Timeline for Too many languages?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 3, 2015 at 12:59 | comment | added | MatthewMartin | The math for lingua francas and community languages are different. If you know a community language, you have a community that will take you in in times of disaster, when you need a business partner, etc. (Think Yiddish in New York), if you know English, people merely understand you, you aren't necessarily a member of a club. I agree, in the USA, 100s of hrs spent in High School, failing to even learn Spanish is a waste of time. But toddlers pick up languages effortlessly when the parents speak it. Teenagers & Adults, way different costs. | |
| Nov 3, 2015 at 4:17 | comment | added | Dan Dascalescu | Speaking of "rationally", it also merits discussion which language to teach the child. | |
| Oct 26, 2015 at 1:48 | comment | added | Daniel | @MasonWheeler I've been raised in a bilingual country and I am multilingual myself and I can tell you that this never happens to me or to any other person I know. Maybe I can make some mistakes from time to time but I never change language in the middle of a sentence without realizing. My guess is that maybe she was not speaking Spanish at home but Spanglish? Or maybe is some kind of "cool" thing to mix English with Spanish? | |
| Oct 25, 2015 at 12:38 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | My grandfather used to cuss in German because the grandkids weren't supposed to know what the words meant. We figured it out... :-) | |
| Oct 25, 2015 at 4:58 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | @MasonWheeler I'm going to guess that her mind has you filed as both an English and Spanish speaker, thus it's free to use either language when talking to you. Without the language being tied down her mind wanders between the choices. | |
| Oct 25, 2015 at 4:56 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | I have frequently seen language confusion--my wife is a native Mandarin speaker, English only from middle age. If she's just been using some Chinese dialect (she speaks several) it's not exactly unusual for her to speak to me in the same language--and I'm lucky to understand one word. | |
| Oct 24, 2015 at 1:03 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | @quetzalcoatl: As in, she only does it with people who she already knows are bilingual, even though she's not aware she's doing it when it happens. | |
| Oct 23, 2015 at 23:15 | comment | added | quetzalcoatl | @MasonWheeler: how does she detect that a person is bilingual? After they use Spanish words ocassionally when speaking in English and she instinctively responds in the same but intensified way? Or maybe just the knowledge that other person understands Spanish is enough for her to start wandering? That may be interesting research | |
| Oct 22, 2015 at 19:35 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | I'm bilingual, raised on English and learning Spanish fluently after high school. A friend of mine, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, was raised on both languages together. When she's talking with you, it's the weirdest thing, because a menudo ella cambia al otro idioma en medio de hablar and then right back again, and she doesn't even notice until someone points out "you did it again." But the crazy thing is, she only ever does this when talking with other bilingual people! So yes, from personal experience, language confusion is real, and it can get really bizarre sometimes. | |
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:41 | vote | accept | Wand | ||
| Oct 21, 2015 at 17:42 | |||||
| Oct 21, 2015 at 13:58 | history | answered | MatthewMartin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |