The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism

Re:The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism by geomark on Thursday February 11, 2016 @09:34AM (#11080317)

My son is growing up bilingual. It's natural since mother and father have different first languages. I've been amazed since age 4 how easily he switches between the two languages. I'll be talking to him in English and he will turn to his mother and repeat the whole conversation in his other language without missing a beat. He is also picking up Mandarin from watching videos on YouTube.

I have no way of knowing if his "executive function" (ok, I'll go with that term) is better because of it. But learning to speak more than one language appears to be very easy for kids.

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Re:The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism by iolothebard on Thursday February 11, 2016 @11:18AM (#11081036)

From my understanding it's not the learning that's easier, it's the fact that the brain tunes itself to the local languages by a certain (early) age. I'd love to learn tonal languages but I have an extraordinarily hard time with them (Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese). I've learned French, German, Italian and Spanish with very little difficulty.

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Re:The Bitter Fight Over the Benefits of Bilingualism by geomark on Thursday February 11, 2016 @06:13PM (#11084086)

Same for me with tonal language. At first I couldn't even hear the tones when given examples of 3 Thai words with the same spelling but different tones and hence different meanings. Eventually I got it and do pretty well now.

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