Language immersion

[sammason]

Were you 'immersed' in a language (or more than one) in early childhood, allowing you to grow up bilingual, trilingual or whatever? Did you immerse your own kids? What's it been like, during and after the immersion

Comments

[germankitty]

Dunno if it was immersion, exactly, but our son kind of picked up English early due to being exposed to the language each day through TV and books/magazines lying around the house. We also took him on vacation to the UK semi-regularly

[electricdruid]

I was immersed as a young child. My father worked full time and was often away on business trips, so my German stay-at-home-mother mostly raised me. According to her, I eventually reached the point where I all but forgot English. When my mom discovered that I had a hard time understanding my father, she stopped speaking German to me for many years.

The result is that a lot of the basics of German are intuitive for me, but a lot isn't. I'm kind of stuck in this limbo where I really struggled to learn German in school or even, to an extent, from websites like Duolingo. I think that I need immersion to really take my grasp of the language any further, but I don't really have that opportunity. I haven't tried to learn any other languages yet, so I can't really compare what it's like to learn a language I hadn't been immersed in as a child.

[iddewes]

I do get the feeling that some people are just better at language learning, and it may not have to do with being immersed, though I guess anyone does do better if they start to learn when they are young and the other language is around - eg people in Nordic countries who learn English from a young age, or Luxemburgers who are educated in German but the official language is French, so they learn both from when they are very young

New tag

[muckefuck]

Do we need a "language immersion" tag? I feel like this is adequately covered by "language acquisition" and "language instruction", but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. (Googling "linguaphiles" and "immersion" only brings up three prior posts.)

[imps85]

my daughter is growing up billingual, we have a minority language at home approach. so it English in the family and German when shell go to Kindergarten(next year at 3yo)