

How multi-lingual children learn languages - nashequilibrium
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/c06ef551-0127-483d-a104-cdd02b1cee31/entry/how_multi_lingual_children_learn_languages9?lang=en

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elliottcarlson
I was born in to a multi-lingual environment, learning Dutch, Swedish and
English since birth. Later in life I learned French and German due to my
locality; I also took Latin and Greek in school and have been teaching myself
Japanese just because I enjoy the challenge. Finally, I also have enough
exposure to Spanish as well as Hebrew to be able to put together a decent
conclusion as to what a conversation might be about. Each of these languages
have been learnt at different parts of my life and I would say that the only
one I am still fluent in speaking is English. My Dutch is rusty, but I can
hold a conversation, though will stumble over words as I try to translate them
(ironic since I used to think in Dutch and had the same issue translating what
I wanted to say in to English). The interesting thing is, while I may not be
fluent in speaking any of the other languages, I understand them. I can pick
up on key words and can figure out what is being said. Due to the nature of
languages and the etymology behind words - I can often pick up on
conversations in other languages I have not learned.

In contrast of my multi-lingual background in the spoken form, I also try to
diversify the programming languages I am familiar with. While the idea of a
programming language and a spoken word language vastly differs, I still see it
as just learning another language - that is the mindset I go in with. A spoken
language has rules - wether they are related to phonetics, semantics or most
importantly the idiosyncratic rules of gender and relationships. Programming
languages have a much more defined ruleset at the core that they all share (to
a certain degree) and the language itself on top of it follows many of the
rules I would expect in a spoken language.

I don't know if there is a correlation to the exposure of languages at a young
age - but in my experience it has helped me.

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tokenadult
There isn't any citation to the (quite interesting) study finding mentioned as
a premise in this article. My two older children are native speakers of BOTH
English and Modern Standard Chinese, and they once spoke to each other mostly
in Chinese, although in recent years they have much more occasion to use
English. There should have been follow-up studies on what happens to native
multilingual persons when they suffer strokes by now, and there could even be
brain-imaging studies on first-language and second-language multilingual
persons by now, perhaps without conclusive results.

This submission makes me curious about the author's premise than about his
conclusion.

~~~
deweerdt
I haven't found the full text, but it seems that this 'The bilingual brain:
Cerebral representation of languages' by Fabbro in 2001 might be it. A related
study: 'Multilingualism in Stroke Patients: A Personal Account' is available
here :
[http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijel/article/view/27556...](http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ijel/article/view/27556/16679)

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drucken
There are too many factors involved here.

For example, human languages are reinforced completely differently.

From birth, you will hear from inside the womb often one language. Later, you
hear and speak either a couple or more languages but generally in different
contexts, e.g. mostly one with parents, maybe one or more with friends or
strangers and one with school and media.

The latter context is normally reinforced further with reading and writing,
while the former rarely or not at all. I suspect, though without more studies
it would be impossible to know, that it is the exclusively spoken languages
that are most affected. The reading and writing languages, as well as being
used in different contexts, are highly likely to be processed by the brain
differently.

In addition, almost all of these human language uses will be tied to life
events and (strong) emotional feelings.

So, the comparison to programming languages seems tenuous at best, especially
since there are plenty of other contexts where one can misapply learned rule-
sets in general. The word "language" is almost a misnomer across these two
different fields, in my opinion.

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eru
Trying to extrapolate between learning natural languages and learning
programming languages seems rather questionable to me.

~~~
fogleman
True, but that's just how he came up with a new way of looking at the results
of the study. (Serial vs. parallel learning)

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Natsu
The point about keeping languages separate is interesting. I know bits and
pieces of many different languages, but I only know two reasonably well. I
studied French for about six years in high school and college, but I haven't
had much occasion to use it since and am somewhat rusty. Conversely, Japanese
I hear quite a bit of these days so my experience with it is much more recent.

But sometimes when I try to remember the French word for something, I get a
Japanese word instead, which is odd because the languages are nothing alike.
Similar problems exist for programming languages, for example, trying to
remember the Perl way to do something and getting the Ruby keyword instead.

~~~
jtheory
I have similar experiences -- I spoke only English at home as a child, then
studied French starting in 6th grade.

Nowadays I'm fairly fluent in French (and live in France, so I use it
regularly), though nowhere near my level of comfort in English, and I know
scraps of various other languages to get by when traveling -- but it seems
like my brain is inclined to store words in just two buckets -- "native" vs.
"foreign".

Often when I'm trying to come up with a word in any other language, the French
word pops into my head first, I discard it, then I'll get the right word in
German or whatever (if I know it). If I'm trying to say something in Spanish
or Italian, I sometimes don't realize that I don't _know_ the right word,
because the French word in the right accent (and possibly modified ending)
sounds about right.

My wife grew up truly multilingual, though, with 2 languages at home, a 3rd as
the medium of education, and friends who all spoke a 4th among themselves --
and she has less of a problem keeping them separate (including new languages
she's been picking up as an adult).

~~~
Natsu
I know what you mean about Spanish. I've never really studied it, unless you
count a few weeks of introduction in high school and a bit of exposure due to
living in the Phoenix area, but thanks to its Latin base and knowing French, I
can read it somewhat reliably by guessing that words that look like French
words have similar meanings. I can even pronounce it reasonably well according
to some Spanish-speaking coworkers because the phonics of other languages have
always automagically "clicked" for me, except when I have to learn new vowels
or consonants.

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jacalata
_There are some languages that are so difficult that they have never been
successfully learned as a foreign language and are only spoken by native
speakers who started at birth._

I am enormously skeptical of this claim, and would like to see evidence for it
- and it would have to show that people had made significant efforts to learn
the language, had access to a level of resources similar to those available
for other languages, etc. I suspect that the examples that would actually come
up would be some dying tribal language where nobody has been able to learn it
properly from the remaining three grandparents who speak it, which is in no
way evidence for 'the language was simply too difficult'.

~~~
KennyCason
I vaguely recall watching a program on tv in which there was an African tribal
language composed of clicking sounds and other sounds that were claimed to not
be able to he repeated unless learned from birth. I'm not entirely sure of the
specifics but I remember it being cited as an "unable" to learn language

~~~
reeses
More likely, no one cared enough to make the effort to become fluent in the
language.

I would say that if it can be categorized as a language, it can be learned,
because categorization would require the observation of patterns of cause and
effect.

(I know they're illusions, but they're _useful_ illusions.)

Then it's just a matter of gathering data, developing hypotheses, and testing
your interpretation of the data by asking someone if their hovercraft is full
of eels.

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Causalien
As a multilingual speaker (English, Mandarin, French, all fluent) who
eventually let English take over as my main language here's what I think.

If you learned two languages since birth you develop two language sites. I
read somewhere that the Wernicke's area is divided into two if you do this as
well. Perhaps auditory memories are triggered based on language as well. You
think and have internal dialogues in different languages which triggers
completely different memories. This explains why one might lose one language,
but keep the other one.

Whereas, for learning languages later in life, a person tends to translate the
new language into the main language. The internal dialogue is always in the
form of the main language. The memories are one contiguous experience based on
one language. Often, when self examining during meditations, it is hard to
make out what language is used. This explains why a brain problem will wipe
out sections of speaking ability across all languages because they are all
eventually translated from the main language.

Like people who started with C, we tend to think in C and see how new
languages add on to C and just remembers the new rules of the new language
relative to C instead of having a completely new life experience from ground
up of learning the new programming language.

In short: Bane said: "I was born in darkness, you simply adapted"

~~~
nobodysfool
I think you can come to false conclusions quite a bit if all you are basing
your research off of is your own intuition. I learned Russian, and as a native
English speaker it was difficult, but I can think in Russian, and I don't
translate Russian into English in my head. There are some things I say in
Russian that I would have no idea how to properly translate into English. The
first programming language I learned was basic, but I don't think 'oh this in
python is like x in basic'.

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realrocker
Let me give you another tiny sample group for the study. Indians! I started
learning Hindi, English and Bengali when I was four. Most of my fellow
citizens(middle class) were in the same boat because there are 22 official
languages here in India. After college I moved to South India, where there is
another myriad family of completely different languages. I can barely keep up
with them. Does it improve or harms my ability to learn new programming
languages? Personally, no. Generally, well the answer to that question lies in
the high quality programming services provided by Indians well recorded by
thousands of forums across the web :). So, no I don't think the comparison has
any merit. Edit: The no. of official languages is now 22.

~~~
shared4you

        > 18 official languages here in India
    

Correction: it's 22. Wiki:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_India>

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KennyCason
I've always thought this subject was very interesting as when I was younger I
lived in Germany and German was actually one of my first languages, I used it
in school as well as with friends. However when we came back to the US there
was simply no opportunity to use it so I have lost most of it. Same goes for
Spanish that I used to use semi-regularly when I was in my teens.

Naturally when I joined college I started studying language classes, Japanese
the first year and every year after, as well as concurrently learning Chinese
starting the second, I also went to college in Japan for a year focused on
upper level Japanese. The process was me religiously studying, watching tv
shows, constantly writing essays on my thoughts about society, culture, news,
Rubik's Cubes, artificial intelligence, etc. even blog daily. Also listen to
music. I can't emphasize enough how much I'd write and from the beginning
engage daily in only using Japanese and Chinese in conversation. It took a
year and a half to be conversational in Japanese (largely due to the
completely different grammar and kanji) and for Chinese only around a year. I
have also recently started Korean, to find that the overlap of Chinese and
Japanese make it almost trivial to learn. So language similarity is also
important.

Also in my years of interacting with foreigners who are learning English. The
best speakers are typically ones who came here younger, there is even a large
difference to students who studied abroad as early as high school (versus
college)

I can definitely contest that you can still learn a language to very technical
competency as late as in college. It just takes a lot of effort and
discipline, and perhaps a bit of accumulated skill. Finally, you certainly get
better at learning languages with every new language as with learning any
subject.

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ethanpoole
The difference between L1 and L2 language competency is deeper than whether
you acquired multiple languages in "parallel" or "serially". The competency
level, whether you are fluent or near-fluent, is based on the critical-
learning period which ends roughly at the onset of puberty. Nothing rules out
acquiring multiple L1s in serial, which I suspect to be the case in many
instances of multilingual children.

Moreover, the author's anecdotal support is in contradiction with the fact
that children do acquire multiple languages largely without problem. There are
effects of one language on the other, but they are different in natural, and
far less frequent, to crossover effects in L2 language learning, e.g. learning
Spanish is high school.

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zenith2037
Here's a thought from someone who's semi bi-lingual from a very young age.
(Semi because I'm not completely fluent, but proficient.

Some people when speaking another language that's not native, will 'image' the
english word when talking. Like, saying "ni hao" but in their mind it will be
'hello'.

However for people who've learned it from a young age, 'ni hao' is simply 'ni
hao' and 'hello' is 'hello' but the meanings we recognize as the same. I don't
remember the source to this, but take it as you will.

~~~
llgrrl_
That theory sounds bad, man. I'm an bi-lingual Asian from a relatively older
age compared to you (10+) and have been living in the US for quite some time.

The 'imagine' part only happens when one is still relatively bad at the
language that person is trying to speak. I wouldn't say that I 'imagine' or
have any intermediate representation when I speak in English.

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dreamfactory
Stephen Pinker writes about this in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct>

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oyvind
I suggest reading the review article "Bilingualism and the brain: myth and
reality" published in Neurologia in 2010:
[http://www.elsevier.es/en/abstract/revistas/neurologia-295/b...](http://www.elsevier.es/en/abstract/revistas/neurologia-295/bilingualism-
and-the-brain-myth-and-reality-13156053-revisiones-2010)

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dschiptsov
by attaching more than one label/tag to an inner representation?

