curious - do any bilingual children struggle with their languages?

[nonicknameseemsavailable]

not sure how to phrase this so it makes sense.

you know how some people find languages easy, so you could be brought up speaking one language but you naturally find it easy to learn more languages and equally some people struggle and really can't learn another language.

I am curious if children who are being raise bilingual can also struggle. So some naturally just learn both and are fine but is it actually a kind of 'programming the brain' issue and some people genuinely CAN'T learn more than one language without problems and therefore could affect a child who is trying to learn both as native languages?

does that make sense? purely out of curiosity. I know a child who is being raised bilingual (now 6) and who struggles with both languages, I don't mean just reading and writing but more general confusion, she just struggles with both so it made me wonder if some of us are just wired up to only deal with one language.

More people in the world are bilingual than monolingual ... I remember meeting a quite ordinary teenager from West Africa who spoke 5 languages; this is normal, apparently ...

languages are different sizes, English is one of the biggest, so speaking English is the equivalent of speaking several smaller languages, that is not to say everyone who speaks English has a large vocabulary though, so the NUMBER of languages you speak is not much of an indication of the AMOUNT of language you use.

For example, I have friends who speak several languages, lets just say A,B and C. if I ask them "how do you say such and such in language A" I might get an answer "language A is not for saying that sort of thing, we would use language B" etc.

Many European languages are large, but English is the oldest and one of the largest.

Yes, there are bilingual individuals who never get to grips with either language, and have serious communication difficulties, but I am not convinced that this is to do with being bilingual. I suspect they might have had the same difficulties is they were "monolingual"

I think i was left with word finding difficulties. I have a greek cypriot father and english mother and my greek grandmother came to live with us when i was a baby. My dp talked in english however gm could not speak any english. My school friends said that i spoke to her in greek but i have no memory of that. She died when I was 9 or 10. I do understand some greek words and can distinguish words even if I dont know the meaning sometimes. In english I have always had a very large vocabulary and in top sets at school etc. However ,particularly when I am stressed, I do struggle to find the word I want to use. I know the word but i can't find it. I have not problems understanding, I just can't retrieve a word I want to use. This can happen when I am talking or writing as well.

Thank you, I find it really interesting. It is quite hard to imagine when you have only been brought up with one language. In my daughter's classes over 60% of the children are at least bilingual if not trilingual so it is interesting to find out about how brains deal with it.

Mind it is also interesting to know that it isn't always a bonus.

I just happened to me with the word "humanities". I know the meaning and correct use, but for the life of me I couldn't think of the department at school that covers geography, history etc and had to google it.

bruffin - I think it is very normal for everyone (monolinguals included) to struggle with speech while stressed. Why do you think that it is your exposure to a second language as a child that has caused this difficulty to find words in English? Surely you learned the word 'humanities' when you were older than 10, at which point you didn't hear/speak any Greek anyway.

For multilingual people, any difficulty re finding words is usually about knowing the word in one language but not being able to quickly find it in the other - like, wanting to say 'cuisine' in an English sentence and not being able to remember the word 'kitchen' for a few seconds.

With me it's not the same as normal struggling with speech when stressed. I actually said stress makes it worse. It is noticeable and commented on by other people. The best way to describe it is, it feels like my brain has several compartment and i am having to look in more than one compartment to find that word, i know it's there but things have got muddled up and my greek was very limited to start with, if my brain was trying to search in both the greek compartment and the english compartment it wouldnt find an awful lot in the greek one. IFSWIM so that why i am coming up with a blank rather than a greek word.

Our DS is just 3. I'm a native English speaker, DH bilingual English/Spanish (castillano). DS speaks English with us, Catalan/Spanish at school and in the street. He has been at nursery since 21 months.

His English is ok, not very sophisticated for his age. His Catalan is ropey - he mostly repeats things (including the teacher saying, "childname, you don't have to repeat my words"!) or speaks in imperatives. His Spanish seems to be bottom of the tree!

I know he is only 3yo and he will get there and his Catalan will bypass his English at some point.

Fwiw, DH was born in the north of Spain and spoke Spanish until he was 7 when they moved to an English-speaking country. He has no recollection of having any problems picking ut up. He did, however, piss his pants in class when the Latin teacher refused to let him go to the toilet as he couldn't form the question in Latin arsehole teacher

oh latin teachers were terrifying.

Especially Opus Dei Latin teachers nonicknameseemsavailable

oh I can imagine!

Yes. I live abroad amongst lots of expats and know some children that manage four languages without difficulty (two at home one from each parent and two at school since I live in in area with two official languages). Other children struggle with two. It seems particularly difficult for the struggling kids if they don't have one of the languages at home (I guess because parents have the time and focus to encourage language development where as a teacher might simply not understand what a child means and needs to focus on 20 or so children).