multilingual children

[szabgab]

Hmm, I guess I am reading too much about motherhood and stuff as I started to remember that once I was very interested in the topic of multilingual children. I subscribed to a mailing list where people discussed difficulties and how they manage it. I even bought a book or two about the subject.

I think this helped a lot and my son now has both a Hebrew mother-tongue and a partial Hungarian father-tongue, so to speak. Unfortunately my daughter quite refuses to speak in Hungarian. She does not even want me to tell her stories in Hungarian.

Anyway I searched for multilingual and surprisingly only found one other person listing it as an interest.

Comments

[cesy]

Several of my cousins are to some extent multilingual, due to where they've lived. For English people living abroad, the kids tend to grow up bilingual just because they'll speak one language at school and another at home. One family has now moved back to the UK, and the kids are still very good at languages, though nowhere near multilingual.

What ages did they start learning the other languages, and how much did they speak them? I would guess that makes a huge difference.

start at 0

[szabgab]

I started to talk to them Hungarian when they were born, actually I think even before that.

My son was more lucky in that we spent almost a year in Hungary after he was born so even his first words were in Hungarian. Then we moved back to Israel and when my daughter was born she heard a lot less Hungarian as the environment was not there and even I could spend less time with her than with my son.