# How many languages can a baby learn? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 31, 2010, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967 "2010-10-31T13:16:51Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/21 "2010-11-01T00:08:07Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > That’s all true, but not really relevant when we are talking about babies learning multiple languages at the same time. Babies can learn several languages at once, and it doesn’t matter how similar or different they are – they pick them all up equally easily. Pretty much. I knew a Kosovar refugee mother living in Budapest. Her kid didn’t quite grow up with all the languages at the same time but when I met the daughter, who was maybe five or six, she fluently spoke Albanian, Serbian, Hungarian, and English–all pretty different languages. The most they have in common is that three of them are Indo-European. Other than that, Albanian is its own branch of IE, Serbian is Slavic, and English is Germanic. Hungarian is Finno-Ugric and not IE. It didn’t really seem to make any difference, from my observations, as to how closely the languages are related. ---
**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/22 "2010-11-01T00:43:14Z")
I know a lot of kids that are tri-lingual. Speak one language with the grandparents, a different language/dialect with the morither and a third with the father. I think if you had quite the organized set up, you could do 4-5. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/23 "2010-11-01T00:44:51Z")
> [@YourAdHere](#): > > [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life\_and\_style/health/article5575661.ece](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5575661.ece) Thanks for the link with ZERO description. Helpful. Yeah, I’ve seen the videos of the guy(highly functioning savant) learning Icelandic in a very short time. He even goes on TV to be interviewed in it and does pretty well. Not quite the answer to the OP, though. And again, thanks for the lazily dropped link. ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/24 "2010-11-01T00:49:57Z")
> [@glowacks](#): > > I personally find it astounding that humans are capable of learning multiple languages as their “first” language. If one grows up surrounded by multiple languages, it has to be a horrendously complex task to be able to separate them and not blend them all together. I don’t know why you think this is the case. I know many natively bilingual people, and am one myself, simply from having grown up in a non-English speaking home in an English speaking country. In my own case, I spoke Mandarin to my parents at home, and have been told I have a “very good” (non-American) accent, but my first grade vocabulary gives me away (except on topics my parents talked about a lot at home). There’s no difficulty in separating the two languages, they’re just… Different languages. You don’t think about it, except in certain contexts that are bound to a particular language and the part where you stop to think about it is when you have to think of “the other words” for that thing or concept (in my case, “ethnic” foods that suddenly sound less appetizing when translated, i.e., “Here, I brought a pack of this… Erm.. Dried squid. It’s shredded jerky, basically. Come on! You eat calamari, don’t you?”, while _you yu gan_ is about as commonplace a snack as a pack of Fig Newtons for Chinese). Or when I suddenly realized one day that I knew exactly which of my cousins were older/younger than me, and from what side of the family, based on what I called them in Chinese, while in English it all came out just as a “cousin”. > [@pulykamell](#): > > I knew a Kosovar refugee mother living in Budapest. Her kid didn’t quite grow up with all the languages at the same time but when I met the daughter, who was maybe five or six, she fluently spoke Albanian, Serbian, Hungarian, and English–all pretty different languages. For kids, the difficulty isn’t in picking up languages but in retaining them, which can be due to a mixture of factors. Heck I know plenty of people who came to the US from other countries at ages as old as 8 or 9 years old, and whose parents speak very bad English, and yet they themselves are functionally monoglot English speakers who can understand their parents’ native language but have great difficulty speaking it themselves. As another illustration, I knew a kid (who’s no longer a kid now) whose mother was Argentinian and spent a lot of time doing 2-year stints in academic posts all over the world. For a while I’d see her every few years and each time, she was fluent in Spanish (her home language), English (which she learned in her first 3 years after being born in the US and which her mother took some pains to maintain), and the local language of wherever she was living. She’d prefer to use that “local language” even with her mother, speaking back to her in Spanish occasionally and only exhibit passive understanding of English from anyone else while being unwilling to speak it. Over a span of about 7 years, I observed her as “locally native” in French, Polish and German - three fairly different languages. Each time she’d mostly or entirely forgotten the earlier “local native” language. Finally, when she was about 9 or 10, her mother settled down in the Midwest - literally, in Kansas - and within a year or two her daughter was down to speaking primarily English, while retaining a good deal of Spanish as a home language, and nothing else. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/25 "2010-11-01T01:02:07Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > One thing to keep in mind is that many languages are very similar, and there are some features that show up repeatedly in even unrelated languages. Once you learn Spanish, for instance, it’s probably not too hard to add Portuguese, and if you understand how noun cases work in German, then you’re prepared to encounter cases in Latin. I agree. I’ve studied Spanish but not Portuguese, and I can read some Portuguese with some reference to dictionaries. If I studied it formally, I don’t doubt that I could get it to the point of my Spanish knowledge rapidly. ---
**Author:** ![robcaro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/df705f/32.png) [@robcaro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robcaro)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/26 "2010-11-01T01:07:37Z")
When I was younger, I spoke English, German and Japanese, but I have lived the majority of my life in the US, so have forgotten 90% of Japanese and German. Now, I am learning Spanish and living in a Spanish speaking country. I learn from listening and talking. It is more difficult now that I am 81 years old, but I am learning a lot. Practice is what is important. I think that the Japanese and German are still there in the back of my brain someplace and would come out if I were to live where those languages are primary. ---
**Author:** ![TokyoBayer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tokyobayer/32/13989_2.png) [@TokyoBayer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TokyoBayer)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/27 "2010-11-01T09:45:26Z")
We are raising our kids with 3.5 languages, Japanese, Mandarin, English, and some Taiwanese. Our oldest is just two, and the baby is 3 weeks, and we can’t tell which language he is crying in yet. Our two-year-old is in Japanese day care, and my wife and I speak Japanese to each other. Grandma is staying with us temporarily, and she speaks Taiwanese to the children and a mixture of Taiwanese and Chinese to my wife who speaks that mixture back to her mother, and mostly Chinese to the children. I speak exclusively English to the kids. Japanese is by far my girl’s strongest language. Next is Chinese, which got a jumpstart with a two-week trip to Taiwan in the summer. However, she can understand English quite well and speaks it OK, with prompting. I strongly expect that she would be better if she were surrounded by other English speakers. According to books I’ve read on raising multi-language kids, average kids need about 15% to 20% of their time in a particular language to become fluent. If this is true, it would seem the practical limit would be 5 to 6 at best for most. Of course, that would assume quite the logistics. It also doesn’t limit the number of languages which one could learn at less than a native fluency. My girl seems to be good with languages. She speaks as good, if not better Japanese than her peers, and has picked up English grammar surprisingly well. She can differentiate who she talks to, speaking only Japanese at day care, more Chinese to her mother and more English to me. However, she don’t completely separate them yet, coming up with sentences such as “papa de car ha how da” (“papa” (Daddy - Japanese) “de” (possessive Chinese) “car”(English) wa (“as for” Japanese) hao da(so big - Chinese)). (Daddy’s car is so big.) She does separate grammar, using plurals in English, which are not used in Japanese or Chinese, 's in English, “hao” only for Chinese words, etc. ---
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 11:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/28 "2010-11-01T11:20:02Z")
TokyoPlayer, how different is Taiwanese from Mandarin Chinese? I have the vague impression that they are more different than, say, British and American English, but a little less different than, say, Spanish and Portuguese. Assuming that’s the case, do you observe anything interesting in how your children negotiate these two similar dialects/languages, as compared to the others they speak which are so vastly different from each other? Just curious. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/29 "2010-11-01T14:35:03Z")
A further illustration on the loss of language that can occur: There is a wonderful documentary called “Wo Ai Ni Mama(I love you, mommy)” about a 8 year old girl from China who is adopted by an American(or Canadian) family who speak zero Chinese. She speaks zero English and they can barely communicate. After 18 months with her American family, she needed a translator to speak with her foster family in China. Her Chinese had already degraded that much. It’s amazing to watch. ---
**Author:** ![SGT42](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b9e5f3/32.png) [@SGT42](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SGT42)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/30 "2010-11-01T19:55:38Z")
An important thing to note is that only children can learn a language without accent. It seems to be related with hearing. A child hears the sounds perfectly and can reproduce them. An adult has difficulty to discern similar sounds. I speak fluently 5 languages, but anyone hearing me in any language different from Portuguese (my mother language) knows that I am a foreigner with a good proficiency in his/hers language. For instance, it is very difficult to me to discern double from single consonants in Italian. My daughter, who learned French in France, when she was 10, speaks French without accent. Also, she learned English with a British teacher, when she was 5 and, to my untrained ear, she has a very good pronunciation of English. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2010, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967/31 "2010-11-01T20:37:22Z")
> [@](#): > > An important thing to note is that only children can learn a language without accent. It seems to be related with hearing. It’s probably harder for adults, but I’ve certainly met people who learned English as adults but who have no discernible accent. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-a-baby-learn/558967.md?page=1)