Well, just an anecdote but my daughter is in this group. My wife is Thai and speaks poor English while I am American and am just the opposite. A friend with experience in these matters told us before she was born. “Testy, you only speak English to her while your wife will speak only Thai. Don’t dilute it by trying to speak the other language.”
We did that, and it worked. Kiddo is 17 now and speaks Thai and English like a native. Seeing as we live in Saudi, she also speaks Arabic (like an upper-class Saudi) and Spain-type Spanish since she learned it in school.
She is quadrilingual and just loves surprising people who think she doesn’t understand them.
There were no ill effects that I can detect.
They used to believe that children would be easily confused by learning multiple langauges. This has thankfully been discredited. America is pretty much singular in it’s habit of only teaching kids one lanaguage.
However, any languages learned as a child do need upkeep to stay with you. If you learned a language before eight or so and never spoke it again, it will fade.
We’re currently raising our 3+ year old in a large, Spanish/English speaking family. Me, I speak enough Spanish to tell people that I don’t really speak Spanish, whereas Mrs Peculiar’s entire family is Spanish first, English second. So the little guy gets a liberal exposure to each language all the time. Often, as he learns a new word in one language, he’ll be taught the other language’s equivilent at the same time. So he may be speaking in Spanish to someone in “the family”, but then he’ll simply turn to me and immediately speak English. It’s fascinating how he just doesn’t even seem to think about it. If he knows you speak English, that’s what he’ll use. If he knows you normally speak Spanish, then that’s what he’ll use. Wild stuff…
Anyway, he’s exposed to the two languages (almost) simultaneously. Raising a child in the way the OP describes - 2 days, 2 days, 3 days - I think that would be a lot less successful. Again, kids are like sponges at that age, and as Flight said, the child would eventually bring everything together without ill effect. But I believe the learning period itself would be a lot more fragmented - less fluid - than it would be with simultaneous immersion.
One thing I forgot. Not bad but odd/funny. When my daughter was a toddler she assumed all men spoke English and all women spoke Thai. Then it went to all people with dark skins speaking Thai while all lighter colored people spoke English. Happily, she got over it but it was funny for a while.
Another anecdote about Belgians. which I hope won’t start reproducing like csharp’s did (the anecdote, I mean. Belgians can reproduce all they want):
When I lived in Ecuador, I used to stop by the harbor in Manta whenever I got the chance to see if any trans-Pacific yachts had come in. Met a family of Belgians- father Flemish and mama Walloon, or maybe the other way around, and three little girls, six eight and ten, who had been raised mostly on the family catamaran in the eastern Med, so had been surrounded by a variety of languages from birth. The kids spoke perfect English, along with French and German and who knows what else, but I was really impressed when I took them to visit a Russian warship that was visiting and in** ten minutes** all three were chattering away in Russian - which they had never spoken before- with the ship’s crew.
My own kids have lived in Mexico since they were born (my son was born in Boston but has been in Oaxaca since he was three weeks old) and have never spent more than one week every two years in the USA, but I’ve always spoken English to them, read to them (for some reason there isn’t much children’s literature in Spanish, and no classics like Alice or Peter Pan) and brought them videos, mostly Disney when they were little, while their mother speaks Spanish and a variety of nannies have spoken Zapotec or Mixtec. The result is that they both speak perfect English, with no accent that anyone can hear, Spanish with their friends and at school. and a mixture when they’re talking to each other. Now they’re both learning French, and finding it easy. My personal opinion is the more languages a child is exposed to the better; stretching a young mind is good exercise.
First son had no delay and shows a flair for languages - he learned a lot of French in the week we stayed there with a French family, and he is now learning Korean, and picking it up well.
Younger son did have language delay - he didn’t speak in any language beyond 50 or so single words, until he was three and a half. Unfortunately for him he began to talk while we were in England for three months, and he had completely forgotten Japanese by the time we went back. I assumed it would come back on the plane the way the older boy’s language does, but it didn’t and he had a HUGE shock when he realised that people didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand them. He shut right down on the Japanese and refused to even try to speak it for nine months - he’d just relentlessly talk English to anyone, even people who had no clue, like his grandparents. This was cured when he started kindy and he wanted to join in. He was utterly fluent within the first term!
Elder boy is still much more flexible and can switch in a nanosecond, but Younger boy takes an hour or so after kindy to get completely into English with me (He tends to use English sentence patterns with all the nouns and some verbs changed to Japanese.) Also this summer at five years old, he had great trouble for the first few days and would address all the elderly aunts and uncles in Japanese. I think this is the same as Testy’s daughter, he had learned that in Japan, elderly people don’t often speak English! My elder son has never, ever mistaken which language to speak to whom.
Oddly enough the older one has huge trouble reading and writing either language. Younger one has a reading and writing age of about 8 in both languages and he is only 5. Who knows what that is about??
The studies I have seen (sorry, no cites or sites) suggest that a child raised with multiple languages:
a) may have some delay in total fluency, but it is quickly overcome (some show no delay, but the average to fluency tends to be longer).
b) will not have trouble figuring out who speaks what or switching to suit
c) will have a much greater facility for learning languages later in life
d) may well have other cognitive advantages related to concept vs. words, etc.
Example for c)…when I was in beginning Chinese class, we were all struggling during conversation practice, trying to say “the cat is black” or some such. All except one kid who was says “I have two cats, one is black and the other is white. I also have a dog, two birds and a fish.” I asked him if he had different study habits from the rest of us. He replied that he was raised in Brazil and learned German, Spanish and Portugese growing up. Didn’t learn English until he was 10. I would have taken him for a Californian. Punchline, he says “languages are easy for me.” Sheesh.
Detail on d)…note that many kids have trouble generalizing from a specific case to the general concept. Kids with multiple birth languages don’t have this problem; they already know that words are just different tags for the same thing. This makes a huge difference in higher grades in school.
With China Bambina, she didn’t start talking until 19 months, and then simple words. Within two months she was speaking complicated compound sentences in Mandarin (the dog is sleeping under the slide), and less so in English. Now she is equally fluent in Mandarin and English, although has a better vocabulary in Mandarin. Her Shanghaiese is a distant third these days. For example, in English she might say “give me that thing” while in Chinese “give me that cake”. Fluent but a little less vocabulary, which one would expect since kindergarten and home language is Chinese.
Based on my experience and reading, one key thing is that the language is constant. For example, Mom speaks Chinese, Grandma Shanghaiese, Dad in English for 1:1. In group situations can mix it up.
i spoke English to China bambina from the day she was born. She also gets Disney, Cartoon Network, etc. I try to limit her to english language cartoons.
Will see how this works with Audrey and Serena. At 11 months, they are making lots of noise, saying words that only a parent might recognize. Expect they will follow the same pattern of speaking slower than some kids, and then quickly getting to advanced language skills in Chinese and English.
Very much agreed on everyone speaking their own languages to the child. I certainly wish my own parents had had another language to give me when I was a child.
One thing I have noticed is that my daughter takes an extraordinary pleasure in zinging people that are making some comment in a language they assume she doesn’t understand.
When we are in Bangkok she takes a walk on Sukhumvit road where the street-vendors set up shop. She invariably asks the price of something in English and when they assume she is a tourist and quote her some amazingly high price she then switches to Thai and blasts them as thieves and threacherous hounds. After a couple of minutes they are almost willing to give her the trinket if she would just go away.
The same thing happened in San Diego a few days ago when a couple of Iraqi boys made an admiring remark (in Arabic) about her shape. She got into their ancestry, personal grooming habits, morals, and various aspects of their personalities, in Arabic as good as their own. The boys were appalled and she loved it. I think she’d have kissed them for the opportunity if she hadn’t been so pissed at them.
Oh, another thing - I have a story about our school’s language classes. For the first two years of high school it’s mandatory for us to take at least one language course, but come year 10 just about everyone drops out, and in years 11 and 12 only the most interested students still bother. Year 10 is also the year languages actually become hard and a triple-digit IQ is no longer the only thing you need to ace (yes, literally get full marks on) every reading and listening test and every assignment.
So for the over 300 students in our year, ALL of whom were doing at least one language in year 8, class sizes by the end of year 12 looked more like this:
French: 15
German: 14
Japanese: 9
Chinese Advanced: 5
Chinese Second Language: 1
Note that the French and German classes this year are actually freakishly large - our French teacher tells us there are only 6 year 11s doing French this year.
Year 12 French isn’t massively hard, but it’s no walk in the park either. If you’re doing it right, you should be able to go out onto the streets of Paris and carry out a conversation with the next guy that walks past. Not a very fluent conversation, maybe, or a very stimulating one, but after you’re done with the course you are supposed to actually Know French. Which is why after 5 years there are only 15 students out of 300 who are still bothering.
And… the point of this is? Well, for 13 out of these 15 students, French was their third language at least. Three out of 13 spoke four languages. Out of the remaining two, one had a French mother who spoke to them in French, and the other had done German in lower school but dropped it.
