Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

I was raised trilingual: born in America to a Colombian dad and Lithuanian mom, so I speak English, Spanish, and Lithuanian. My Lithuanian has gotten a bit rusty since my younger days (mostly out of lack of practice--it's not a language you hear every day), but otherwise I'm fine with all three. Though I can't quite put my finger on it, I have no doubt in my mind that being raised with three languages has had a significant positive impact in how I think. And it's only as I've gotten older that I've realized what a gift that was. When I was young everyone would tell me that, but I didn't believe them because it seemed so natural!

If anything, knowing more than one language makes you better appreciate the commonalities of all langauges. For example English and Spanish are heavily rooted in Latin (English mostly in vocabulary), so you see a lot of words inbetween. Likewise Lithuanian also has a surprising amount of vocabulary lifted directly from Latin. Knowing all three and how these seemingly completely disparate languages are in fact related in many ways fills me with wonder.

Me as well, having Romanian parents, being born in Thailand (where they taught me English) and coming to Sweden at age two. Romanian, being the last language I learned well, is the rustiest of course.

But I too feel that one can appreciate the commonalities of all the languages, and that, at least for me, I often can see how languages are built, through the pre- and suffixes, and how they work in a Latin manner. This has helped a lot when I had to learn a fourth language in school (French for 4 years, Spanish for 2 - both being very poor now that I haven't trained).

For these reasons I am shocked that people actually thought that raising a bilingual child would do damage their intelligence, seeing how a lot of smart people have been polyglots - although that was not necessarily something they were raised to be, but still.

Laba diena!

I was bilangual as well. I grew up speaking Lithuanian, and moved to the US at around 7, picking up English surprisingly quickly. My lithuanian is also very rusty, as yes, the only people I ever encounter that speak it are my family (and apparently you).

I was going to come on here and make a very similar point. A few years after moving to the United States, I was involved in a "vocabulary bee", won in my school and did very well at the state competition. This despite the fact that I had been speaking English for less than 3 years, and had no training for the competition, instead answering largely on intuition. I realize now how much knowing Lithuanian helped me largely because of its latin backgrounds.

Later I went on to take several years of spanish, and I had the experience, and noticed it amongst my classmates that the people that picked up the language the fastest were the ones that already spoke more than one language.

Being in Canada, we've been able to put our daughter into French immersion schooling (we only speak English at home... for now!). She's only in kindergarten and so we're finding it really hard to get her to understand the reasons why it's good for her to do this. C'est la vie :)

Although we see all of these awesome benefits in our friends who are bilingual, like I say, it's hard to get her to understand this. Instead, we just tell her how good it will be that pretty soon she will be able to talk with her cousin and our son (who are both about to start school the same way) without parents understanding what it is they're talking about. She likes that idea.

Of course, my wife and I are feverishly trying to learn it ourselves, too!

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