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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I think the more insidious problem is translation between languages.

Anyone who has multiple common languages with a friend knows this well. It’s quite common to drop a word from a different language into the middle of a sentence even when the sentence’s language has a word for it, just because there can be meaningful nuance or partition that the speaker wants to convey.

Strangely, doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children. Somehow it will confuse them. Yet I’ve never seen anyone manage that in a polyglot household with kids.

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> doctrine in the US seems to be that one shouldn’t mix languages in a sentence when speaking to children

Whose “doctrine” is this?

My experience (Canadian in Canada) may shed light.

Our daughter’s speech development seemed delayed. A speech therapist with experience with bilingual parents with different mother tongues gave us great advice: I was to speak to her exclusively in English, her mother in French, so that she could tell the difference. What we spoke between us was irrelevant.

Within a very short time she was speaking both equally well and it wasn’t long before she was switching mid sentence as well.

So the “doctrine” could be a more rigid, simplified statement of that advice.

It is very common for kids to acquire multiple languages simultaneously, but it seems to require clearly distinct user groups, e.g., think immigrant kids who speak one language at home and another with their friends or at school.

But if the user groups are less distinct, it may be harder for the child to puzzle the languages apart and learn how either works.

Fair enough. And congrats on teaching your kid to speak multiple languages. That is a wonderful skill that will serve her well.

But this is like for a 1–3 year old, maybe 5 or 6 at the outside. After the kids are reasonably fluent in at least their native language, I can’t imagine throwing occasional foreign words is going to give them unreasonable difficulty. I was thrown by the word “children” in the top-level comment.

> seems to require clearly distinct user groups

I’d be interested to see the research on this. I am skeptical that this is required.

Side note: pretty well every language learner goes through a phase where they quickly jump from very limited ability to produce speech to impressive levels of fluency, in a relatively short stretch of time (weeks to months). Those leaps of improvement are not necessarily related to any specific external stimulus.

It’s pretty stamdard advice in articles about bilingual kids; the advice from teachers of the Spanish-primary bilingual public school my gf sent her kids to, etc.

Like I said I’ve never seen anyone practice this, though I have heard some parents in the US apologies for not doing so. My own kid went to non-US bilingual school and there was none of that.

Also, English has a very large number of loan words from other languages.

So you're dropping words from other languages in English all the time.

Avatar, mantra, juggernaut, kindergarten, zeitgeist, and many, many others.

This is true of all languages

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