Disadvantages Of Multilingual Children

Introduction

Psychological studies have found out that speaking several languages can have great benefits on learning, cognition, memory, task conducting and many many other . The brains of bilingual and multilingual people work in a different way than monolingual speakers and thanks to these differences for quite many mental benefits. The most interesting thing is that only people who are bilingual or multilingual can have these positive factors. not Unless you have spoken a foreign language, your brain might not reap these bilingual benefits. However, people who begin language study in their adult lives can still achieve the same levels of fluency as a young learner, and still reap the same mental benefits, too. There are so many benefit

Your extra effort will give them a valuable skill they'll use in numerous ways for the rest of their lives.

The Cons

To make an informed decision, you simply need to know the facts. The truth is that there are basically only four potential disadvantages, and even these are not true in every case:

Speaking Later. While there's no scientific evidence that proves multilinguals begin speaking later, many parents estimate that there is a three to six month delay compared to monolingual children the same age. If you think about it, it makes sense that a child learning two or more language systems might take more time, since they are actually learning twice as many words. Even so, six months is a small price to pay for the ability to speak two or three languages!

Mixing languages. Mixing words is very common in children learning more than one language at a time. But this is a temporary phenomenon. At the age of four or five it has mostly disappeared. Don't forget that children who are learning only one language often use the wrong word until they learn the right one, and adults often say "umm" when the right word doesn't come quickly. When multilingual kids can't think of a word in Vietnamese, for example, they might borrow it from French. This automatically disappears when the vocabulary in each language increases. The best remedy is to be consistent when talking to your child. Your patience will be rewarded,

This is probably the biggest issue. Raising a multilingual child is a commitment and much like piano lessons -- you can't expect your little one to be a virtuoso overnight. This is a long-term investment in your child. It will require extra effort on your part to provide enough language exposure, extra encouragement, keeping your language rules consistent, and in some cases even change the previous language pattern in the family. It can feel a bit awkward at first if you introduce a new language into the family when baby is born, but rest assured, after a few weeks it simply becomes a part of your daily routine. Incidentally, it's easier to raise a multilingual second child if your first child was raised that way. Your first will end up doing a lot of the work for you by simply being a natural chatterbox. Parents of multilingual children agree overwhelmingly that the benefits for their children are well worth the