Multi-Lingual, What Happened To Our Brains?

There was a time when being multi-lingual was the norm for many, especially Jews. That's why there were always some Jews in the ships that explored the great oceans, like in Columbus's crew.

The more languages a person knows, the easier it is to understand and learn newer ones. And the younger a person is when he/she learns, the easier it is.

When a child is exposed to multiple languages from day one, they are part of his/her speech, basic linguistic development, not "extra" languages.

Just like the medical experts who interfered so in infant feeding that few babies since the twentieth century are given mother's milk until old enough to eat regular food, modern educators and speech therapists made all sorts of rules and charts and insisted that it's "too difficult" for a baby or young child to absorb multiple languages, creating a mono-lingual society.

Suddenly, multilingualism became a rarity. The children of multilingual parents who grew up hearing only one language only found learning a second language in school impossibly difficult.

When I was growing up in mid-twentieth century U.S.A., learning a foreign language was considered "only for the brightest." It was rare to be exposed to a foreign language until high school. When that's the case, it is hard to learn a second language.

It's easiest and best to make sure children grow up on more than one language. It's a painless way of learning. The brain develops in a more flexible way, making it easier to learn more and more languages.

Don't listen to the "experts" who claim that it's best to perfect one before learning another. They're wrong. Even children of lower than average intelligence can be bilingual if that's what they're exposed to.

My five kids all had different patterns in their early speech development. My oldest kids heard mostly English and just a bit of Hebrew when we were out. The younger ones heard mostly Hebrew, except from me. At times they "stopped" using English and only spoke Hebrew to me, but by adolescence they were all bilingual.