I’m just curious if in different places, with different languages, kids learn to speak later.
I’ve started learning written Chinese recently, and I read (not in Chinese, in one of the books to learn CHinese) that it takes more time for kids in Chinese speaking countries to learn to read than kids learning English, because the process of learning to write/read Chinese is tedious: learning every character, writing it repeatedly, etc.
I was wondering if any languages were, in some sense, more complexe than others and so the kids can’t even learn to *speak *them well until later than kids in other languages.
I don’t have any sources at hand, so this is sans cites, and I have a pretty limited education in linguistics, but I can give you a short answer to tide you over until the heavy-hitters come along to verify it: no. If I understood my teachers and books correctly, children seem to acquire language in the same way, at the same ages (well, more like the range of variation is the same, but you know what I mean, I think), and make and avoid mistakes of similar kinds across all studied languages. Writing, while intimately associated with language, is a different beast, and one that the brain doesn’t handle in exactly the same way.
My linguistics education is also very limited, but that’s the way I remember hearing the same things Grelby talks about. Assuming they don’t have any developmental problems, kids will progress through various stages of babbling (which comes before speech) no matter what language is spoken at home, and no matter what the language is, they should do it within the same range of times.
Just to chip in, while agreeing with everyone else, that my daughter (10 next month) could pick up either spoken language (English and Cantonese) equally easily, or with equal difficulty, I suppose one could say, if you take the view, as some linguists do, that, say, five or six years is a long time to learn a language. Of course, like any other bilingual, she isn’t strictly speaking ambilingual (the word coined to describe the “ideal” bilingual, who is equally fluent in each language). In her case, her English is weaker, as she has fewer people to converse with.
Regarding the written forms, Chinese *is/I] a tougher language to learn to read and write than English, for the kind of reasons you cite, and she duly prefers her English studies! The sociocultural aspects of bilingualism are fascinating: in Natalie/Ji Yu’s case, she finds most Chinese books (even modern HK and Taiwanese stuff form the library and bookshops) stultifyingly boring, moralistic and preachy (“Oh, not another fable!”), so that attitudinal disposition may be having, or later may have, an effect.
But, as parents, of course, we encourage her in both pursuits. And she only has to listen to my halting Cantonese (which she doesn’t for long, before laughing or interrupting) to see a living example of what happens when you have to acquire a language ina dulthood, rather than pick it up from birth!
I believe kids learn to speak/understand languages at pretty much the same pace irrespective of language (despite the claims of a collague of mine that Danish kids take longer because the words are so indistinguishable :dubious: ) but that the writing/reading thing can take longer in countries like where the writing system used is adapted from another language and therefore not particularly well-suited to rendering the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Japanese, as an example