For those of you raising or who have raised a bilingual child
What did that look like during early stages of language development? Did they prefer one language over another, mix words and phrases, etc? I'm just curious to hear about your experiences.
I'm in the process of teaching them Tagalog. They're now learning body parts. They prefer to speak English. It's good that way because all their friends are Australian. Atleast when we travel it's not too hard for them. Teaching them while they're young.😊
We made sure they were fluent in English first then sent them to barnehage aged three and half. Six months later they were indistinguishable from the natives. They rarely mixed up the two languages (English and Norwegian).
I on the other hand being 30 years older took five years to achieve my fluent bad accent and am now able to be simultaneously tongue tied in two languages and even more often only able to bring to mind a word in the language I'm not speaking.
Throwing an English word into a Norwegian sentence doesn't bother most Norwegians but dropping a Norwegian word into a conversation with an English speaker tends to derail things.
I can't answer but the question fascinates me. How the mind works speaking multiple languages. What language do you think in and the instant translation while speaking. To my pea brain it's baffling
@Gibbon it actually baffles my mind as well, because I didn't start learning our language until I was an adult. I've never seen the processing from the beginning stages of language development before.
We were told not to mix languages mid sentence when she was really, really young as it could be confusing. Other than that, her preference is English but she uses the odd Greek word here and there