LL-L "Language acquisition" 2005.09.14 (01) [E]

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Language acquisition" 2005.09.13 (07) [E]

Ron wrote:
> Late start of speaking appears to be a fairly frequent phenomenon in
> children to whom their parents speak in different dialects or languages,
but
> once they start they tend to take off like rockets, often equally well in
> both varieties.  Perhaps they need that extra time to sort out "the mess,"
> and once they have, they display heightened language ability.  I know
quite
> a few individuals and families that fall into this category, and this
seems
> to be a frequent outcome.

Well, that would explain all three of my daughters (the older two were
bilingual in German and Dutch when they learned to talk, and the younger in
German and English). But each one of them followed their own strategy. All
three, however, started by saying "Mama" early on, followed by "Papa" a
little later. Then absolutely nothing, even while other babies started
babbling this and that. The only exception was "gnn-na", a word my oldest
made up for horses when she was only ten months old - she's still crazy
about them.

But, at the age of 18 months, on a long car ride, my oldest suddenly looked
at her feet and said "Füße!". When we returned home, she said "Küche!"
(kitchen). Then she pointed at an apple and said "Apfel!" - quite clearly,
like she had been speaking all her life. She continued to name everything
she saw until she went to bed that night, and two days later she was
speaking in whole sentences. She talked completely like an adult before she
was two, forwarding all kinds of wild theories, and never shutting up. A
week after her second birthday, her sister was born. And that's when she
suddenly decided to speak Dutch as well, because she obviously thought that
the baby needed to hear both, just like she did!

My second daughter followed a completely different strategy - she, too, was
18 months old and hadn't said a word. Then there was a birthday party with
chocolate cake - she had finished her piece, held out her plate and said:
"Noch haben Schokolade!" You could hear a pin drop, but she just grinned and
enjoyed her second piece of cake. She said nothing more until two or three
weeks later, and then it was a whole sentence again, born of some kind of
need. This continued for quite a while, she was perfectly happy to let her
very eloquent older sister do the talking, and only piped up, in German or
Dutch, when she needed something "corrected". Later, when she moved to the
USA at the age of five, just like her sister, it took her about four weeks
to become fluent in English.

The third daughter started to talk very late altogether, and seemed to make
little progress for a long time. She spoke German almost exclusively until
she was three, and then switched to English when I started living with the
guy who is now my husband, who spoke no German then, and she started
attending a daycare center. But she always made efforts before to speak
English to visitors like her grandparents, for instance, although her
English was limited then. I have been wondering whether the other two may
have had it easier because German and Dutch is so much closer? Anyway, this
third daughter is 12 now and has a great knack for languages, picking up
foreign words and structures almost instantly and helping me come up with
words when I'm stuck in a translation.

So, yes, although they took very different appoaches, I suppose that all
three of my daughters are points in case for what Ron stated above.

Gabriele Kahn

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language acquisition

Thanks, Gabriele.

Those experiences tally up with those of other people's children I know, a 
couple of them raised with three languages (one: mother's [Japanese], 
father's [Farsi], and community's [French], the other: parents' 
[Vietnamese], godparents'/babysitters' [Spanish] and community's [English]). 
I also came across a few such cases in Israel, where this is rathe common. 
In one case, the mother spoke Hungarian, the father spoke Czech, they spoke 
Yiddish together, and the environment spoke predominantly Hebrew.  The child 
learned all, but Yiddish mostly passively.  In another case, the son learned 
Polish and Yiddish from his parents, Arabic from his play mates (mostly 
North African and Yemenite immigrants) and Hebrew "outside."  His Arabic 
fizzled out as he grew up, he and his friends dropping it for Hebrew, but he 
had a leg up when he started studying Arabic formally in in early twenties.

There is another "strategy" I've come across: no talking for "ages," then a 
phase of intonational exercises (e.g., animated pretend-conversations 
between toys or on the play phone that sounded like the real thing in two 
languages but without real words), and then, virtually instantly, sentences, 
three months later actual conversations ...

I suspect that the extra time is needed for cracking the various codes, 
sorting them out, processing them, stocking the lexicons.  But it seems to 
be time well spent, a great head start, at least in many or most cases.

The only cases in which I observed problems were those in which the 
"teachers" were inconsistent, thus confusing, in their language use.  Also, 
in one case I know, the mother restricts use of Farsi with her son to 
mundane, everyday topics, usually switching to English in case of more 
"esoteric" topics.  As a result, the son, now over 30, speaks childish 
Farsi, stunted in part also because he never learned to read and write that 
language.  At the same time, his English is a bit imperfect, albeit 
operational, probably because he's been a mommy's boy, and his mother's 
English is mediocre.  In another case, a strained relationship with the 
father led to abandoning the father's language in adolescence.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Language survival" [E]

> From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
> Subject: LL-L "Language survival" 2005.09.09 (04) [E]
>
> Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
> >English speakers don't want! to learn other languages because
> they believe English is superior <
>
> Once again - informed opinion or unfounded prejudice ?

I thought that what you were saying below was linguistically interesting and 
wanted to defer discussing it until after the heated argument had passed.

> Let us just take a simple straightforward description of an object.
>
> In order to describe a certain black cat in English all you have to do is
>
> 1. Say / write 'the'
> 2. Say/write 'black'
> 3. Say/write 'cat'
>
> All 3 of these are invariables and therefore require a simple cognitive
> procedure for recall and retrieval.

I don't really agree that there are no "checks" (like you describe for 
French and German) to be done for this phrase in English.

For example, a "check" that non-native speakers have particular difficulty 
with is checking whether the article is required, and which article is 
required, so let's add that:

1. Find out / check/  know whether we are talking about cats in general 
("a"), a specific cat ("the") or a nickname (no article).

Yes, you'd still have to do this in French and German, but not in a large 
number of other languages such as Russian.

> Now do the same in French
>
> 1.Find out / check/  know the gender of 'chat'
> 2. Work out whether you need to use le/la/l'
> 3. Work out the form of the adjective to match
> 4. Find out / check/ know the position of the adjective
> 5. Put 2 and 4 together with 'chat' either in the order    2 chat 4   or 2
> 4 chat

This list, on the other hand, seems pointlessly inflated. Steps 2 and 3 
could be said to be already done as soon as you know the gender. Or put it 
another way, just how much work is involved in each step? Nobody knows.

And I suspect nobody ever will, because people don't do all those checks 
when speaking a language. When I did French in school I couldn't deal with 
all this gender business and everything - following the sort of steps you've 
outlined made building a sentence in French extremely tedious. On the other 
hand when I started using French in France it was easy - I simply didn't 
think about gender and waited for things to get ironed out with usage.

In constructing a phrase like "the black cat" I think the process is 
essentially same in any language:

in English, say "the black cat";
in French, say "le chat noir";
in German, say "die schwarze Katze";
in Dutch, say "de zwarte kat";

and so on.

The point is that a vast number of simple phrases - or perhaps I should say 
a vast number of simple sentences - become so familiar that you can say them 
without any real processing at all. Less familiar sentences are perhaps 
simple transformations of these basic sentences.

I suspect that the human brain is so good at processing language that any 
consideration of relative difficulty between languages in terms of grammar 
is swamped by the ability to memorise, compare and adapt utterances without 
worrying about grammar.

Perhaps the problems you see are more of the teachers' than the learners' 
problems. Teachers seem to prefer to teach grammar and vocabulary and show 
how to build sentences from them, whereas learners would perhaps be better 
off just learning masses of stuff and how to adapt it.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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