ismael chang ghalimi

Polyglot

Neige is 28 months old, and speaks four languages: Cantonese, English, French, and Spanish. She can now make full sentences with 3 or 4 words in all four languages, and has a vocabulary of hundreds of words in both English, French, and Spanish. As her mom and I found out, the key is in always associating one tongue to one person: her mom will only speak English to her, I will stick to French, she speaks Spanish at daycare, and her grand-mother on the mother side only speaks Cantonese to her. Overall, she does not seem to be confused, and developed a good understanding that different people speak different languages in order to say similar things. Last week, she was watching Dora in Spanish with her mom and did the translation in English for her. Quite amazing…

Fascinating, and it makes me only a little jealous…

I wish you much luck in continuing to raise her with 4 languages.

Consistency is key! Cases like Neige have been described in other places, including the book Raising Multilingual Children. My experience with this (we are raising my son bilingually) is that while the kid can learn more than one language, at some point imbalances in exposure will produce differential expertise. At 28 months, my son’s proficiency in English and Russian was more similar than now at 3.5 years; English is (slowly) taking over.

I wrote some of this up a while ago on my blog.

Jared, Gene,

You’re absolutely right. Keeping it up is definitely a challenge. In order to maintain a balanced exposure, we’re planning to have her attend a Mandarin-speaking school, either one of the local public schools, or the International School of the Peninsula in Palo Alto. That way, she will spend most of the day speaking Mandarin, and I will continue teaching her French in the evening. Living in the U.S., English should not be a problem, and living in California creates many opportunities for speaking Spanish. We’ll see where this takes us…