The Mysteries of Learning Two Languages

Here’s an odd thing I learnt the other day about language.   If you teach a young child two languages at the same time, they learn them both as fast as any other child learns one.  I wouldn’t have believed this, but I have several bi-lingual work colleagues with young kids and it’s true.  Their kids are learning more than one language at the same rate as their peers are learning one.

Surely, this defies logic, you’d think.  Learning two languages must be harder.  In fact, wouldn’t it simply be confusing?  If anything, shouldn’t the confusion make them learn slower?  This got me thinking, and here’s what I thought:

Learning language isn’t about learning the words.  Learning language is about learning to divide the world into concepts that can be tagged with a word.  For example, if you want to learn the word ‘table’, you have to learn how to sound out the word, but that’s the easy bit (spelling it comes later).  You also have to learn that when someone makes that sound, they mean something like, “Any structure with more than two supporting legs and a large flat top that can be placed on the ground or other surface to support other objects – commonly food or drinks – to elevate them up to the level where they are easier for human beings to reach.  Oops remember, it’s not just a shape; it’s only a table if it’s designed to have this function (not just any platform will be a table).  Also it is only a table if the size of it is roughly adapted to be convenient for humans, though toy tables made for dolls etc. also exist….”  And my definition could go on listing exceptions and boundaries.  The point being, learning ‘table’ is easy; it’s learning how to recognise the boundaries of what table might mean (logging all that definitional stuff) that takes the mental effort.

Now we begin to see why it’s not so difficult for a kid to learn multiple languages at the same time, provided they are learning them at the same time as laying down the definitional memory.  If I learn that “a table = ‘a very long definition requiring much memory storage'”, it takes only a fraction more brain power to learn that  ” a table =eine Tabelle =Tēburu = ‘a very long definition requiring much memory storage'” … and now I’m up and running in German and Japanese as well as English!

If what I’m saying is true, it might also explain why psychologists detect a reformatting of the brain which occurs when children learn language.  Free thought becomes confined by the boundaries that we are forced to put on concepts in order to make language work.  You can’t have language unless you are willing to fence off the mental landscape and call some things ‘table’ and some things ‘chair’;  more worryingly you also have to put artificial boundaries around scales of thought that don’t really have boundaries, for example ‘love, like, tolerate, dislike, hate’.