Bi- and multilingualism at children

i think it is awesome. i wish my father had spoken chinese to us so that i could speak it. i am now struggling to learn it later in life. stinks.

i guess as long as children fully speak and understand both languages there is no problem. however, if speaking one causes them to not be able to speak the other, hmm, you have a dilemma.

I was raised multi-lingual until we moved to the US o A in my teens where the US of A school system beat me senseless till I only spoke only good americanese.

The more you expose children to different languages the better.

Having such an experience I would say I feel good when switching on languages. I never felt confused or mixed languages.

One can only benefit from that exposure...

My kids are bilingual (English and Spanish) with no accent in either. I am jealous (and proud) of the ease that kids pick up two languages. It is a lot of work to pick up a new language as an adult.

We plan to have our 6 month old speak Spanish in the house (she will learn English easily enough from school, relatives etc.)

I have to second all of the above. I wish I had grown up speaking two languages. My kids have exposure to one other language but are not fluent. We are considering sending them to a private school where they will learn another language at the elementary level because we feel like it is that important.

I consider it very important too. My daughter started with
Spanish in Preschool and German last year (she's 9 years old)
and I hope she'll be fluent in a few years.

The more, the better.
The earlier, the better.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

German was my first language.
I learned Portuguese from children in my neighbourhood before I started school.
I learned English, in part, through the story hour work of a local librarian.

By the time I started kindergarten, I was fluent in German, Portuguese and English - to the point of reading Time magazine. I learned to speak French in school, and taught myself Dutch through a shortwave radio program as I entered my teens.

Other languages of similar groupings are fairly easy for me to eavesdrop in - and to read magazines.

I can't imagine how flat and stale life would be without the ability to understand/be understood in other languages.

~~~~~~~~~

The more, the better.
The earlier, the better.

Yep. And travel to other countries is often taken to be practically impossible because of the language barriers. Though, obviously, that never stopped me from traveling and butchering local languages at will.

I am always regretful that I did not learn a second language. At home my parents came from different language backgrounds and so they only spoke English except in rare instances where they (father or mother) had another family member with them but I was not encouraged to learn either language. In school it was just another course and after 4 years of Spanish, it was done with. Sadly I never really applied myself in school or in later years as far as the language skills went.

Thank you guys for your responses (hope to get them more! )
Personally, I also think that raising children to speak 2+ languages is a good idea because children pick languages easier when they are younger.

We've had a couple of threads on variants of this discussion.

As I recall, not only is it easier for children to pick up multiple languages, that ease/comfort with foreign languages remains - so if a multi-language user wants to pick up an additional language later in life, it is a bit easier for them.
I do notice that hamburger can pick up foreign phrasebooks to this day, and put together enough of a language to get a good meal and some bottled water.

I think we all agree this is a positive phenomen, but please consider this for a moment.
I had a chance to meet several children who were raised bilingually.
From my experience on them, they SPEAK both languages correctly, with proper accents, and all the rest. But what also happens is that they're - how would I call it? - somewhat illiterate. And I don't speak about children who were raised on languages with different alphabets, nor about children who are at the early school age when it's expected to make mistakes when writing. They're adolescents, high schoolers, who had plenty of chance to study both languages and read in both languages. They don't mix grammar in words order or so; what they mix is simply the matter of writing:
for example, croatian-italian combination.
They don't write "avevo ragine", but they write "havevo ragione" (it'd be pronounced the same way actually) and similar quite elementary things, in italian.
In croatian even worse, the don't differ "č" and "ć" (both are pronounced as "ch"), so they write words like "kuča" and similar; they don't differ "ije" and "je", so they write words like "vijeverica" and similar. If you don't speak croatian all of this probably makes little sense to you, but trust me, those are lower-grades of elementary school mistakes by rang. And they're adolescents.
To be worse, kids I talk about attended BOTH schools in italian language and schools in croatian language.
If this would be a single case, I wouldn't even bring it up because there'll always be "illiterate" kids; but I had a chance to see this rather often.
Do you find this normal or consider it a problem?
Btw I can only speak for italian-croatian combinations because I speak both languages so I know what are mistakes; but I've heard this happens also in croatian-hungarian, croatian-czech....basically, in any combination, and it's not that rare. What I mean is the following: is the ability for perfect speech enough?
Those bilingual kids on average, as I've seen in croatian classes at my schools, write worse tests in croatian then the rest of kids.
Does this happen in America with spanish-speaking children?

My mother is psychologist and she also pointed one more thing about bilingualism at very early children. She said it can happen that child is "blocked" or doesn't differ languages at early age and that this whole bilingual raising can end up not-so-well if parents don't know how to do it "properly" (i.e.when to put second language or so).
It is a bit of strange saying for someone who has bilingual child herself , but trust me, when seeing all those adolescents who don't write properly, it makes me wonder is she right?

Do you think there are cases (like this "blocking" she described which can slower children) in which parents should not raise children to speak 2+ languages?

Don't attack me , I just wrote what are facts at SOME, but measurable number of children.

You raise some interesting questions. I don't know the answers since I haven't had the occasion to observe any bilingual children's writing or reading habits. Maybe someone else will come along and have a go.