Growing up bilingual: my experience!

[FOOLibra]

First of all, what does it mean to be billingual? - According to thefreedictionary, this is the definiton:
Using or able to use two languages, especially with equal or nearly equal fluency.

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As I am one of those children who grew up bilingual (German and Tunisian-Arabic), I decided to share my experience with those who are interested, just curious about it or even want to raise their own children bilingual.

The advantages:

1. It is easy to learn another language from birth. After age 10, learning new words becomes progressively harder. The older you get, the more you use your native language and the more it comes to dominate your linguistic map.

2. Children who can speak more than one language have a learning advantage. This is what the researchers from the National University of Signapore found out:

The babies who were growing up in a bilingual environment became bored with their first picture more quickly, and showed a greater interest in the image of the unfamiliar soft toy. [...] One explanation for these findings could be that bilingual children simply require greater information processing skills in order to rise to the challenges they face.

3. This advantage may not apply to everyone but it was definitely one of the reasons why I am glad that I grew up bilingual. Being able to communicate with relatives who only speak ONE of your native languages. I have a strong bond with my grandparents and cousins from Tunisia. That wouldn't be possible if I couldn't speak Tunisian-Arabic. It is mostly impossible to build a relationship based on trust without communication.

4. Learning a 3rd/4th/.. language. Learning two languages early in life makes it easier to acquire more later on. So if you want your child to converse in many languages in his adult life, start with teaching him second language now. 


Potential risks:

1. Mixing up languages. Mixing words is very common in children learning more than one language at a time. But this is a temporary phenomenon. At the age of four or five it has mostly disappeared. When I couldn't think of a word in Tunisian-Arabic, I just 'borrowed' it from German until I learnt the word in both languages.

2. Speaking later. Some children raised bilingual take a little longer to start talking than those raised in monolingual households. We are talking about a 3-6 month speech delay. However it is not a general rule and it only makes sense since they are actually learning twice as many words.

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To sum up, there are are a lot of adavantages which come with being bilingual. The advantages far outweigh the minor potential risks.

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Question to YOU: Were you raised bilingual? Do you wish you were? Are you planning on raising your children bilingual?

I hope you enjoyed reading this Take! :)

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I am sure some people will be able to relate to this. :D

Trying to tell really funny jokes from one language and having them fall flat because the humor gets lost in translation.

“It’s really funny, I swear it is! No, like, seriously! I promise!”

[TheLuckyOne1]

Haha I swear that I knew it's you how wrote this when I saw the title in the feed before even clicking on it 😛

Well, that's nicely written! I wasn't raised bilingual. No body in my family speaks any language besides Arabic (except my father who speaks Hebrow). And even though I have started taking English classes in school since first grade but that didn't benefit me a bit. We have a really bad English learning system in our schools. Unfortunately, it's not taken seriously by the students and the teachers as well.. I actually learned English on my own, in an unintentional way you might say. At the age of 14-15 I was able to speak a little bit English, and by the age of 18 I started to speak English more correctly.

I think that being a bilingual is very nice, however I'm not sure whether I wish I was raised bilingual or not, I mean it's really cool to grow up speaking 2 different languages but I would also say it's also cool to learn your second language on your own, instead of being raised speaking it.

Personally, I just wish I gave more effort for learning languages when I was younger, learning languages is definitely one of my biggest interests. I'm 20 and I speak 2 and a half languages right now, I feel that's a little lol, especially when I see 18 years old people who speak 4 languages fluently. But then again I still have time to learn more and more! As you know I'm learning German right now and after that, I would like to learn French.

Nice MyTake Elissa 😊

[FOOLibra]

Haha yay!! 😛
Wow, I would have never guessed because your English is very good since I often see you writing complex sentences.

And I definitely agree with you on that, I'd say it's a bigger accomplishment which requires way more effort and dedication. One can also say that I didn't exactly choose to learn my native language lol.

You seem to learn quickly and I am sure that one day you'll also be able to speak French :)

Thank you so much, Yazan!

[lumos]

I wasn't really *raised* bilingual since both my parents have always spoken in Swedish with me. But since I live in Finland, I picked up on Finnish somewhat early on. However, due to the fact that I've always been more in contact with Swedish (Swedish speaking parents/relatives, Swedish daycare, Swedish schools, Swedish friends...) I'm still struggling a lot with Finnish, even though I consider myself pretty fluent. I understand Finnish pretty much perfectly as long as it's spoken at a normal pace and the language used isn't too "political", or otherwise super advanced with new terminologies I'm unfamiliar with. But I suck at grammar and I sometimes forget even the most basic words. It's quite embarrassing but I'm slowly making progress.
My English has always been pretty good, though, and I've never struggled with it. I started learning it very early on through movies and TV shows. I used to watch Disney channel in English, for instance. But whenever I visited my friends' houses, they would watch it in Swedish of Finnish. This actually annoyed me because I preferred it in English lol. We started learning English at school at the age of 10 I think, and I was so excited when we got our books that I ran home and finished reading the textbook the same evening. :)

[FOOLibra]

Wow, Finnish must be extremely hard! :o My sister tried to learn Finnish with some YouTube videos but gave up real quick hahah.
And yup, I used to be the same with being excited every time I started learning a new language :)

[lumos]

Yeah, Finnish is the kind of language you can't really just learn by yourself on a whim. The best way to learn is to have a great teacher (in person, not just on youtube) and to have lots of people you can actively talk in Finnish with. Otherwise you'll never get anywhere.

[AleDeEurope]

In my house we only spoke Spanish, but my parents took me to an English school when I was 3 (about to turn 4). So thanks to that now I'm bilingual, and it allowed me to come study in the US without a problem to understand the people.
I know I still make some mistakes cause I went 3 years without talking almost any English since I moved to a Spanish school, but I just had to get used to speaking it again.

Now that I'm spending the whole year in America, and only speaking in English, I'm mixing up my thoughts, meaning that I sometimes think in Spanish and English, so when I go to Spain, I tend to forget how to say some words in Spanish and end up saying them in English. I don't have that problem the other way around though :/

I like being bilingual, and I think it's necessary nowadays, so when I have kids, they'll be bilingual too.

[ikissedtheskyonce]

Lol cool but the English is different here in America. Like there are sayings Americans use that are local to Americans only

[AleDeEurope]

@ikissedtheskyonce Well, I started watching movies, TV-shows, and listening to American music, so that helped me get used to some of the local words. Sometimes I even get lost with some words they say here. For example, I didn't know in some places (Chicago, which is where I am), instead of "soda" they say "pop". At first I didn't know what they were saying, but then they explained. And the same happened with some other words, but by the context I get most of them.

[ikissedtheskyonce]

Yep I'm from the mideast and when I moved to the south people were confused by the way I talked. They even told me I talk too fast. And when I called hot chocolate cocoa they were confused what I was asking for

[AleDeEurope]

@ikissedtheskyonce Yeah, some people here have also confused some things that I said. I studied in a British school, so I learned to speak British, with the accent too, so when I first got here I said some words the British way and some people didn't understand me.
The good thing is that they never shamed me for it.

[FOOLibra]

Thanks for sharing :) When you say "English school" you're talking about a school where all subjects are in English instead of Spanish, right?

And yeah, that can happen! Over time your dominant language can change, especially if you don't use it regularly.

[ikissedtheskyonce]

I meant to say Midwest not mideast

[ikissedtheskyonce]

Oh I don't think you will get shamed for it but us Americans are not afraid to point it out if you sound different from us, we do it to other Americans too so we will definitely do it to foreigners

[AleDeEurope]

@asker Yes, all the subjects, except for two (Spanish and another one) were in English. Everything was like in Britain, cause they even used a difference grading system.

If I'm able to stay in America, I'm sure in a few years my dominant language will be English.

@ikissedtheskyonce Oh, that changes things now hahaha but yeah, Americans do point it out, which I don't mind at all, I actually like it, and I like it when they point out what I said wrong, it helps me improve my English.

[redeyemindtricks]

I grew up in a bilingual Spanish/English household.

The advantages part is totally on point. I mean, I'm fluent in those two languages, professional-level in two more, conversational in two more, and basic functional in at least five.
I'm kind of a language nerd, so that's to blame at least in part -- but that, too, probably has something to do with growing up bilingual.

Simply COULD NOT learn Diné/Navajo, though. Could not do it. My grandfather was full-blooded, and I tried to learn some of it as a "gift" before he passed. Couldn't do better than a few isolated words.

In our household now, we so totally use as many as 4-5 languages in a single sentence. Bouzen yo hijueputa magtetext lang apre minwi betta be real! LOL Amazingly, our kids are still able to speak English fluently, when that's necessary. (:

[FOOLibra]

What is Diné/Navajo? :)

And I totally know what you mean lol, sometimes I also end up speaking two/three languages at the same time with my sisters just for the heck of it. 😂

[redeyemindtricks]

The Navajo Nation is a Native American tribe. "Diné" is the Navajo word for Navajo, in the same way that, say, "Suomi" is the Finnish word for Finland.

[FOOLibra]

Makes sense! Thanks for explaining.

[redeyemindtricks]

Sure! (:

[EdwardtheGr3at]

Personally being bilingual has been very beneficial to me whether is my job which I travel a lot because I am a model and academically since university education is very centric in multi-culturism (in some courses) also personally because it helped me develop interest in other languages as a result up to date I speak English (obviously), Spanish, German, and Polish. Personally I have minimal negative consequences like sometimes I tend to take time to remember some words of my native language but that is practically it. I just felt the need to share since is a interesting discussion.

[FOOLibra]

Thanks for sharing! :) And yes, being bilingual is very beneficial to your future career. Glad that you could make use of it.

[redeyemindtricks]

Hey, cool. What kind of modeling do you do?

I did editorial, for 4 years in my early-mid twenties. I traveled a lot and learned a lot of languages, too, but I totally went about it in the opposite order. LOL
Like, I decided to move somewhere, and then was all, "oh shit, guess I gotta learn [language] in 2-3 weeks." Haha.

Really, not kidding -- I got scouted in southern California when I was 21, without knowing a word of Japanese or anything about Japan, and was on a plane to Tokyo exactly 19 days later. Learned Japanese and French from editorial career, and learned Finnish and Russian from other models I had as roommates. How about you? Where do you go, what do you do?

"I tend to take time to remember some words of my native language"

Haha lol, I have a very good Brazilian friend who knows Adriana Lima pretty well, and she says Adriana can't remember half her Portuguese words. LMAO!

[EdwardtheGr3at]

@redeyemindtricks I got spotted at a convention center in the San Antonio area as I was representing a company's product, I was a minor at the time so my mother had to say yes and she signed and I was off to L. A. I got introduced to other models older than me and they guided me through the process about 2 years later after doing small things I became of age and got contacted for me to travel to France to introduce me to a recruiter and they accepted me and I got a contract for Hennes & Mauritz or (H&M) shortly after. I really enjoyed my first real experience because I met with models all around the world and being a catalog model was a first to me. Shortly after, I got contacted by Ralph Lauren clothing who was going to have a fashion show in the UK so I traveled there and I did a catwalk with their brand and got an exclusive with them and thankfully it went pretty good I met Barbara Palvin & Cara Delevinge they were very nice and Cara would joke around 😂. Me & Barbara became friends.

[EdwardtheGr3at]

and up to date I am really thankful about everything I have done.

[redeyemindtricks]

Very cool. Yeah, you'll find it's generally a supportive industry, despite stereotypes to the contrary.

My only beef with Cara is that, because of her, there are now 10,000,000 women trying to make THOSE eyebrows work, who really shouldn't be trying to do that. Lol

[EdwardtheGr3at]

@redeyemindtricks thats what defines her though... In her snapchats she says that her eyebrows are on fleek almost everyday.😂 Are you still in the industry or not anymore?

[redeyemindtricks]

I haven't done anything in fashion in a long time. I'm in the fitness industry now. Do figure shows myself, also train younger fitness models of both sexes. Among many many other things that i do.

Still have the passion for fashion, though... We've converted a whole room of our house into a closet+showroom hybrid kinda thing (with "displays" of clothes, and also the custom leather stuff that my husband does).
I mean, it's a closet for all 5 of us, but, still... it's a whole room, that's a closet. LOL

[EdwardtheGr3at]

@redeyemindtricks Wow that sounds really impressive well I wish you all the success possible specially in this times that are demanding (industry wise).👌

[redeyemindtricks]

Thanks, same to you!

[ChaosKilledTheDinos]

I really really wish I was raised bilingual. Unfortunately, my grandparents' generation either didn't raise my parents with their language or they themselves didn't speak it much.

My nephews speak Polish and English though. I think it's adorable and am happy that they are fluent in both. I think it's a great skill. It brings people together. It was funny though, when the older one was two, if you were holding something he wanted instead of saying "give" he'd say (idk how to spell it in Polish) "die" while pointing at the person holding his toy.

[BiscuitesSwag]

I grew up in a bilingual family but wish I could be in the normally way more languages (I'm mixed with like *rough guess* half of Europe but only 2 languages remained up in our family). If I will ever have a child, I will teach him/her all the languages I can speak (currently Romanian, Hungarian and English). Like you said, the advantages weigh out the disadvantages.
My parents told me that I made my own language that sounded like some kind of native American language because they were mixing me with 2 languages simultanously and I couldn't handle it. 😂
I have started to speak normally when I was 4, yeah, I know, very late. 😂

[apple24]

It was hard for me. It still is i am always translating or making phone calls for myself and for my mom. I always have to fill out her paper work etc. I alway have to pay my mom bills and sometimes I have trouble explaining things in spaiinsh since I so use to English side of my brain. But it like a jerk knee reaction and my spainsh comes out. haha I say its never easy to be billigual. And than there this sterotype that we American born hispanic are stuck up and full of ourself. But its not like that. It a lot of pressure and I was always shy even to order food or call on the phone. I had to do that kinda of adult stuff since I was 8 yeah it sucks. Hopefully when I have kids they never have to go through what i went through. (:

[RicanEyes]

I am bilingual too and I speak English and Spanish. I am so happy I know Spanish and talk it pretty well and understanding it. My only problem is writing it can only write it a little. But the reason for that is I was born in Boston MA. Yes I am a city girl at heart all American. But when I talk to someone in English they understand me very well but say I have a Spanish accent a little. I find it weird because I swear I am so American.. LOL!!! But I can relate to you when you said explaining something funny in a different language doesn't sound the same. Spanish to English sometimes it doesn't make any sense either when trying to say a funny joke.

[RicanEyes]

Nice my take by the way I enjoyed reading it!

[Anonymous]

Putonghua/Mandarin Chinese = First Language Ever.
Wuhanese = I only got exposed to this in my teens (during my visit to China and my parents' use of QQ chat service), when my parents spoke the Wuhan dialect to my relatives. Sometimes, they would use a bit of the Wuhan accent to standard putonghua Chinese.
American English = Only Language That I Have Achieved Full Mastery In Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening.
Spanish = Only Language That I Learned In Middle School, High School, and University.

[___austriangirl]

I was raised bilingual too. I live in Austria but my parents are from Turkey. So I learnt German and Turkish at once. I speak both languages fluently. Then I learnt English in school but I still have to improve my English. I had Latin classes in highschool for four years but I don't think Latin counts to languages. It's not a language in which you can chat with someone. Now, I'm planning a language trip to England in summer holidays. So, I can practice English. When I speak English as well as I speak Turkish and German I'll begin to learn French or Bosnian.

[ashisimo]

i was raised bilingual (english and somali) but my stupid ass refuse to speak in somali most of the time because i deemed it unimportant. i'm relearning it now because my relatives in somalia roast me for being illiterate. now i'm almost trilingual because i'm learning arabic (quranic fusha) and i'm nearly fluent

[matheus_mb]

I wasn't raised bilingual but I wish I had been. I have decided already that my children will be raised bilingual, I speak English and it'll be much better and practical for them to learn it with my native language. My first language is Portuguese by the way.

[DaniaMQ]

I was raised like that, I learnt Arabic, Spanish and English all at once... And I'm so thankful this happened, its a big advantage! I will learn turkish soin... And I'm actually planing on teaching my kids ( when i become a mother) more than one language before they start growing up! They won't regret it when they are older 😆

[Lynx122]

I was raised bilingual (german &english) then I also learned french in school, I'm pretty good at it but not nearly as good as the other 2 languages. I'll consider learning a 4th language if I'm really into it or I go live somewhere else (I'm really into korean stuff atm), but after that I think I'm done :) too much work.

[Glue-Sniffer]

I was brought up bilingual. I can't really say if I liked it or not. I remember as a kid it was tiring to switch between two languages and my peers would often laugh at my brother and I when we spoke in our "other native language". Later however, it was an advantage. I'm quite talented at learning languages now... I think if I ever had children I'd like them to speak my 2 native languages as well.

[KDA20]

I am quite jealous of the fact that you are multi lingual - I am from one of those rare countries where for historical reasons my native language was almost faded out into extinction (irish) so English is my first language but not my native language - English is the only language I speak with any degree of proficiency, I sometimes wish I had paid more attention in school to my native language instead of viewing it as an unnecessary burden.

[Dylanguest1989]

Dia duit, an bhfuil aon scéal agat?

i just typed that into google. I too wish i was multi lingual without cheating lol.

[KDA20]

@Dylanguest1989 I thought that was what you said but I had to use the translator as well to be sure.

[Dylanguest1989]

Yeah, i wish i could take a pill and gain intelligence, i love the idea of more and more knowledge.

[KDA20]

@Dylanguest1989 If only life was that easy

[Dylanguest1989]

the movie " limitless " is about that. but his life becomes really hard as well.

[KDA20]

@Dylanguest1989 I heard of the movie - I don't think I saw it

[Dylanguest1989]

I read the book. basically he's overwhelmed with power. but it'd be nice to make money on the stock market and just rest.

[KDA20]

@Dylanguest1989 Hard to say, I just focus on the life I have and try to get on with that.

[lonerider]

I really feel sad for your country ever since i came to know about this. It's sad to not be able to speak your own language. It's being revived, i hear?

[FallOutBoy2001]

I've been learning Spanish since I was in preschool, and I distinctly remember once telling a joke, in Spanish, to my Spanish speaking friends, which a trilingual kid (English, French, and Spanish) translated into French, and they started laughing. Turns out that the joke had an alternate meaning in French, and just didn't translate into English

[Anonymous]

Yeah I'm bilingual. The brain is more plastic when we are young so it's much easier to learn things, it has all it's connections open and as we get older it closes the ones that aren't used, giving us a particular way of thinking. Learning two languages from young gives us a wider way of thinking. You can learn more languages later but it's harder, but learning to speak with the foreign accent is almost impossible if you didn't learn it when you were young. Though I knew both languages from very young I didn't speak to anyone at school so I never spoke the second language so I still don't have a perfect accent in it

[lonerider]

I was raised quadri-lingual (I hope that's a word). I never found that it was a big deal until I started surfing the net. People who can't speak more than one language seem to be the majority here.

[FOOLibra]

( Yes, that is the correct word!). That is impressive! Can you tell me the four languages you grew up with and do you use them regularly? :)

[lonerider]

Marathi (my mother tongue)
Gujarati, Hindi and English.
Yes I use them regularly. Besides them I have learnt French and Sanskrit in school and I am on my way to learn my 7th language now :P

[lonerider]

What about you? You are from Germany so I'll guess German and Dutch, learned English afterwards?

[FOOLibra]

Wow, I envy you haha! :o
I grew up speaking German and Tunisian-Arabic and then learnt in school English, French and Italian! I also wanted to start learning Norwegian but that was an entire fail lol because the language course wasn't as I expected so I stopped going.

[lonerider]

Except English and French, all the other languages I know are Indian. Sanskrit is extinct for christ's sake XD Your knowledge is more useful. Mine.. not much outside India

[QuestionMan]

My first language was Russian and my second was English.
Nowadays when I forget a word in Russian I just substitute it with the English one. I'm trying not to do that since it create a weird dialect of Russian called Runglish which is mostly spoken by Russian speaking immigrants in the US and Canada. It's not pure Russian so when I mix English words in it makes it harder for people that do not know English to understand me.

[ikissedtheskyonce]

I grew up speaking English and Spanish. And I mix up words, I was even told I have an accent even though I was born and raised in America. I can not imagine learning Spanish as an adult. People ask me why a certain Spanish word means what it means and I can not explain it, I just know to use the word