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Comment by fuzzythinker | Hacker News Reader

I've been teaching my 2.2 yr old son 3 languages since birth. I speak 60/40 Chinese/English to him and my wife speaks 100% Japanese to him. We only let him watch around 1 hr of TV a day, a mix of 3 languages too. So far, he's vocabulary is only ba(dad), ma, and go (throw toy for our dog to fetch).

I wonder if his confusion over the 3 languages pay the major part for his late speaking abilities, or if he got too much of my left brain genes, or a bit of both. Anyone here with experience teaching their kids 3+ languages since birth? What was their speaking ability like around this age?

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We have two boys who are tri-lingual (thai, german, english). The essential thing is that the kid makes the association:

one person = one language

If you speak both English and Chinese to your son, he might be later confused on what words are from which language.

I would recommend you only speak Chinese to him. For our kids, English is now their strongest language but it was only taught by their 'environment' i.e. kindergarten / school and they started with English only at age 2-3. Now they talk English with each other (before they went through a period in which they talked German or Thai with each other). So you should not underestimate the 'environment language'.

Also, you might consider having some other relatives speaking certain specific languages with your son (e.g. grandparents). This could reinforce their language skills.

Personally, I do not believe that learning languages from TV is effective. Learning languages is about relationships and interaction. I think the 1 hr per day would be better spend on interacting with your son in the respective language, e.g. by playing memory game etc.

Regarding late development of speaking. We did not experience this with our kids. But they might be a bit delayed when learning to read and write because of different phonetic rules of the respective languages.

Thank you for your input. The one person = one language is echoed by eande and wooyi too, so maybe I'll try that. My mom takes care of him half of the week in the day time and speaks Chinese to him, so that's why I was trying to speak some English to him since he doesn't get much exposure to English (no daycare yet). I may be exaggerating a bit on the 40% though, it's probably less than that, mostly just on some vocabulary that doesn't come out naturally in Chinese for me.

Playing memory game is a good idea, we haven't done too much of that.

> The essential thing is "one person = one language"

I was told this by many people but I am not sure why they say this.

My wife and I always spoke a mixture (German/French) together so of course did so also with our kid (plus English/Spanish outside the house). He had no problem, and in school or was quite orthodox in regards to which language to speak with which person. But at home or with relatives and polyglot friends he would switch back and forth. His classmates seemed to be the same.

I have seen my mother, in her 70s, switch mid sentence when arguing with her brother. Then turn and speak to my father in English.

Majority of Finnish children learns English from TV and knows it quote well before starting school. They learns all from TV, because in Finland they do not voice-over dub[0] TV shows (except children shows), only add subtitles.

When I was child we had re-transmitted children German tv shows, I could speak German a bit without actually learning it for other sources.

Disclaimer: I'm not from Finland, but had discussion with one of the teacher in there.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbing_(filmmaking)#Finland

Artificial neural networks do both supervised and unsupervised learning. While this is a very rough generalization, unsupervised learning is good for building models and encodings of data, while supervised learning is good for minimizing the error rate when answering questions about data. The state of the art for training neural networks is to "initialize" the network with unsupervised learning, then "tune" it with supervised learning.

To me, a child learning from listening to the TV is like a form unsupervised learning. It probably helps them build an internal representation of language structure, but doesn't teach them much if anything about proper use of language. If I had to guess, I'd say it is probably mildly helpful when the child is very young (especially if the alternative is silence), but it probably stops providing any value fairly quickly (by about a year of age for the typical child would be my very uneducated guess). At this point, I'm guessing improvements in language facilities probably require focused interaction (supervised learning).

Multilingual family here. All of us speak 3+ languages (English, Japanese and our native language). Our son is proficient in all three though a bit short on vocab in Japanese for a 6 year old. By 2.5, he was code switching comfortably and had a vocab on numbers till 20, "bandaid", and other usual stuff (food, colours, etc.).

I have a 2.5 year old who is spoken only English with me and Spanish with my wife. The one language to one person connection is important so that the child understands the context for switching. (We have a 11 yr girl who went through the same routine and she is bi-lingual although her language development was way faster... she was talking in sentences at age 1) Every child is different. My 2.5 can maybe form 2-3 word sentences...

I personally was brought up with 3 languages (English, Cantonese and Malay), which would be common if you grew up in a multi-cultural country.. no one ever thinks it's a problem there.

I only started speaking at 3 and I was in an environment with English, Chinese, Malay and 2 other dialects. Certainly not a indicator of general well being and intelligence since I turn out ok, just not very sociable :) I also read that late speakers may hint at other stronger developments like spatial thinking. But in any doubt, bring him to see a doctor if unsure.

We speak three languages in our family --- Marathi, which is our native language, besides Hindi and English, which are both common throughout India. Our older kid grew up speaking only Marathi at home. She picked up Hindi with here playmates in the apartment, and learnt English at day-care. She is good at all three now. Our second child is going through the same process now. There was no serious confusion in either child's mind, besides the occasional mistake of crossing words from one language to another.

The older kid said her first sentence consisting of three words at 18 months, but the younger kid did not. By that stage, both had a large vocabulary of words to express themselves, and even larger vocabulary of words that they understood.

EDIT: Missed the detail about "since birth". So no, my example does not answer your question, since they were exposed to only one language --- Marathi --- until 18 months.

From an academic perspective, bilingualism/multilingualism is no longer considered an explanation for language delay. If you think he is delayed, you should get him checked out. Of course there will always be kids who are faster or slower at talking than "average", whether multilingual or not, without that indicating any problem.

We have 3 languages in our house and my 8 year and 10 year girls master all three languages (English, Chinese & German) without a problem.

Key in the early learning stage is the relationship of person to language and to repeat it

one person = one language

Our family conversation is happening in English and that is their native language by a distance. The girls do have daily Chinese afterschool program and with my wife using it daily it kept them very proficient. My German use is limited and I can tell they are getting a little rusty.

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