A two language baby!?

The only way to be truly bilingual, I believe, is to learn two languages from the getgo. I have a friend who was born and raised in Mexico; his parents were Americans; they spoke English to him, and the servants (over 45 yrs ago) and the outside world spoke Spanish. He is equally comfortable w. both languages and sounds like a native speaker in both. If you adopt, the baby will be receiving a gift if he/she learns English and German as s/he starts to talk. And as a teen, s/he can sass you in both.

I was born in America to American parents, but they brought me up speaking Hebrew and English and I can’t thank them enough for it. PLEASE speak both langauges to your baby, s/he will thank you for it when they are bilingual.

Children learn to distinguish so well that they innately know which parent speaks which language, and never speak the wrong one to that parent. It’s kind of amazing.

Ditto on the great responses above.

I read somewhere the bilingual kids will have a easier time learning a new language in high school rather than one language household.

Our son knows signs and spoken language.

A friend told me a story about a baby in a tri-lingual household (the nanny spoke Farsi) and I forget what the other languages were, but when the baby began talking it would speak Farsi to the nanny and each of the other two languages to the respective parents.

I have a friend who is American and married to a Russian woman. Their daughter was brought up speaking both languages. For a short time when she was 2–3 years old she spoke Russian to any woman and English to any man because that’s the way she thought it was supposed to be since she learned russian from her mom and english from her dad. Funny. She’s 7 now and speaks both fluently.

Within the field of second language research, it is well documented that language acquisition occurs primarily, possibly exclusively, during childhood as the brain loses plasticity after a certain age. It then becomes rigid and fixed, and loses the ability for adaptation and reorganisation, rendering language (re-)learning difficult.

What this means for your adopted child is that he or she will develop billingually with both languages for most of the early years of life provided there is aural imput from both languages and the child is allowed to interact in both. Some billingual children appear to develop slower than their one language peers, but the evidence seems to be that this is simply because they are “laying down the cognitive network” necessary to support more than one language. That cognitive network is a rich mixture of both lexis (words) and the suprasegmentals of a language (pronunctiation, intonation, accent, discourse structures, etc.) Imagine the inside of a baby’s brain encoding pathways for the billions of stimuli received for langauge; a bilingual child will create double. By the time the child is school aged, he/she will automatically choose the dominant language to interact in. If his classmates all speak English, so too will the child. But the neural network exists for both, doesn’t it? This is why many cognitive psychologists and Second Language Theorists argue that the child has the ability for multiple language skill.

There are other issues here. A child raised in a bilingual environment doesn’t automatically develop into an adult who can speak, read and write in dual languages. The higher cognitive skills like reading, grammar, writing and so on must also be developed. However, many in the field argue that children raised in a bilingual environment are at a strong advantage because of the neural networks created to process the suprasegmental aspects of the language. It is the main reason why adults, try as hard as they may, can never completely lose their accents when learning a foreign language. Other research in the field has indicated that the spoken fluency required to sound “native” drops off significantly after puberty. This may be biological or psychological, the evidence is unclear. However, it really doesn’t matter to answer your question.

I do have one question for you regarding the child. Are we talking about an infant here or a small toddler who has already been exposed to a first langauge?

To augment OsakaRob’s response, the prime years for speech and language development are from birth through 5 years of age. Full neural maturation of these areas of the brain occur by 11–12 years of age. A child with normal learning capabilities will do well if exposed to both languages from as early an age as possible, and having the opportunity to interact in them consistently. However, there are some children who have learning disabilities, such as auditory processing disorders, that can make them confused by multiple languages.

I was born in Switzerland to a Swiss-German mother and American father. We moved to the US when I was an infant. My eldest brother was sent to Kindergarten, where he was teased for having language confusions. So my parents decided to raise us with English only, and I wish they hadn’t. So do try raising the child bilingually, unless he/she demonstrates significant difficulties with it.

For the pros here, who seem to know what they are talking about, what about the issue of the vocal chords, layrnx, tongue position and the other physical parts of the mouth and throat that make the sounds? The French “r”, the Hebrew “ch,” the Zulu clicks, Mandarin tonality, etc

.I taught French to 3d and 4th graders for several years, and not only were they fearless and willing to do ridiculous things with their faces and tongues,etc., but they got the accent perfectly…

You hear a lot about “you can never really learn a language after childhood” but I think the brain is really much more adaptable than we give it credit for. Just based on my own personal experience – I started learning French in 8th grade and then lived in French-speaking countries for two years during and after college. I will never sound like a native, but the French language is definitely integrated into my brain. I don’t have to think about how to say things: I just speak. And even though I haven’t spoken French hardly at all in the past five years, I’m not really “losing” it. I can still speak and understand it very well. French seems to be stored differently in my brain then the paltry tiny bit of Arabic that I learned, and have mostly forgotten.

The ideal is still to learn another language as a child, when the brain is most plastic and highly sensitive to language acquisition. But if you are interested in learning a second language as an adult, you may surprise yourself with how well you do. Some of this has to do with individual ability – if you are a very verbal person, this may come more easily to you. Some of it, I think, has to do with how we teach languages. Most people don’t learn well by memorizing grammar rules and vocab lists – which is how most adult language classes are taught. Is it then at all surprising that most people think it is too difficult to learn another language as an adult?

Ditto to christybird – I learned French from two very fierce native French teachers in high school, never used it, went to France when I was 56 and understood everything that was said to me, was able to speak fluently and with a very good accent; the only pitfalls were words I simply didn’t know. This happens in English sometimes and was solved by asking, with a tipped head, “Comment?
However, trying to learn Spanish later in life has been a bear – I love it, I work hard, but
it’s not the same without Mlle Marie and Mlle Annette holding a sword over my head.

No it would be good he would learn two languages.
I would be like two different lives!

Your baby will be fine. You should speak only English to the baby and your partner should speak only German to the baby.

Eventually the baby will be fluent in both.