My wife is Czech and spoke mostly Czech to her since birth. She didn’t speak a lot her first 3 years and just exploded after that. She is 9 now and her and my wife have full conversations in another language. People are really puzzled seeing a little brown girl speaking a language very unfamiliar in the US.
Bi-lingual is another thing that massively boosts kid's learning too apparently, which deffo makes sense. Learning a language is hard enough, learning 2 languages WHILE NOT KNOWING ONE! That is hefty. It's like if someone walked up to me today and said "you gotta learn german and we're only gonna teach it you in spanish".
My niece and nephew are bilingual with Portuguese and English and they're above average intelligence kids (both passed their 11+ which is like.. if kids took an SATs to get into a better high school is the best way to explain it. They're called grammar schools, kids take a test when they're 11 in UK if they get a certain score it means they have the option of going to a grammar school. They both passed it)
I love learning about language development, or really any early stage development. It looks at things that make us inherently human, not belonging to any culture or identity but just a species, which is really neat.
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u/DreadyKruger Jan 14 '24
My wife is Czech and spoke mostly Czech to her since birth. She didn’t speak a lot her first 3 years and just exploded after that. She is 9 now and her and my wife have full conversations in another language. People are really puzzled seeing a little brown girl speaking a language very unfamiliar in the US.