[lojban] Re: Fwd: lojban and raising a child bi-lingual

["H. Felton" <fagricipni@gmail.com>]

On 9/22/09, MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com <MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com> wrote:
> In a message dated 9/22/2009 11:26:25 Eastern Daylight Time,
> adam@pubcrawler.org writes:
>
>
>> says everything I would want to, only better.  Particularly the "Children
>> learn language easily" part (wish there were an internal anchor there).
>> Short
>> version: learning languages is really hard, and children don't tend to do
>> it
>> if they can at all avoid it.
>>
>
> If it were hard, then why is it that every kid in the world who is even
> approximately normal physically (able to hear and/or see, make utterances,
> think) learns the language of the people around him, without anyone teaching
> him. In some cultures (El Salvador hills) the kids' speech is ignored until
> they're able to speak more than baby talk.  And the kids still learn it.
>
> mu'o mie stevon

I remember reading some article that made the point about even children
not learning a language if they don't have to (it may have been that one); I
think that the answer is that a child has to learn at least one language in
order to far more clearly communicate its desires -- but a second langauge
is a redundancy, unless for some reason there is someone significant in
their lives that does not respond properly to the first language; an
example of the would be a child who is taken care by a non-English-
speaking nanny while their parents are at work, but their parents only
speak English; however if the child learns that the nanny can speak
English, the child will resist learning the second language -- well,
perhaps not very early in learning language, but certainly by the time
that the chuld is 4 or 5 years old.


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