suitable age for learning a foreign language

melissa83827 · Post by **melissa83827** » Sat May 13, 2006 3:47 am

recently, i develop my interest in the suitable age to start learning a foreign language. some people think that the younger the better, because they think that it is easy for the little kids to form the habbit of another language, and their spoken langage will be much more native like.
while, others may disagree that they think that the little kids are too young to get involved in two languages and it's hard for them to master the two languages at the same time. and the most important thing is to develop their language skills than how many languages they can master. if they can't form the mode of one language, how they can learn another language?
so, what do you think?

sonya · Post by **sonya** » Sat May 13, 2006 6:50 am

well. it's basically a fact that if you don't "learn" a language by around 12, you'll never quite achieve native speaker status in it. and it's certainly easier for kids to pick up other languages.

as for not being able to juggle multiple languages.. that's not true. I have friends who grew up speaking three languages with no trouble, and are fluent in all three (although English is the best for all of us, if only because we live in an Anglophone country and have seriously studied it in school. But if we lived in one of the other countries for a while, it would become as good as our English). Myself, I grew up speaking Mandarin and English. I used to do a lot of speaking in both languages. Apparently this is called code switching. But it's not as if it tainted either language, and when I was with someone who didn't speak both, I could carry on just as well in one language. Plus, I think being natively bilingual also *helps* with learning and understanding other languages after that magical age.

EH · Post by EH » Mon May 15, 2006 7:07 pm

You're never too young to learn multiple languages. It's also true that you're never too old--though after puberty most (not all) people lose the ability to sound native-like in a new second language.

But remember, when teaching a second language to very young children:
1) *Always* continue to support the development of the first language. If you start a kid on, for example, Korean for the first two years of life, then suddenly switch to English-only then the kid is likely to end up semilingual rather than bilingual. It's better to continue to teach the child Korean and use Korean all the time, adding English in slowly and naturally as a supplement rather than a replacement.
2) If you teach two or more languages simultaneously from birth, you need to give the kid equal (and extensive!!) opportunities to use and hear both. Just saying "kimchi" once in a while in English sentences won't make a child bilingual. You have to have some Korean-only contexts, some English-only, and some mixed contexts. Reading books and having friends in each language is especially useful.

-EH

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Tue May 16, 2006 5:36 pm

If you are thinking of having a baby and want to know if you should teach your child mutiple languages, I would say go ahead. I have a trilingual 2 year old granddaughter and she is doing just fine in all three. You can see her sizing up newcomers and watching their mouths to see what language they will speak and then she seems to be able to tune in to the conversation. It seems that the best situation is if one parent speaks consistently in one language and the other in another and a third or fourth, etc person in another language. Many children in India speak up to four or five different language and dialects depending on the caregiver they are talking to at the time. There are adults who have learned a language with native abilities but it seems that skill is like being very good at piano or driving a race car - it is a real talent. In Canada, they found that grade 7 is a good time to introduce French full-time in immersion programs and the students do really well, so that is about 12 years old. But anyone can learn any language at any time if they want to do so. I met many mentally challenged young people in Japan that could communicate in English. They had been watching English movies and cartoons and listening to English songs and loved them. I also found that people who wanted to learn the language did but some of the young people who tried to learn the language were more interested in using their time in other occupations and so they didn't and then complained that the language was too difficult. That all changed if they got a girlfriend or boyfriend who only spoke one language, not their own.