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Passing your Polish language and culture to your kids [74]
Darius, really then I have to accept that the language teachers that taught my children were correct
I don't know what that refers to.
What I wrote is not some invention of mine. This is based on research (not mine). When you write about linguistic abilities it may mean a lot of things. For instance the linguistic abilities of 50 year old autistic persons often leave a lot of room for improvement.
The above is biggest load of bull I have ever heard.I have direct experience of this situation with one of my own children and know at least six other bi-lingual children of a similar age group that have had the same problem and been treated at the age of 7/8.
Again, the information I posted is based on serious research by linguists and psychologists. Those particular observations of yours do not apply since the issue is not whether the children at the age of 7/8 will hit some problems in a new language acquisition. Of course they will. It would be idiotic to think otherwise. The issue is the linguistic competence and linguistic performance as defined by Noam Chomsky and the threshold age beyond which it is generally impossible to become linguistically competent. It is generally accepted that the barrier beyond which the chances to acquire it are at about the age I mentioned earlier. So the linguistic competence of those 7/8 olds (given the right context and circumstances) will be the same as of the native speakers of the language - eventually but not when they are just starting out.
You also mentioned your daughter was reading a book by Ryszard Kapuściński. If she is reading the book in Polish, how can the translation be botched, when Ryszard Kapuściński wrote his books in his native language of Polish and your daughter is reading the book in Polish.
I thought you'd figure out the response before you asked the silly question. Oh well, here it is - she read the English version first and she did not like the language. Just asked here again yesterday and she sticks to it - the translation is botched and devoid of the original color of the language.
You should understand this is NOT a pissing contest for who's child is better, it is a place to discuss common interests.
Not at all. I have an academic background in both linguistics and psychology. I also used to teach, and obviously I had to learn foreign languages. In addition, I have a direct experience with people who fall into the category of people we discuss here, not just my daughter by dozens, if not hundreds of speakers of Spanish, Yiddish, Italian etc. All new residents of New York City, some norther areas of NJ and fringes of Long Island.
following a development plan with a expert in linguistics, the acquisition of languages becomes easier as they get older. 'It is not about what ability your child has,the main question is what are you going to do with it?"
Apart from a very loose approach to the terminology, sadly, you appear to have a pretty vague understanding of psycholinguistics and thus you mix terms, circumstances and scenarios.
An older child (say 16 and on) will understand the written rules of the grammar and such, but a child who has been raised in a given language environment since birth does not need to be aware of those written rules. They grow into them. The 16 year old will more than likely be always distinguishable from a native speaker. A child who started in his/her infancy will not.
Guess how many perfectly bilingual children in Harlem owe their language skills to the efforts of their parents (if they even know who their parents are) or some wonderfully conceived and executed language learning plans? My guess would be 1 in 10 000.
As for the "studies" you mentioned, the figure of 10 perfectly bilingual children in Poland is 100% bogus. You'd need to test every single bilingual child in Poland to take this number seriously. Do you have a link to those results and how they arrived at them?
