[Nyororin]

Originally Posted by hadron

i see your point, but i would be worried more from psychological side-effects of having 2 parents speaking 2 different languages. last thing i would be wishing for is when my child come to school and on a first essay about family would write something like "my father is ok, but he doesn't want to speak with me japanese, he is a bit different (understand psycho)".

But children do not see it that way. If the father has never spoken Japanese to the child, it is never an issue. It is more like "Mommy speaks this way, Daddy speaks that way." It is a given as the child has been raised in that environment and is accustomed to it.

you need one language on which you build up a healthy connection between child and both parents, equally

Wrong. You need to build up a healthy connection between child and parents, with active and clear communication. It does NOT have to be in a single language. If a child is being raised bilingually, they are pretty much equal in both languages. They are NOT speaking a foreign language to one parent - they are speaking both of their *native* languages with their parents.

kids are very smart and you can learn even more than 2 languages in the early age. simply by taking hours of language, you know, sit together with your kid and say "come on we are going to learn a bit of english" and then talk english, but after that return back to your family language, but always talk together (you all 3) same language. for non-mixed language families it is recommended that kids come to contact with foreign language at around 4 years old (depends individually).

A child knowing a bit of a foreign language and being a native speaker of more than one language are very different things. Yes, you can teach a child quite a bit in a couple hours a day. But chances are they will never be a native speaker of that "foreign" language as it is and always will be presented as foreign. It will be a second language, not a native language. Not to mention that the sudden change of a parent into another language on a set time schedule tends to be stressful for the child and not give that language a good image.

but i wouldn't take that route that one parent learning one language and other parent learning other language only. if both parents talk both languages kid gets a teachings from 2 sources about the same thing and that is much valuable.

But how does the child know which language is which? If parents mix languages when they speak, a child will mix the languages when they speak. Except in the case of the child, they will not know they are mixing two languages so will be unable to use one or the other. They will only know ONE language. This is called a creole language and is NOT what you want to happen when raising a bilingual child. When it does, both languages are "foreign" languages to the child so there will be no other native speakers of the language they have acquired.

But, who am I to tell you? I`m just a linguist who specialized in language acquisition and did a fairly large study on children in bilingual Japanese-English speaking homes...