and the teacher set aside some time for her to do so. The other parents heard from their kids, and thanked the teacher for it!
I speak two other languages fluently, and I'm a slightly different person in each language. It's really fascinating.
It takes a long time, I find, to reach a comfort level in another language that rivals that of how you express yourself in your mother tongue. I've been speaking Portuguese (my 3rd language) at least 50% of the time for the past 7 years or so and I'm still not able to hit my mark, as if it were my own...but I'm close. Btw, these last few years, I speak it 80% of the time.
If I were to venture a guess as to why 'hitting my mark' isn't so easy, I'd say that with most language learners, there's a certain point in your learning where you say to yourself, "I'm fluent enough". Reading and writing, I'm in the 95 percentile in Portuguese but with speaking (seemingly no matter how much I speak), I stay at around 85%.
That, and a new, huge, appreciation for anyone that learns the easy-to-start, nightmare-to-master, English as a second language.
We can make an analogy to programming languages. The reduced vocabulary (if any) from learning two languages at once can be likened to the fact that when you learn two programming languages you will probably not be familiar with as many modules from each language that you learn, whereas focusing on one programming language would allow you to deeply learn all the modules available. However, you would still fully learn the syntax and most of the core features of both programming languages. In contrast, the analogy to what George Orwell was talking about would be removing features from the core language to the point that it is no longer Turing-complete, and is only capable of expressing "approved" programs. Kind of like HQ9+[1], only instead of "hello world", quine, and 99 bottles, it's "The government is great", "I love the government", and "All power to the government". The plus can still increment the accumulator, but the accumulator represents how much you love the government.