Bilingual Language Learning Quotes

Annoyance has made me bilingual.

My motivation for learning Japanese was to translate a chemical patent, a job that I had heroically (i.e., rashly) taken on.

Language is present in a piece of writing like the sea in a single drop.

The truth is that bilingual babies are like machines.

Learning another language is not only learning how to do things with different words, but also learning how to do things in different world.

At first, we should read with a blitheness practically bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientiousness close to distrust.

imagine telling someone that learning French would ruin their kid’s English, hurt their brain. Usually people scoffed at her and February would nod. It did sound ridiculous. And yet, though fear of bilingualism in two spoken languages had been dismissed as xenophobic nonsense, though it was now desirable for hearing children to speak two languages, medicine held fast to its condemnation of ASL.

Learning another language diminishes prejudice towards those who are different

One small step towards a language is one giant leap towards inclusion.

Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul. Polak and I had often very heated discussions about the desirability or otherwise of giving the children an English education. It has always been my conviction that Indian parents who train their children to think and talk in English from their infancy betray their children and their country. They deprive them of the spiritual and social heritage of the nation, and render them to that extent unfit for the service of the country. Having these convictions, I made a point of always talking to my children in Gujarati. Polak never liked this. He thought I was spoiling their future. He contended, with all the vigour and love at his command, that, if children were to learn a universal language like English from their infancy, they would easily gain considerable advantage over others in the race of life. He failed to convince me. I do not now remember whether I convinced him of the correctness of my attitude, or whether he gave me up as too obstinate. This happened about twenty years ago, and my convictions have only deepened with experience. Though my sons have suffered for want of full literary education, the knowledge of the mother-tongue that they naturally acquired has been all to their and the country’s good, inasmuch as they do not appear the foreigners they would otherwise have appeared. They naturally became bilingual, speaking and writing English with fair ease, because of daily contact with a large circle of English friends, and because of their stay in a country where English was the chief language spoken.

To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often.

I find attempts to create bilingual gospels laughable, in particular the attempt to translate the service from Church Slavonic into Russian. What for? In order not to make the effort and not to learn the divine, if somewhat artificial but solemn, language specially carved for this purpose? This language also provides a link with a tradition which is realized at depths and which the modern Russian language cannot plumb.

It is often important that the anchor language is retained. The home language gives assurance and a feeling of security when there are stormy seas. Even if the child is slow in sailing in that language with progress delayed, it is the boat known to the child. Being forced to switch to the majority language will not make the journey faster or less problematic. It is more important to learn to sail in a familiar boat (the home language) in minority language situations.

Bilingualism and diglossia are different. Bilingualism is about two languages you know having essentially the same functions, such that it is easy to translate from one to the other. Simultaneous translators are bilingual, or even trilingual as the United Nations requires, because they need to be able to say exactly the same things in their different languages. With diglossia, however, what you find is a child first learning one language and speaking it at home, and then later on, maybe at school, transiting to another language which is used for less basic things. The end result is not two separate languages that exist in parallel, but a single competence, where ground-level things are done in the first language and things to do with school, or the modern sector, in another. And since each of these languages is bound to its context, translation is not easy.

This week we'll be learning about key elements of high quality picture books. Using the award winner lists in our course materials, select one picture book and share why it received its award. For example, Abuela is listed in the 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know. According to Publishers Weekly, this is why it's so good: "In this tasty trip, Rosalba is "always going places" with her grandmother--abuela . During one of their bird-feeding outings to the park, Rosalba wonders aloud, "What if I could fly?" Thus begins an excursion through the girl's imagination as she soars high above the tall buildings and buses of Manhattan, over the docks and around the Statue of Liberty with Abuela in tow. Each stop of the glorious journey evokes a vivid memory for Rosalba's grandmother and reveals a new glimpse of the woman's colorful ethnic origins. Dorros's text seamlessly weaves Spanish words and phrases into the English narrative, retaining a dramatic quality rarely found in bilingual picture books. Rosalba's language is simple and melodic, suggesting the graceful images of flight found on each page. Kleven's ( Ernst ) mixed-media collages are vibrantly hued and intricately detailed, the various blended textures reminiscent of folk art forms. Those searching for solid multicultural material would be well advised to embark.

Question, Dave. At what age is it appropriate to stop dreaming of the year I sweep the Nobels, and really hunker down and specialize on the talent that’s gonna win me international acclaim and sex? Fourteen? Eighteen? Six? I got to tell you, nothing discourages the ambitious twelve-year-old like a bilingual Japanese fifth grader who gets onstage at skits, all humble and nervous, and busts fiery concertos out her violin like it’s nothing, or like a linguist mom who tells me that if I were to make it my life’s pursuit to learn the little fiddle prodigy’s primary language, it’s already too late for my brain to pick up on the nuances necessary for fitting in. I’m too late to dominate at something, aren’t I? If I’m too late, it’s fine, I just need to hear you say it so I can transition out of having goals and start nudging whoever’s beside me at skits and going, “Yeah, but at least I’ve got a life.” Or, wait, “Yeah, but at least I’ve got a life.” Well. Not there yet. I’ll work on it.

There are exceptions to this sequential pattern. In a language majority context, children sometimes learn to read in their second language. For example, in Canada children from English-speaking homes take their early years of education through French. Hence, they may learn to read in French first, and English a little later. This usually results in fully biliterate children. Learning to read in French first will not impede later progress in learning to read English.

Something critical happens when the cadre of bilinguals learns to read imported scrolls: they gain entry into a library. I use the word "library" to refer not to a physical building but, more broadly, to the collectivity of accumulated writings. . . . humans possess an ever-increasing store of writings, the totality of which I call the library. The transformation of an oral culture into a written one means, first and foremost, the potential entry of bilinguals into a library.

There may be occasional periods when the bilingual child seems a little behind the monolingual in learning a language. However, this lag is usually temporary. With sufficient exposure and practice, the bilingual child will go through the same language development stages as the monolingual child. Occasionally the speed of the journey may be slightly slower, but the route through the developmental stages is the same.

Keep in mind that the languages that you choose now will be the ones that you orchestrate mostly from home. There’s no reason that your child can’t take advantage of opportunities to learn a third language (or even more) in the future.

C18: A child is autistic or has Asperger's syndrome. Should we use one language only with the child? Children diagnosed with a specific autism spectrum disorder have a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour, with delays in social and emotional development. Such children use language in restricted ways, expecting much consistency in language and communication, and are less likely to learn through language. However, such children may experience the social and cultural benefits of bilingualism when living in a dual language environment. For example, such children may understand and speak two languages of the local community at their own level. Like many parents of children with language impairment, bilingualism was frequently blamed by teachers and other professionals for the early signs of Asperger's, and a move to monolingualism was frequently regarded as an essential relief from the challenges. There is almost no research on autism and bilingualism or on Asperger's syndrome and bilingualism. However, a study by Susan Rubinyi of her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, provides insights. Someone with the challenge of Asperger's also has gifts and exceptional talents, including in language. Her son, Ben, became bilingual in English and French using the one parent–one language approach (OPOL). Susan Rubinyi sees definite advantages for a child who has challenges with flexibility and understanding the existence of different perspectives. Merely the fact that there are two different ways to describe the same object or concept in each language, enlarges the perception of the possible. Since a bilingual learns culture as well as language, the child sees alternative ways of approaching multiple areas of life (eating, recreation, transportation etc.) (p. 20). She argues that, because of bilingualism, her son's brain had a chance to partly rewire itself even before Asperger's syndrome became obvious. Also, the intense focus of Asperger's meant that Ben absorbed vocabulary at a very fast rate, with almost perfect native speaker intonation. Further Reading: Rubinyi, S. (2006) Natural Genius: The Gifts of Asperger's Syndrome . Philadelphia & London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

When language is separated along divisions of different people, different contexts, even different times of the week or day, a child is learning that language compartmentalisation exists. Mixing may still occur early on, but boundaries enable a smooth transition to a stage where children keep their languages relatively separate.

There is as little likelihood of squeezing an adult into the intellectual framework of their childhood as there is into their first pair of pajamas.

What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put them together in meaningful sentences? What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though their early simple communication is successful for most purposes? Does child language develop similarly around the world? How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?

For example, in Spain, the Barcelona Age Factor (BAF) project studied the effects of changing the age of beginning to teach English to Catalan/Spanish bilingual students. When the starting age for teaching English was lowered, Carmen Muñoz and her colleagues took advantage of the opportunity to compare the learning outcomes for students who had started learning at different ages. They were able to look at students’ progress after 100, 416, and 726 hours of instruction. Those who had begun to learn later (aged 11, 14, or 18+) performed better on nearly every measure than those who had begun earlier (aged 8). This was particularly true of measures based on metalinguistic awareness or analytic ability. On listening comprehension, younger starters showed some advantages. Muñoz suggests that this may be based on younger learners’ use of a more implicit approach to learning while older learners’ advantages may reflect their ability to use more explicit approaches, based on their greater cognitive maturity. She points out that, in foreign language instruction, where time is usually limited, ‘younger learners may not have enough time and exposure to benefit fully from the alleged advantages of implicit learning’ (Muñoz 2006: 33).

In the early 1990s, Moon and colleagues showed that two-day-olds can distinguish the sounds of their language from those of an unfamiliar language if the overall rhythms of the sentences are different between languages. Their tiny subjects could tell English from French and Japanese because they have different rhythmic structures, but not English from Dutch, because the rhythmic structures are very similar. By five months, English-learning babies could distinguish English from Dutch, too. At that same age, bilingual Catalan-and Spanish-learning infants could distinguish both of their languages from other languages and from each other.

Page 12: The Bilingual Education Act expanded the idea of students’ right to their own language to their right to be educated in their own language, if their command of English was insufficient for them to learn on a par with native English-speaking students in classrooms where only English was spoken. While obviously conceived as a transition to an English program, in effect, bilingual education also strengthens students’ abilities to communicate in their own language, if that is the language in which it has been determined that they can learn more effectively. The social significance of this development, however unintentional, is that public schools—perhaps for the first time on a national scale—have become actively engaged in maintaining the native language of ethnic minority groups.

We know that babies of around nine months old have had sufficient experience with language(s) to show a certain amount of sensitivity to phonotactic rules. We believe this to be true because babies demonstrate a preference for hearing words that contain highly frequent sound sequences in their language rather than less frequent sequences.

One of the primary jobs for a baby during the first months of learning is to build what we call a sound inventory of the language to which he or she is exposed.

Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year.

Nowhere in all this elaborate brain circuitry, alas, is there the equivalent of the chip found in a five-dollar calculator. This deficiency can make learning that terrible quartet—“Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision,” as Lewis Carroll burlesqued them—a chore. It’s not so bad at first. Our number sense endows us with a crude feel for addition, so that, even before schooling, children can find simple recipes for adding numbers. If asked to compute 2 + 4, for example, a child might start with the first number and then count upward by the second number: “two, three is one, four is two, five is three, six is four, six.” But multiplication is another matter. It is an “unnatural practice,” Dehaene is fond of saying, and the reason is that our brains are wired the wrong way. Neither intuition nor counting is of much use, and multiplication facts must be stored in the brain verbally, as strings of words. The list of arithmetical facts to be memorized may be short, but it is fiendishly tricky: the same numbers occur over and over, in different orders, with partial overlaps and irrelevant rhymes. (Bilinguals, it has been found, revert to the language they used in school when doing multiplication.) The human memory, unlike that of a computer, has evolved to be associative, which makes it ill-suited to arithmetic, where bits of knowledge must be kept from interfering with one another: if you’re trying to retrieve the result of multiplying 7 X 6, the reflex activation of 7 + 6 and 7 X 5 can be disastrous. So multiplication is a double terror: not only is it remote from our intuitive sense of number; it has to be internalized in a form that clashes with the evolved organization of our memory. The result is that when adults multiply single-digit numbers they make mistakes ten to fifteen per cent of the time. For the hardest problems, like 7 X 8, the error rate can exceed twenty-five per cent. Our inbuilt ineptness when it comes to more complex mathematical processes has led Dehaene to question why we insist on drilling procedures like long division into our children at all. There is, after all, an alternative: the electronic calculator. “Give a calculator to a five-year-old, and you will teach him how to make friends with numbers instead of despising them,” he has written. By removing the need to spend hundreds of hours memorizing boring procedures, he says, calculators can free children to concentrate on the meaning of these procedures, which is neglected under the educational status quo.

As the Hispanic population surges past 50%, Spanish will replace English as the dominant language. New waves of Mexican immigrants won’t have to learn English to work or collect welfare, so they won’t bother to. Thus, they will not be assimilated into American society as previous Mexican immigrants have been. Demographics and affirmative action will purge the Anglos out of police departments and other branches of local government. Bilingualism will increasingly be mandatory for both government and private employment. Eventually, a working knowledge of English will not be a requirement for government employment at all. Eventually, Anglo citizens who speak only English will be hard pressed to obtain any government employment or services. The southwest will be transformed into a Spanish-speaking, de facto province of Mexico. Enforcement of immigration laws by Hispanic-controlled police departments will disappear entirely. Some Hispanic-controlled police departments will publicly announce their defiant refusal to enforce immigration laws. Millions of desperate, poverty-stricken Mexicans will stream across the border.

The deepest connection you have with someone & their culture, is through learning their language.

The research evidence suggests that a better approach is to strive for additive bilingualism—the maintenance of the home language while the second language is being learned. This is especially true if the parents are also learners of the second language. If parents continue to use the language that they know best with their children, they are able to express their knowledge and ideas in ways that are richer and more elaborate than they can manage in a language they do not know as well. Using their own language in family settings is also a way for parents to maintain their own self-esteem, especially as they may have their own struggles with the new language outside the home, at work, or in the community. Maintaining the family language also allows children to retain family connections with grandparents or relatives who do not speak the new language.

There are those who eagerly learn another language to be one with another culture, then there are those morons who insist on the exclusive glorification of their so-called native language. The world is beautified by the former, whereas the latter only sustain disharmony - the latter only act as a prehistoric impediment to the unification of humankind.

I raised you to care deeply, too much so. About words, for one thing. All those years spent working as a bilingual teacher’s aide, undoing what Khmer children learned at home, perhaps it had made me paranoid. I thought I needed to ensure your fluency in English, in being American. The last thing I had wanted was for you to end up like your Ba—speaking broken English to angry customers, his life covered in the grease of cars belonging to men who were more American. So I read to you as much as I could, packed your room with dictionaries and encyclopedias, played movies in English constantly in the background, and spoke Khmer only in whispers, behind closed doors. No wonder mere words affected you so much. Even now, you still think language is the key to everything. And that’s my fault—I thought the same thing.

Why can't bilingualism be seen as an extra resource? Is it because kids who can think in two languages are smarter? (from the book Attitude, 2002)

Speakers of two or more languages are said to be more creative thinkers.34 Studies have also shown that bilingual children have better-developed metalinguistic awareness (the ability to think about words and language as abstract things). This may help them learn to read earlier.35 Plus, being bilingual in childhood makes picking up another language easier.36

[...] when faced with a new language, the bilingual has to learn to juggle with three balls, already knowing how to do so with two, while the monolingual has to learn from the beginning.

Bilingualism stimulates your brain, improving memory retention and overall cognitive function, which can contribute to a healthier mind.

Bilingual individuals have been shown to have smaller vocabularies and to take longer in retrieving words from memory when compared to monolinguals.

it has been estimated that there are fewer monolingual speakers in the world than bilinguals and multilinguals.

Earlier this year, a self-identified White, monolingual English-speaking teacher explained to me that, among other signs of her stupidity, Dr Baez’s English language skills are ‘horrible, and from what I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either’...If Dr Baez, the bilingual school principal with multiple university degrees, including a doctorate in education, was subjected to such discriminatory thinking, then what could this mean for students, who were positioned in highly subordinate institutional positions?

While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome

Culture shapes the language, Language shapes the culture. When you absorb another language, It reshapes your mental atmosphere.

Between 2000 and 2005, the Hispanic population increased at an annual rate of 3.7 percent, no less than 14 times the growth rate for whites, and more than three times the black rate. This increase was due both to high birthrates and to immigration of about 800,000 Hispanics every year. Much of that immigration was illegal. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated in 2009 that 12.7 million Mexican citizens were living in the United States in 2008, and that they accounted for 60 percent of the 11.9 million or so illegal immigrants in the country. The center has estimated that other Hispanics account for another 20 percent of illegal immigrants. Most Americans believe that a willingness to learn English is a prerequisite to full participation in American life, but this does not appear to be a high priority for many Hispanics. According to a 2006 poll conducted by Investor’s Business Daily, 81 percent of Hispanics spoke mostly or only Spanish at home. Even Hispanics who are comfortable in English prefer Spanish; according to a poll by P.C. Koch, nearly 90 percent of bilingual Hispanics get their news exclusively from Spanish-language sources. In 2003, 44 percent of Hispanics did not speak and read English well enough to perform routine tasks, up from 35 percent in 1992. English illiteracy therefore increased for Hispanics during the decade, whereas it declined for every other major population group.