Kids learn languages faster then adults

Its great that at this age he speaks two languages. Also strange that he started speaking another language while learning French, but it will be better if he speaks French as he is learning this language.

Beth he already knew English and Spanish before started using the Rosetta Stone French version.

I received an email with the tracking number for my Spanish version, should be here on Thursday.

The one thing the bugged me about ordering from the Rosetta Stone website is you can't buy the software for one user, you have to buy it for five!

I get e-mails on daily basis from Rosetta as adverticing. They do not stop - all I did about a year ago was to into their website.

Why do you have to buy for five. Do they think it is always a whole family or a group who wants to learn a new language and not just a single person?

why don't you just denote that the rosetta stone emails should go into spam?

I do every time - I have written them several times and asked them to stop sending me mail. They continue to mail me.

They told me the price was for five licenses, even thou I told them I only needed one but that’s how they sell the software. I’ve been getting two emails a day and I won’t receive the software until tomorrow but luckily with my IMac I can bounce the emails so I’ll never see them again

If Rosetta Stone at least would send all those e-mails in another language - I could learn something.

My Spanish version was delivered today, you would think for that much money the box would be a lot bigger

Installing the Spanish version on my Mac was a lot different then installing the French version. I had to call technical support in India after being on the phone for 25 minutes and getting no where I finally hung up on the guy.

I'm now installing it myself without their help.

Good luck to you.
Hopefully the instruction is in English or at least in Spanish for beginners.

Thanks! Its actually pretty good software. I’ve only finished lesson one and scored a 97%. The voice recognition software is pretty neat. You have to pronounce the sentence and then select the correct picture that describes the sentence.

Here are some other tapes in Spanish - all for free!
http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Spanish%20Programmatic

Thanks Jane, I'll check them out.

If I have time tonight I'll start lesson number two

There isn't solid evidence that kids learn languages faster than adults. But kids can indeed learn languages... so can adults. Adults often have more things competing for their time though. But I applaud the effort and interest. My daughter could count and say basic greetings and phrases in 9 languages by the time she was 8. We took advantage of times such as riding in the car to review, "echi, ni, san shi" .... "eins, zwei, drei, vier," ... "aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet"...
The real challenge isn't THEIR learning, it's YOUR ability and knowledge to teach to them.

My children can be both speak Thai. I would get them lessons in Mandarin if they were available at the shithole we live in. That said, they've got a jump on Asian languages as they can already speak a tonal language and make the sounds. My wife still struggles with English. Grew up speaking Thai and Laotion, and learned Korean fluently in the just under 4 years she lived there.

The biggest problem for adults is that they think they can learn a language whereas children just absorb a language. Adults ask why? when they don't have the need or the mental wherewithal to understand. Kids just absorb and let their internal grammars sort things out.

I spoke various languages with my son from the time he was 3, he always resented it, and never really mastered any foreign languages, though he graduated from a top college. My daughter was learning 9 languages simultaneously as a child with no pain whatsoever. I hated learning Spanish as a child, but learned Italian easily in middle age. My own research and my own family's experiences indicate to me that there is most certainly a genetic and probably a gender propensity toward learning languages, plus adults are able to bring "cognitive hooks" into play which include a broader vocabulary than children have, thus they can tag more words based on their similarities to English (cognates). A child might expect that the Italian parenti means parents, but it doesn't, it means kin/relatives. Genitori means parents in Italian, but children are unlikely to know cognates such as "progenitors."

So your daughter speaks 9 languages fluently? That's incredible!!

My daughter learned from the time she was 5 years old German and Spanish. She learned more Spanish in school - 12 years of it and hardly speaks the language. Her German is better, although she only went on Saturdays to school for it.

I believe that children use a different part of the brain to learn languages, (the deep motor area).

Not fluently, but she was simultaneously learning 9. She stuck with 4 and lost interest in the rest, which was particularly understandable given that there were no teachers available to continue developing her skill in those.

But again, what worked for her didn't work for my son. Clearly their brains didn't work in the same ways.

As a rule females learn languages better than males and males learn mathematics better than languages.
I am curious why your daughter learned 9 languages.
First of all children should learn the native spoken language of their parents.
That way the learn the idea of grammar, also they live traditions and a feeling of belonging.
If the parents are native speakers in different languages the children can easily learn two - the one from their father and the other one from their mother.
In case a family speaks one/two languages at home and a third one outside the home that is where the child picks up a third language in daycare, school and from friends.