What's the maximum number of languages a baby can learn at once?

[A_BC]

Is there any scientific research about this subject? Any personal experience?

Thanks

[mom2bee]

I think the general understanding is that baby could learn as many languages as they're given constant exposure too and provided with ample reason and need for.

I have met Africans who speak 4+ languages. They grew up needing 4 languages.

I met a young man from Africa who spoke 8 languages fluently plus about 6 more to various levels. He learned them in his home town thorugh need. There are blogs by parents raising qudrilingual children, which are excellent resources because you get to read through detailed posts about the babies development and how the parents maintain the languages.

Keep in mind that children need about 33% of their waking time in a langauge to truly learn the language to fluency and they need to hear the language modeled regularly by at least one person but the occassional immersion environment is required to boost language fluency to get from point A to point B.

OPOL works best, one person one language, so that a child can learn a language from each parent and possibly from a nanny also, and the community language makes 4.

Once your child knows 2 or three langauges, it is easy for them to learn more.

I'm hoping to teach my children 4+ languages.
Spanish from me.
Arabic from their dad.
Chinese from carefully selected media
and English from my family


in the first several months but I also want my children to learn French, Japanese, German and Esperanto.

[A_BC]

Thanks a lot for your response. Do you have the links of these blogs?

Actually, I am teaching my 4months-old son Arabic, French, English and ASL, his father speaks Arabic (a different dialect than mine) and planning to introduce GErman and Spanish as I speak them too (but not fluently) as well as Chinese ( I don't speak it AT ALL).

So the system won't be OPOL but may be based on a schedule (each day a different language).

Also, I am wondering about how to teach them with LR... That's gonna be a LOOOOT of work especially that I want to follow the same curriculum for all the languages. For the moment, I am showing him LR 3 times a day. I am also worried about how to introduce LM (Should I use it in many languages as well?). This may sound overwhelming but I read in many researches that babies are like sponges (e.g: The Absorbent Mind/ Montessori).

[aangeles]

Hi Chiraz,

I started teaching my baby English, Chinese, Filipino, and ASL when she was 3-6 months old, introduced French and Spanish at 14-16 months and Japanese at 29 months. We only speak English, Chinese, and Filipino at home. The rest of the languages she learns from exposure to native speakers, LR, audiobooks, music CDs, DVDs, and games. So far, it appears to be working well. Just this morning, I woke up to hear her reading from one of her French books!    And now she is watching and laughing along with a French cartoon.    We actually debated whether to introduce Japanese or Arabic as her 7th language but decided to go with Japanese since her dad trained in Japan many years ago and can still remember a few words of rusty Japanese (although nowhere near fluent). I am really interested in the Arabic lessons you are working on though. You may find this website useful: http://multilingualchildren.org/ On that forum, I have read of children growing up fluent in as many as 6 languages with constant exposure.

Hope this helps! 

[TracyR4]

I'm curious as to how with families that have no one in the family that are bilingual. We are a 'typical' American family. No one speaks a lick of anything except English. Of course we've picked up a few words of this or that in Spanish ( from shows like Dora the Explorer) but neither my husband speak a foreign language.
My father was Polish but never really taught it to us. He thought we would pick it up but we weren't immersed in it at all. He only spoke Polish when he was with his family and we weren't around them enough to pick it up. I mean I know Polish when I hear it but I don't speak it at all.  We don't live close to my dad so my children really don't know my dad that well nor when they have been he doesn't speak Polish. Which if your not around people who can speak it , well there is no need to.

So how do you consistently teach a child a foreign language when you don't speak it yourself. My 4yr old seems to like Spanish. I'd love for them to learn Polish( as well as I) and French and German.
I'm thinking of getting the Your Baby Can Read Learn to Speak programs.
But my question if its not spoke consistently in the home , will all be lost?

[aangeles]

You are exactly right, Tracy. Children are very practical creatures and need to see that there is a use for a particular language for them to speak it. Which is why teaching multiple languages works best when there is a native speaker to speak with. For the non-native languages that I am teaching Ella, I am just really only laying the foundations by using multimedia resources. Ultimately, I plan to have a native speaker of each language interact with her on a regular basis so that she will be truly fluent. Once a child becomes fluent in a certain language, it becomes very hard to really lose it. They may become rusty and forget certain terms or figure of speech, but once the need for the language arises again, they will easily re-learn it, like riding a bicycle.   

[A_BC]

Hi Chiraz,

I started teaching my baby English, Chinese, Filipino, and ASL when she was 3-6 months old, introduced French and Spanish at 14-16 months and Japanese at 29 months. We only speak English, Chinese, and Filipino at home. The rest of the languages she learns from exposure to native speakers, LR, audiobooks, music CDs, DVDs, and games. So far, it appears to be working well. Just this morning, I woke up to hear her reading from one of her French books!    And now she is watching and laughing along with a French cartoon.    We actually debated whether to introduce Japanese or Arabic as her 7th language but decided to go with Japanese since her dad trained in Japan many years ago and can still remember a few words of rusty Japanese (although nowhere near fluent). I am really interested in the Arabic lessons you are working on though. You may find this website useful: http://multilingualchildren.org/ On that forum, I have read of children growing up fluent in as many as 6 languages with constant exposure.

Hope this helps! 

Hi Aaangles,

I am so glad that your little girl is progressing that well in French! This is really encouraging!
I'll try to add sounds to the files I upload so that people who don't speak Arabic can learn directly from LR, I'll be more than happy if you use them with your little girl. She's so cute by the way, I can't stop singing "Tchin Tchin" after watching the video

[mom2bee]

http://multitonguekids.blogspot.com <--Quadrilingual family. Danish Father, Italian Mother, living in France, the parents use English between them. No recent updates.

http://busyasabeeinparis.blogspot.com/ <--French father, Spanish-American mom. They now live in Paris, but started out in the states

http://babybilingual.blogspot.com <-- American Francophone mom, using only non-native French with her son to help him be bilingual.

http://babelkid.blogspot.com/ <-- family raising quadrilingual children.

http://trilingual.livejournal.com/ <--a globetrotting family, an Indonesian mom, French father. Raising their kids with OPOL. They lived in America, where their son went to preschool and learned English, then they lived in Germany for a little over a year and their son picked up German language, now they live in Australia. In both Germany and Australia, their kids attend French Ecole (schools) but they only cultivate English, Indonesian and French.

There are many more blogs, many of them you can find through the links on the recommended blogs above.

This should be enough to get you all started. Happy reading.

[TracyR4]

I'll admit this is one thing American children do not have much of an advantage in at all. Unless you are born into a family that speaks another language your plum out of luck.. Foreign languages are taught in some schools ( where there is a higest percentage of Spanish speakers), and its mostly Spanish(because South American is below us.
 Not all schools in elementary grade have foreign languge programs and high schools really lack in their ability to teach a foreign language. If you are lucky in high school to go to a foreign country to submerse yourself in it, or come from a family that speaks different languages your out of luck there too.

[carpe vestri vita]

I have no research handy, but I remember reading that kids have 10-25% fewer words per language on average for each additional language they speak. The average two year old monolingual child has 50 words. This implies that there is a limit to how many languages can be learned natively. So I made a chart:

Languages	Words per  language	Total words
1	50	50
2	37 to 45	74 to 90
3	27 to 41	81 to 123
4	20 to 37	80 to 148
5	15 to 34	75 to 170
6	11 to 31	66 to 186
7	8 to 28	56 to 196
8	6 to 26	48 to 208
9	4 to 24	36 to 216
]10	3 to 22	30 to 220
11	2 to 20	22 to 220
12	1 to 18	12 to 216
13	0 to 16	0 to 208

After 7 languages there may be an overall loss of words, and after 13 there is the risk of the child having no words at all. Statistically of course. I don't know anyone trying to teach their child more than 7 languages.

We are teach Zed 7 at once though. He has, at nearly 14 months, picked up about 60 words and a dozen or so phrases. But they are nearly all English (the language of the environment here) I'd say at least three dozen words and 7 phrases are English. 15 words and 2 phrases are French. He has no Spanish words but does have a couple phrases. And two words in each of the other 4 languages, and one Chinese phrase. Which just proves that my sample size is too small. 

[A_BC]

We are teach Zed 7 at once though. He has, at nearly 14 months, picked up about 60 words and a dozen or so phrases. But they are nearly all English (the language of the environment here) I'd say at least three dozen words and 7 phrases are English. 15 words and 2 phrases are French. He has no Spanish words but does have a couple phrases. And two words in each of the other 4 languages, and one Chinese phrase. Which just proves that my sample size is too small. 

Congratulations, your child must be very smart!    What's the method you are using to teach him all these languages? Are using any special programs?

[A_BC]

http://multitonguekids.blogspot.com <--Quadrilingual family. Danish Father, Italian Mother, living in France, the parents use English between them. No recent updates.

http://busyasabeeinparis.blogspot.com/ <--French father, Spanish-American mom. They now live in Paris, but started out in the states

http://babybilingual.blogspot.com <-- American Francophone mom, using only non-native French with her son to help him be bilingual.

http://babelkid.blogspot.com/ <-- family raising quadrilingual children.

http://trilingual.livejournal.com/ <--a globetrotting family, an Indonesian mom, French father. Raising their kids with OPOL. They lived in America, where their son went to preschool and learned English, then they lived in Germany for a little over a year and their son picked up German language, now they live in Australia. In both Germany and Australia, their kids attend French Ecole (schools) but they only cultivate English, Indonesian and French.

There are many more blogs, many of them you can find through the links on the recommended blogs above.

This should be enough to get you all started. Happy reading.

Thx a lot! karma point to you!

[A_BC]

@tracyR4:

Public schools in the US really lack language teaching, but there is a HUGE opportunity to learn about culture and languages in private institutes or within communities. So, I think you really can teach your child many languages by simply hiring a nanny who will use her native language or by using those community services.

[annisis]

Currently in our household, we speak English. I know a very small amount of Spanish as my father and step mother were fluent and I was actually born in Panama. My husband knows very little German for HS. Our plan is to do what aangeles is doing and expose our child to as much as possible. We also hope to learn many languages ourselves as the years go on.

We are going to homeschool Josiah, and I think as time goes on and we( my husband and I) learn more languages, I will implement a rule that we speak a certain language as much as possible in our home on certain days.

Something like: Monday- Spanish, Tuesday - German, Wednesday - Japanese, etc etc.

This will allow my husband and myself to grow our own minds and for our son to retain what he has already learned. I think making it a family effort makes it all the more fun! It will of course be slow going for the adults. Probably intense study of a new language each year for us, but we dream big here.... really BIG!

At the same time, I hope to continue to acquire more complex literature in foreign languages as my son grows older. I want to make these part of his curriculum. We plan on studying world religions and I think that will also be very helpful.

I currently have no experience, only dreams. 

[A_BC]

@annisis: we're all having dreams now but it would be great if we share the progress our children are making so we learn from each other

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