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Comment by Anon84 | Hacker News Reader

Me too! Babies and toddlers brains are like sponges. We started teaching my baby 3 languages since birth (essentially I always spoken with her in my native language, my wife in hers and gets English from living in the US). She’s not even 4 yet an fully fluent in all three and seemlessly jumps back and forth between them. (To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence)

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>> To my surprise, she doesn’t mix words from the different languages in the same sentence

I knew two brothers that would mix words from different languages while speaking to each other because they shared the same set of languages and presumably used the best words to express their thoughts.

Your daughter probably knows other people generally speak and understand one language at a time and just conforms because its most effective.

I'm not sure if or at what age it might be good to start mixing languages with others who can.

If you look at the rate of "new" word use after the first spoken word its very clear that word acquisition and categorizing occurs for a long period before that first word is ever spoken.

Speaking to babies is incredibly important for linguistics but probably for all types of complex brain function, I don't think there is an upper bound on how many words we should expose children too.

There's a lot more to language learning than being a "sponge". Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before. And the grammar is implicit in what we hear, so children need to extract it in a form that can be generalized to new thoughts and words.

This is why learning Latin the way I did (very methodically and technically, with no real speaking/responding) makes you good at parsing it, but not at speaking it. There are schools today where it's taught as if it were a spoken language.

>Virtually all the grammar we learn is productive/ creative--that is, we apply it to new words, and say things we never heard anyone say before.

That's downstream of the sponge phase. So much so, that initially we only absorb and don't talk yet.

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