Were you language - learning delayed and raised bilingual?

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rainbowbutterfly
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14 Jun 2010, 11:33 pm

I'm curious about this because my parents tried to raise me to speak Hebrew and English at the same time, but my learning delay interefered with their ability to teach me to be bilingual. A psychologist they took me to when I was a toddler told them to teach me one language 1st, and the other language later. So, my parents taught me English because I was born in CA, but I wasn't taught Hebrew later on. I have many relatives in Israel, so the thought occured to me that I should probably just learn it on my own at this point. I'm wondering if there are better ways in handling language learning delays in this kind of situation.

Out of curiosity, have any of you had similar issues? I'm curious if there are any of you that were language learning delayed whose parents still managed to teach you more than one language at the same time. When there is a language learning delay, I'm curious if that delay has to interfere with your ability to be bilingual or multilingual all at once.



Claradoon
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15 Jun 2010, 12:46 am

I live in Quebec so we have a lot of families that speak both English and French in the home. Sending kids to the "other" language school seems to work, until they get that they're losing their first language, then you switch them back. We also have a large Jewish community and it's not uncommon to run into trilingual kids, but not before school age.

My own opinion is that hearing the languages in the home and learning a few phrases sets a child up for fluency in those languages at school.



liloleme
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15 Jun 2010, 1:04 am

My son (7 year old aspie) learned French and English at the same time. My daughter has a speech delay (started saying words at age 3) but that is due to her Autism....she now knows some French and English words.



Kenani
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15 Jun 2010, 1:11 am

I, apparently, had no language delay.

I originally learned to speak Hebrew. When I moved to America as a baby, I learned English, and somehow forgot Hebrew. I don't think there's anything like a figurative threshold in my brain that only allows me to speak one language, because I know Spanish pretty well. It just happened somehow.



bee33
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15 Jun 2010, 1:36 am

I wasn't language learning delayed. As far as i know I learned my first language earlier than other kids. But l;earning various languages as a kid can be very confusing and can lead to a lot of strange, unexpected difficulties.

I spoke only Italian until I was six, then we moved to Brazil and I went to an American school, so I had to learn English and Portuguese, which I did without too much trouble (though it wasn't always easy during the learning process, because so much was confusing). English became my primary language, which it is to this day. I still speak Italian with my parents, but I often can't remember words and express myself awkwardly. I struggle not to just replace the words I can't remember with English words (since my parents understand English) because it's a slippery slope to forgetting those words in Italian.

When I was kid, Italian and Portuguese were so similar that I started speaking a mash-up of the two, and people who didn't know both languages couldn't understand me, so when I went back to Italy I had trouble communicating with my relatives.

Learning languages seems like a great idea, because when you're a little kid you're a sponge for languages, but it's fraught with problems, it's not some panacea.



ouinon
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15 Jun 2010, 1:52 am

My 10 year old AS-of-some-sort son was very language-learning-delayed; he didn't start speaking at all until age 4 and a half, and was unintelligible, ( speaking in poorly pronounced telegraphese at best ), to most people until he was 7 and a half, when he suddenly learned to read, virtually overnight, and this seemed to help him construct speech better. He speaks almost completely normally now, in both languages ( though french is still a bit clunkier ), and he loves reading, and at hyperspeed too.

He is bilingual, brought up in France by me, his english speaking mother, who has never tried to speak french with him, and his french papa who has never even learned english anyway. His papa is away from home an average of four days per week for work, and until this February my son was homeschooling, so he heard, and spoke, and read, mostly english, with me, or my books, and uses english internet on the whole, so his french always lagged significantly behind his english.

But now that he is going to french school his french is catching up fast with the english.

My mother is German but my english father said that we, my sister and I, must learn to speak and read english properly first, ( we lived in England ) so we did, my mother speaking english to us all the time and we were NOT language delayed at all, if anything we were precocious speakers and readers ... but then we never learned german, except the little bit that we picked up, especially the idiomatic structure, on holidays there. My father is almost certainly an undiagnosed aspie, and my sister and I are both somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum.
.



Last edited by ouinon on 15 Jun 2010, 4:15 am, edited 3 times in total.

pyzzazzyZyzzyva
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15 Jun 2010, 2:13 am

I'm four languages: I speak English, Gibberish, Manganese, and Pig Latin. My brain could barely handle learning all 4 at the same time. I coped somehow though.



Anke
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15 Jun 2010, 2:22 am

My son was born in Sweden to a German mother and a Russian father, and we spoke English at home... I figured he'd get Swedish from the nursery and 3 languages to begin with would be a bit too much, and I could always teach him German later. So I spoke English to him as a baby.

Now we live in England and I never taught him German, so now he's not even bilingual!

As far as I remember he wasn't language learning delayed.


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visagrunt
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15 Jun 2010, 12:26 pm

I was born and raised in Montréal, so my education was bilingual (even though I had an "english license").

I did not have any language delays, however. I was speaking on schedule and reading (basically) by age 3.


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15 Jun 2010, 12:51 pm

From what I remember of my linguistics courses in college, kids who are learning two languages at once tend to be slightly delayed, but end up with far better language abilities in the long run. "Delayed" doesn't mean to pathalogical levels, but if you took thousands of kids learning a single language and the same number of kids learning multiple languages and compared their stats you'd find the bilingual kids slightly "behind" the other group in their language learning rate, but way ahead as adults. Even if they forget one of their languages, they will have greater ease learning new languages and with how they understand any language. Kids handle language very differently than adults, and there is something really good neurologically that happens when they learn multiple languages.

Again, that's what I remember from courses I took a very long time ago.