Thursday, June 2, 2011

Two Posts in One Day!!

Cleaning the desk, catching up on emails, watching a movie with my hubby, doing laundry, buying winter pajamas for Bea! That's what happens when I get a moment to catch up. Oh, and I have the time to post again:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html

A very interesting article about a woman who has researched what happens in the brain when you are fluent in two languages. Sometimes I worry about the things that my children are not getting (less hours at school! no Girl Scouts! so little playing in green spaces!) and it helps me to remember what they are getting. My husband and I struggle daily to communicate. But they sound like Brazilians (and I LOVE IT when people tell me this). I break out in a sweat when I have to make a phone call. But my oldest gets on the phone and gets all the details about the birthday party she's invited too. The ability to fluently speak another language is something that has affected their brains, and hopefully will open up doors for them in the future. And yay for research that confirms our decisions, and makes me feel better about the many sacrifices we have made.

2 comments:

  1. And the part about Alzheimer's is interesting, too, huh?
    Congrats on your children's second language acquisition and fluency/accuracy. And remember, the only advantage that children have over adults is that they can speak the new language without an accent. Adults can acquire native like proficiency in a foreign language (research proves this) and can learn rather quickly, despite our age.

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  2. I read an entire thing about how bilingual brains are denser. I think it's great, although I worry about my youngest sometimes. He's still not quite speaking. But as the pediatrician said, the only downside (which isn't even a downside) is that the kids sometimes speak later than normal. It is fun to hear them, isn't it! My oldest (4 yrs) was saying eenie meenie minnie moe in Portuguese! lol

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