Bilingual Kids Show More Creativity 221
An anonymous reader tips news of a study from researchers at the University of Strathclyde which found bilingual children to be significantly more successful at a set of tasks than children who spoke only one language. "The differences were linked to the mental alertness required to switch between languages, which could develop skills useful in other types of thinking." Lead researcher Fraser Lauchlan said, "Bilingualism is now largely seen as being beneficial to children but there remains a view that it can be confusing, and so potentially detrimental to them. Our study has found that it can have demonstrable benefits, not only in language but in arithmetic, problem solving and enabling children to think creatively. We also assessed the children's vocabulary, not so much for their knowledge of words as their understanding of them. Again, there was a marked difference in the level of detail and richness in description from the bilingual pupils."
Multiculturalism (Score:2, Offtopic)
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How about tri-ligual, quad-ligual ? (Score:3)
Actually, I can speak, read and write in 7 languages
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Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.
Not only you speak 7 languages, you have a 4 digit UID... what an honor.
Re:How about tri-ligual, quad-ligual ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, I would like to get hands on a wide reaching comparative study involving more languages than two. My guess is that finding people speaking more than 2 languages are not common... and you sir are a real exception.
Depends on what part of the world you're from. Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages, the Solomon Islands has hundreds. Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages. It's perfectly commonplace for a child to be fluent in either English or French (depending on which school they attend), both of their parents' native tongues, and Bislama [wikipedia.org], the lingua franca here. In the course of any given day, I find myself speaking English and Bislama at the office, French with people of French extraction, and sharing greetings and pleasantries in about fifteen (yes: 15) other languages.
Nobody blinks an eye, except for those who observe that a lot of unilingual expats never learn even one other language. I suspect the difference is that I grew up in a mixed English/French-speaking community, and picked up my first 'second' language at a very early age.
I expect that people's facility with multiple languages is what leads to Bislama - a variety of pidgin English - being used so inventively [imagicity.com], in spite of being particularly impoverished in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
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Re:How about tri-ligual, quad-ligual ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Should I ever visit your country, do you have any recommendation for a good feel of the back country?
Here's a primer on how to behave [imagicity.com] (and what kind of behaviour to expect) in Vanuatu. And these people have the best tour packages I've seen [vanuatusanpentour.com]. Feel free to look me up. It's a small place and we all like to welcome visitors.
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Papua New Guinea has over 1000 living spoken languages
Of course
Places like Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea have a lot of spoken languages, but there is _ONE_ big problem - that's all they have, spoken words, no written word, no way to jot down what they say on paper, et cetera
Re:How about tri-ligual, quad-ligual ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Places like Africa, India, and Papua New Guinea have a lot of spoken languages, but there is _ONE_ big problem - that's all they have, spoken words, no written word, no way to jot down what they say on paper, et cetera
Total, utter poppycock.
How can you educate children using a second language? Educators found generations ago that teaching in a language other than the child's first language simply does not work for young children. So, to teach the child, books and other material written in their native language, which requires a written form - an orthography - has to have been developed.
Here in Australia, two generations of linguist graduate students (from the 1950's onwards) were employed creating written forms of the various Aboriginal languages. They recorded words (dictionaries) and grammar. They wrote down the local tribes children's stories. They translated the standard primary school texts into the local language. All of this is essential to run a primary-level education system. Similar programs have run in PNG, Canada, Central America and Africa over the last fifty years.
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How can you educate children using a second language?
Huh?? Ever since I was a tiny baby people around me were speaking 4 different languages
I guess I picked up all those 4 languages "naturally"
Educators found generations ago that teaching in a language other than the child's first language simply does not work for young children.
[Citation Please !!]
And as I grew up, I started by learning how to read and write the 4 languages that I spoke, and in adulthood, I picked up yet another 3
To me, picking up languages come naturally - it doesn't mean I am the language expert in all the 7 languages that I can speak, read, and write
I picked up the Eng
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Huh?? Ever since I was a tiny baby people around me were speaking 4 different languages
I guess I picked up all those 4 languages "naturally"
That means you have acquired four first languages. "First language" is a matter of how a person acquires a language (acquisition starting in the age of 1-2), not a matter of numerical order.
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Even Vanuatu, where I live, has over 100 spoken languages.
Just out of curiosity (and a slight bit of pedantry :-)), are they languages or dialects?
How similar are the languages?
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I'd be willing to bet a fair chunk of people in (Continental) Europe and Africa can speak three languages.
It's pretty common (Score:3)
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But that's not bilingualism as studied in the paper. There they compare children who grow up bilingual with those, who learn only one language before they get to school. If you spoke seven languages before turning seven, it would be more interesting in this case.
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Before the age of 7 I only knew 4 languages (mainly spoken). I learned 3 more in adulthood, as well as read and write in all the 7 languages.
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So you are quadrolingual in the terms of the paper.
Re:How about tri-ligual, quad-ligual ? (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I can speak, read and write in 7 languages
And with all that creative power at your disposal, the nickname you chose was Taco Cowboy?
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It means "The Mighty Warrior Who Crushes the Skulls of His Enemies" in one of those seven languages, you insensitive clod!
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Taco Cowboy is the pivot man for Commander Taco and Cowboy Neal
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I met a child with two bilingual parents who was raised to speak four languages. The problem is, even at the age of six she could only speak a few words in any of those languages. Her speech was at the level of a two years old. I think four languages is too much.
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Kids of multilingual parents are adversely affected, if the parents do not stick to a single language when communicating with their children.
Example: I'm effectively bilingual (DK, EN_UK), and made the mistake of using two language with my kids (EE and DK). The children's mother is Estonian, so the outcome is that the kids are crap at Danish, are not good enough at Estonian.
Meanwhile, the big girl is learning English from me and her mother use of it when we talk - this is becoming an additional language for
Re:Multiculturalism (Score:4, Insightful)
No thanks. In the amount of time it takes to learn a new spoken/written language, I could have become an expert in any other more useful thing. If you speak English, there's little point to learning a second language. This isn't some arrogant pompous statement. I just mean that, in almost any business or travel situation you are likely to ever be in, the other people are likely going to speak a common tongue -- English.
Some people say "well, gosh, you need to learn another language to be well-rounded and so you can travel". That's bullshit. Great, I learn German. That'll help me for the one week of my life that I ever spend visiting in Germany. How is it going to help me in Japan, China, Mexico, Spain, Canada, France, Norway, Iceland, Russia, Sweden or any other place?
I'm almost 40. I'm a professional. I deal in a highly technical field with other highly technical people from all over the world who are from and working in all parts of the world. Every day, I deal with people who are French, Indian, German, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and countless other nationalities. At no point have I ever thought "gosh, I sure wish I knew ONE of these many languages". It just isn't necessary. Now, if you plan to go live and work in another country, sure. Learn the language. If your whole goal is to be a specialist in arab history, learn arabic. Great. But you don't need to learn a second, third, or even fourth language for most jobs and you certainly don't need it in your day to day life.
Re:Multiculturalism (Score:5, Interesting)
I wasn't biligual as a child, but I am now at least.
For me, from the moment on I was able to not only communicate, but also think in both languages, a lot changed.
Certain concepts click together easily in one language, but if I had to use the other language to grasp them, I'd get stuck. And it's not always my first language which is superior, as you might expect.
Each language brings with it a different way of thinking, the cultural aspect, that's coded into it.
It's very helpful to switch between languages for different tasks. Kind of like using mutiple virtual desktops.
Mental Integration (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one of the ignorant monolingual types so typical of the U.S.A. When I studied Francais at school, I noticed that I did some thinking in the language, and felt that it was speeding up my thought processes, much like a multi-threaded CPU. I thought if one could grok the subtle differences between word translations it could increase intuitive understanding of reality.
Is Dr. Lauchlan the first one to actually look into this?
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Learning a language will teach you how to learn a language, which will be useful if you want to learn a few words of German for your holiday.
I started German evening classes a couple of years ago, and was surprised at how two people in the class struggled so much. It turned out they were the only two (of about 14) who had never been taught another language, which was unusual for here (they were immigrants from the US and the Bahamas).
(I could probably do something more useful than learn German, but I could
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Great, I learn German. That'll help me for the one week of my life that I ever spend visiting in Germany. How is it going to help me in Japan, China, Mexico, Spain, Canada, France, Norway, Iceland, Russia, Sweden or any other place?
It would help you a lot. You'd have a better understanding of what it's like to get by in a country without anyone knowing your language. You'd be grateful when people speak their language slowly and clearly and try and help you. Best of all, you can relate much better to the Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Spanish, etc. people you meet in your own country.
There are other nice things too. You'd have the experience of the first joke you "get" in a foreign language. The fact that you understand it makes even the
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Re:Multiculturalism (Score:5, Insightful)
4-language fluency here (Spanish, English, Russian, French) and working my way up in Japanese.
The difference between doing business in English in a land where it's not the native language vs. the local/national language is huge. By not speaking the local language you limit your understanding ranging feim mere subtlety to complete conversations that may (and will) happen in front of you.
Maybe it's because for a large chunk of the last 15 years I've arranged my business around international locales (e.g. I was doing business in 5 countries in July) -- I find knowing multiple languages to be a huge asset. It fine tuned my cultural sensibility and my ear (e.g. I can grasp significant snippets in Polish, German, Italian during a biz conversation). And it helps to lubricate all social situations.
The ages at which I learned them were English: 16; French: 18; Russian: 24; Japanese (which I use the least and I'm far from fluent): 38. If I went to Japan on business more than 5 weeks/year I'd probably be more fluent.
In the US or abroad I deal daily with people who speak these languages. Communicating with them in their native language can often create rapport and a better experience much faster. Great for business and interpersonal relationships.
Just my $0.02 back. Cheers!
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I speak English fluently, passable Mandarin, and better-than-restaurant Spanish and Japanese. This means I mostly communicate effectively with a huge chunk of the world's population. Unlike you, I travel mainly for pleasure (in business, everyone speaks English of course), and I always venture away from the tourist hotspots so knowing the local language is invaluable and one can get much more out of travel by interacting with the locals at a more meaningful level.
Re:Multiculturalism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm almost 50 in a highly technical field, but I can assure you that mastering 4 languages (Dutch, English, French, German - all reasonably fluently) is an enormous help. I have team members that are native French speakers with a limited knowledge of English. I have team members who are native German speakers and are quite fluent in English, but who still communicate faster in German. For me as the team leader it helps enormously that I can switch on the fly.
Much more important, however, even as a "technical manager" I constantly have to deal with suppliers & potential customers from all over the world. Being able to switch languages to their native one or at least to their second best one opens an enormous amount of doors. Germany is a particularly good example of this. Especially in southern Germany practical knowledge of English is limited - even amongst engineers. They are always very pleasantly surprised when they discover that a foreigner speaks German fluently enough to do business with them. And if "doing business" sounds not technical enough, the same applies to our field application engineers. As a worldwide company, we have field application engineers "everywhere", but we cannot afford to have them in every country. So we require them to be multilingual so they can cover a wider area, travel with ease, and deal with people who master English less than perfectly.
You say "how will German help me in Japan, China, Mexico, Spain, Canada, France, Norway, Iceland, Russia, Sweden or any other place?" And indeed, German will not help you in Japan. But it will help you in many European countries. French and Spanish will help you in a very large part of the world. Think of Africa & South America, for instance.
Finally, the whole point of the reported research is that having grown up in a multilingual environment helps in other ways than just knowing languages.I fully understand that this may be hard to believe for people who didn't have that luck - a bit like inhabitants of flatland can't imagine the third dimension. But that doesn't make it untrue.
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Re:Multiculturalism (Score:4, Informative)
Well, it is a pompous and arrogant statement, in many places they won't be able to speak English, especially if you go away from anywhere touristy.
I started learning Spanish 4 years ago, basically because I felt like some Imperialist speaking English slowly and loudly at foreigners. It has had benefits I never even imagined, and never went out intending to have when I learned it. I only started so I could learn enough to do touristy things - get a hotel room, order a beer, get food, find directions, but it sort of turned into an addiction when I found out that learning languages was actually fun, and not the dull boring slog they made us do when they forced us to learn French at school (and unfortunately, I still don't speak more than 2 words of French. I learned almost nothing about French at school, partly due to lack of effort, partly due to the sheer boredom that the method to teach French in school induced. Learning language should be fun, and it's something humans do naturally, and turning it into a boring difficult slog is completely counterproductive, and school language teaching has failed generations of kids in this country).
Some of the unintended consequences that have happened: I've now got a whole heap of Spanish friends, and good friends too. I've discovered new music I never would have discovered. TV and films I would never have known. Food that I would never have tasted otherwise, all because speaking the language gets me places I otherwise wouldn't have been. All of those have been ten times worth the effort of learning Spanish, and it was fun to do anyway! And when we talk about highly technical subjects, we understand each other a lot better. Even if a Spanish person is speaking English, I can understand why they make certain errors in English and what they mean when they make these errors so it's been enormously helpful even if the person I'm talking to is actually speaking English. The time spent learning Spanish has paid off for me more than 100 times. With a little more effort I'll be fluent. I'm not a kid either, I was 36 when I started learning it. (I actually gave a talk in Spanish with only 14 months of learning under my belt, it's actually not as hard as you expect since you can prepare beforehand). And yes, I now use Spanish every day.
Also there have been studies that have shown that bilingualism may be more effective in slowing things like Alzheimers than drugs.
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I don't know about asia, but european languages are related in so many ways, so learning one can help you understand things written in another.
For example: Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are so simular that they usually can understand eachother. Icelandic is not that far away. Dutch to me sounds like a mix between German and English. People from Finland usually learn Swedish in school.
Now, I don't speak either of these languages myself, but from what others have told me French, Italian and Spanish are relate
Re:Multiculturalism (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm getting old so learning new languages seems to be a lot harder than it once was. I started learning Polish 10 years ago and I am fairly competent enough to converse with Polish friends. I let rooms to Poles in my home which really helped me learn to learn a language well you must use it.
The hard thing about learning languages is building a vocabulary getting those words into your brain and usable. My favourite aid is cuebrain I use it on android but it is available on Iphone and windows mobile. It is a flashcard system and fairly open there are a lot of language pairs available and you can add your own cuecards. It isn't limited to languages for example chemical elements was easy to create mapping symbol to name.
Cuebrain (optionally) uses svox voices to speak the words, I bought hungarian and english so I can listen to as well as read the words. It could as easily be phrases. You can also compete against other users, trying to speed up to climb the rankings can become addictive.
most card sets can be completed in around a minute or less once you are familiar with the set.
so it's something you can do to kill time.
Obviously you need to learn grammar and sentence structure and inflection too and unfortunately that can be a bit dry i use ebooks for that. Also Google translate is very useful especially when conversing over the internet. Of course google translate isn't perfect but with the drilling exercises more and more words will come to have meaning.
Someone posted that different languages give you the ability to think differently and concepts can be easier in one language over another and that I would say is true.
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of Slashdot users are multilingual I would have thought a majority can program to some extent and human languages are a natural extension to programming languages. I would think most of us have the aptitude and the intelligence to be quite successful at developing the capacity of our brains to think and be more creative.
Funny how it is always the people who speak just one language who cannot see the advantage in speaking more than one :)
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I find that compared to hiring a native teacher over the internets Rosetta Stone is worth at most a tenth of the asking price.
In short: Even if it's ever so slightly useful, it's still a waste of money.
If you have time to burn and don't have to pay for it, Rosetta Stone can save you 2 or 3 hours of other learning.
More if you're slow ;-)
Correlation, Causation (Score:2, Interesting)
Alternatively, bilingual children tend to be raised by people with greater drive and skill in problem solving, notably immigrants.
Re:Correlation, Causation (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Correlation, Causation (Score:4, Informative)
Luxembourg is a good example -- people born there (to Luxembourgish parents) tend to speak Luxembourgish, German, French and English.
Many people in Wales speak both English and Welsh.
A huge number of Europeans speak their native language plus English, but how often they use English will depend on their occupation. Some universities give lectures in English (rather than the local language), and some workplaces work in English.
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"Luxembourg is a good example -- people born there (to Luxembourgish parents) tend to speak Luxembourgish, German, French and English."
I'm from there and I can confirm that. German is the first one we learn officially at 5 years, French comes at 6.
Kids watch French and German TV from an early age since there are only a couple of Luxembourgish programs.
Lots of people (about 25%) also learn a fifth one in High School, either Spanish/Italian or Latin.
Also a third of the population are immigrants who have troub
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I visited a couple of weeks ago, and stayed with a Luxembourgish friend.
I thought it was strange that, even though Luxembourgish is far more closely related to German, French seems more prominent in daily life outside the home. Shop staff speak French, menus are in French, the captions in the museums and galleries are in French first (and sometimes not in anything else). At the cinema the film was subtitled in French.
Why not German?
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Nice and Amerocentric!
If you read TFA, you'd find that the study was of kids who spoke English and Gaelic, or Italian and Sardinian. That kind of assumes British or Italian/Sardinian kids, not immigrants to the US...
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Some people think bilingualism causes confusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who the hell thinks this? I grew up in a bilingual household and then took Spanish in high school, so I'm semi-trilingual. Childhood is the best time to learn a new language since children can still hear the differences between phonemes that aren't present in the main society's language.
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Je ne sais pas que tipo de confusión ce puede causar.......
(It's a joke -- don't mod me down for using alternate languages...)
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Re:Some people think bilingualism causes confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the hell thinks this?
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
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Who the hell thinks this?
Monolingual zealots (typically of the borderline racist kind). Seriously, YMMV, but the only type of people I've ever seen making this claim are the type not typically happy with people speaking a foreign language around them. I don't understand what they are talking about, so they must be talking about me!!!". It feels like a long time ago, the early 90's when you could still see the bigotry the hatred. It was regular topic in the news, of employers firing their employees because they were talking Spanish or Vietnamese or Creole, or f* Klingon in the parking lot on the way home or during lunch (not on the clock, mind you, not on the clock.)
Now, the rhetoric has shifted from language to immigration status, and to a somewhat lesser degree to Islamic fundamentalism. The later two are based real issues - illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism. However, a significant number of people who bring these issues up do so to rationalize Anti-Hispanic or Islamophobic sentiments, regardless of their connections (or lack thereof) with illegal immigration or Islamic terrorism.
It is a generalization, I know, to say these claims are only made by people uncomfortable with foreign-language speakers. But it has been a generalization that holds true in my experience. YMMV obviously.
I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first. Sometimes they are confused about who speaks what language. Many times one of their children has come up to me and started babbling in a language I don't understand. Since small children are basically psychopaths (don't know right from wron
Re:Some people think bilingualism causes confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
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ideally using a young child that uses two languages in a single sentence as evidence
Just refer them to the phenomenon of code switching [wikipedia.org]. That is not an error or grammar mistake by any means. This phenomenon has been observed to have strict grammatical rules, as solid as, say, embedding ESQL in the host language in programming.
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Have you ever heard of Russia or Canada?
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Or Australia?
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Or Brazil?
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Or Chile?
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Or Argentina?
Hint: Google Maps can help you determine which countries allow minimum overland journey times of 36 hours or greater.
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I'm surprised you didn't get China in there, given that Mandarin has more speakers than any other language.
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I wasn't too sure how well Mandarin is universally understood in China. China has an ass-load of languages.
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I don't think you need to be any kind of zealot to think that multiple languages confuses a child. My wife's first language is not English. Many of her immigrant friends have children who are learning to speak English and another language. They are slower at first.
Slower with respect to what? With what objective measure????? My daughter speaks English and Japanese (from her Mother) and understand Spanish (my language) when I talk to her, and can count in all three languages. She is only 3 and a half years old. I don't see any confusion or delay in her progress (and neither 3rd party observers, including my sister who is a speech therapist and whom I asked her to evaluate her just in case.)
My nephew speaks English and Spanish from a very early age. He simply picked
It's partly true (Score:3)
But yeah, I'm bilingual, semi-trilingual as well, and the confusion is very minor. Most of the time you can "switch gears" between the languages without problem (cross-language homophones and the occasional grammatical equivalent can cause a little confusion). But the benefits (allows you to see things missing in the language which mono-linguists take for granted, forces you to recognize there
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...so I'm semi-trilingual...
You speak one and a half languages? :-)
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My wife's research is in this field (linguistic development in children), mostly doing case studies on non-Japanese children learning in Japan.
These kids are typically from lower income households with busy parents. Rather than gaining full mastery of one language, many only develop partial mastery in two languages. This partial mastery negatively impacts their scores in testing as they have more difficulty expressing certain high level concepts in either language.
Now, obviously does not apply to everyone.
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Break out the Rosetta Stone (Score:4, Interesting)
California Public Schools (Score:3)
How does the disparity in performance among Hispanic kids factor into this study?
Re:California Public Schools (Score:4, Interesting)
Without knowing anything about the demographics of Scotland and Sardinia I couldn't even guess about what other factors might correlate with bilingually there... it might be very different than how many bilingual Americans are recent immigrants, and thus at a disadvantage due to poverty in addition to whatever language barrier exists.
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Re:California Public Schools (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife is Hispanic. She grew up in a bilingual home in Chile.
At one time she held the highest score ever recorded in South America in the Oxford English Competency Exam. After graduating from college at age 17 in Chile she was awarded a 4 year scholarship to study in Europe where she picked up 5 other languages.
She was then awarded a Fullbright scholarship to come to the US where she obtained a PhD in Medieval English Lit.
If there is a performance problem with Hispanic kids it's due to poverty, racism and the the horrific US education system which has no concept of how to teach even monolingual students.
Now, time to shove it down their throats (Score:3)
Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
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Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Fourteen no, three yes. I'm American living in France so my son speaks both languages very well. Anticipating the continuing growth of China in the world I've encouraged (read bribed) him to take Mandarin lessons as well.
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Spelling != language.
que?
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Since it's for their own good, time to shove fourteen languages down the their throats in forced mandatory education. Stop concentrating on math and science, start concentrating on languages. Veuillez considérer le bien-être des enfants.
Qu'est-ce qui te fait penser que l'algèbre n'est pas une langue?
(TR: What makes you think Algebra isn't a language?)
FTFY
Guesswork on my part, but (Score:2, Insightful)
Whodathunkit? (Score:2)
Programming languages (Score:2)
Could we speculate about whether the same effect could be observed with computer languages ? I think a lot of people would agree that studying another computer language, especially if it has differing base paradigms (functional, OO, procedural, dynamic, static, etc.) would give them new hindsights when they came back to their "main" language.
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Intelligence (Score:2)
I found something similar when I was doing my psychology thesis in 1990. I found that my bilingual participants, when compared to uni-lingual participants, had a statistically significant difference in their high school leaving grades, first year university grades and on a test of general mental ability (g). At the time I thought it made sense as the same abilities you use to learn a second language (memory, language skills, cognition) are also measures that an individual needs to learn academic subjects.
Sounds like the liberal media... (Score:5, Funny)
Californinglish (Score:2)
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As long as they don't talk like the characters in SNL's 'the Californians' recurring skit, then they'll be fine.
I speak fluent gibberish... (Score:2)
Native language feedback (Score:5, Interesting)
Seeing how the "same" word translate differently in another language helps to fix in your mind the differences between:
- capitol / capital
- principle / principal
- affect / effect
- its et al
- theirs et al
I could go on, but these silly mistakes mostly happen to speakers ignorant of their own native language. Bilingualism kills that ignorance.
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Not really, most multilingual folks don't use one language to think about another. It just takes too much time every time you want to say something.
As another bilingual person, I disagree. You don't think about it every time you say something, of course, but you only need to think about it once - and you definitely will, at the stage where you still speak foreign language by mentally translating it back & forth to your native one - and then it sticks.
Measuring creativity? (Score:2)
How exactly do you go about scientifically and objectively measuring creativity? If you think you're doing it right, you're doing it wrong.
Logos (Score:2)
Think about it.
There, did you notice how words defined and directed your thoughts?
That is all.
Make sense. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
so a university, probably a 'progressive' organization, manipulates stats to praise some aspect of 'multiculturalism' for an obvious profit motive. what a shock. perhaps it's just that those who can learn languages quickly are simply smarter people.
In case you didn't read the article before your reactionary flamebait comment, notice the study was done in Scotland with Scottish children (some speak Gaelic), and in Sardinia with Sardinian children (some speak Sardinian). Hardly multicultural.
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that doesn't mean learning multiple languages increases intelligence.
Research seems to support you in this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure diversity in doing things instead of single mindedness is nearly always valuable.
Lera Boroditsky [stanford.edu]'s research has come up with results that challenge some basic assumptions in linguistics. One such finding is that rather than language simply expressing thought processes, it shapes mental models of the world.
Re: (Score:2)
What ‘basic assumptions’ are you referring to? That particular claim is at least as old as Grandpa Sapir, if not much older. I am completely unaware of any theories that depend on the negation of that as an assumption. Indeed, in much of linguistic theory today the rest of the mind is considered to be irrelevant or at least abstracted away from so that it doesn’t complicate the (already fiendishly complicated) models. If you’re referring to things like the various cognitive grammar t
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps it's just the fact that children that have the opportunity to become bilingual are exposed to a greater variety of situations and therefore can adapt to situations requiring 'creative' thinking.
Based on my own experience, I suspect the issue is actually that learning new languages exposes you to significantly different patterns of thought. Language really does affect how you conceive of ideas as well as how you express them. I've lived in multilingual environments for pretty much all of my life, and I've often been in situations where people switch from one language to another -sometimes even in mid-sentence- simply because an idea is easier to express in a different language. I've seen this behav
Re:no shit sherlock... (Score:4, Informative)
And the results of this study are a surprise...why? Of course children who have the discipline, tenacity and motivation to learn and switch between two languages are going to be better at most things...language is a multifaceted mental effort, one of the highest degree...if they can learn and master two languages its should be a no-brainer they can do most other things better as well.
I think you're missing the point. In many, many parts of the world, people learn two or three languages before they even start school. In East Africa, you learn your parents' language and ki-Swahili; in Indonesia and Malaysia, it's parental language(s) plus Bahasa and sometimes Arabic; in the Philippines, it's parental language(s) plus Tagalog plus English. The list goes on. It's simply taken for granted. I don't think the study is saying that learning language makes you smarter per se; it's saying that certain kinds of problems are easier for children who use more than one language on a regular basis.
If I've read it right, this is on the level of stating that people who grow up in mountainous areas with few vehicles generally show greater leg strength across the board. It's not suggesting that there aren't stronger and weaker children within that sample. I personally know some functionally illiterate people who can speak 4-6 languages fluently. They're not special; they're just a product of the environment they grew up in.
... It is disappointing, however, to see how unimaginative unilingual people can sometimes be. Maybe it's perceptual bias on my part, but I feel that I encounter more zero-sum, black/white logic from unilingual people than from multilingual people.
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The study is about kids who grow up in housholds where the parents speak different languages.
Not about kids who are taught a second language on purpose by a teacher. No discipline involved.
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Anecdotal evidence is not data.
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Canada is bilingual, but Canadians themselves, not so much [wikipedia.org].