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Zenigame
@zeni.eth
We're raising our son trilingual (English, Japanese, Mandarin), living in Okinawa, Japan. My wife and I speak Japanese and English with each other, 2yo speaks Japanese at daycare, English with me, and Mandarin with Mom and Grandma. Definitely took longer than other kids to start, but It somehow seems to be working.
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Pichi 🟪🍖🐹🎩 🍡🌸
@pichi
You are doing great. Don’t worry about anything you read about language development by certain ages. All that nonsense is for monolingual kids. Your little one will be so ahead of the game and be able to learn a new language in school for fun! Your son is so lucky to have you!
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Zenigame
@zeni.eth
🙏 thank you. indeed, the language developmental stages are completely off for us. a challenging confounding factor is that he does have some attributes the correspond with other developmental differences, so it made us a bit nervous about language. But he seems to be smoothing out and catching up rapidly, so we'll see!
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Pichi 🟪🍖🐹🎩 🍡🌸
@pichi
My cousins who speak 6 languages fluently as adults were quiet kids when they were very small. When I would watch them 1:1 and they’d talk to me in French I’d simply say English please and they’d switch. They’d forget 10 mins later and I’d ask them to switch for me. Then at about 6, they couldn’t shut up. And the more excited about something they’d get they’d constantly switch and always enjoyed listening to them. My favorite was hearing them make up conjugations like: “today I eated cinnamon bread for lunch!” And I’d reply: Oh wow, you ate cinnamon bread for lunch, how fun! They’ve never heard an adult say eated. They made that shit up! I was so proud! They tried their best. It was hours of entertainment for me. But their parents worried about them too. A lot of data a studies are not around bilingual kids and it’s a shame. Their brains are working triple overtime and we should be studying them the most! We’d learn so much.
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Zenigame
@zeni.eth
6 languages?! That's amazing! Love the creativity kids come up with as they learn language. Last month, my 2yo had me play the same piano song on my computer and phone simultaneously and ran around exclaiming "double music!!" It totally makes sense, but adult would never conceive of it naturally. That you were able to have so much fun with your cousin's kids, you sound like such an awesome aunt to be around!
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Zenigame
@zeni.eth
And yeah, multilingual brain development is under-researched and there's the default cultural assumption that monolingualism is the norm that's tough. I'm from southern california where over half of my friends were bilingual growing up, so wish there was more representation in the educational literature
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Pichi 🟪🍖🐹🎩 🍡🌸
@pichi
They blow my mind. They spoke English and French at home so in French school they had them take German. They clearly aced that and added Spanish. Then in middle school they chose Mandarin and Arabic and had to go to the local college at lunch time to take lessons from native speakers so they didn’t developed accents. Now as adults they both want to be in a band full time but I’m evil and made them go into management consulting for 5 years to build a nest egg with an international firm and then they can purse music for 3 years full time and see what happens. I obviously want them to pursue art but I want them to not be starving artists and use all these language skills to make bank while they can.
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