Spent the week with a quadrilingual 5 year old

[robtarc]

And the funniest thing was seeing him assign a language to my 7 month old. My partner and his family all speak greek together so naturally my daughter will also eventually speak greek in that environment. The kid however is used to speaking greek with adults and german with kids, and a third language with his father. His English is completely passive, he has no reason to ever speak it but picks it up from listening to his parents. I didn’t speak with the kid much because our only common language is English and I was assuming he didn’t understand it.

Yet as the adults all got up and left the room we’re in, and it’s just me and my baby, he immediately switches language and starts explaining things to my baby in English. Showing her games, explaining the different colors, counting pieces, “this goes here”, “this one we don’t use” etc. It was quite fascinating to me that he would already have placed a non-talking infant in a language group he never speaks at all.

I like reading everyone’s stories of how your kids slowly grasp different languages so I thought I’d share!

 

[lliner]

@robtarc My five year old still refers to English as 'your language' (meaning mine) despite speaking it fluently.

The one I find interesting is if we're out in a playground and I suggest he asks another child if they want to play he asks them in English and has to be reminded to use Polish. However, if he was with his mother he'd ask them in Polish

 

[robtarc]

@lliner Haha I can imagine they don't see it as a skill of their own at this age, more as "your language" "mommy's language" with no "my language". Interesting!

 

[godmadegorillas]

@robtarc It's pretty interesting, my neighbors speak a relatively uncommon langauge for where we live, and one day their daughter (she was about 5 at the time) met a friend of mine who also speaks that language. The little girl was in disbelief that anyone other than her parents could speak that language, but she quickly caught on.

 

[mjmichaels]

@robtarc That's so sweet! What I'm enjoying with my 4 year old (trilingual but hears a lot of languages regularly) is that she is just so creative with making up words especially in the languages she hears but we dont speak fluently. She's always asking me things like with random syllables "what does X mean in te reo Māori?" and figuring out which sounds go with which language.

 

[godfavorme]

@mjmichaels My daughter is exposed to 5 languages and has just recently started switching how she babbles depending on what language we've been speaking to/around her or what the video she's watching is in. She even babbles in ASL by wiggling her hands and arms.

 

[rr00008]

@robtarc That's sweet. When my eldest was three, we went to live in Japan for a short time. By the end she was communicating quite fluently. Even now, four years later, when my wife and I have a conversation in Japanese, our eldest will interject her own comments.