Bella, 6-year old Russian polyglot

[aokoye]

Ah ok yeah, we're definitely in agreement then. That was part of my questioning why we would even speculate about her degree of "fluency".

[Kraut]

What impresses me most is that she gets the "accents" of her languages right, something that some adult polyglots don't achieve.
I'm glad that aged 6 she now seems to enjoy her performance. In another video where she is younger she is like a disoriented little doll.

[Serpent]

We've had several threads about her. https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =14&t=6047

[aokoye]

What impresses me most is that she gets the "accents" of her languages right, something that some adult polyglots don't achieve.
I'm glad that aged 6 she now seems to enjoy her performance. In another video where she is younger she is like a disoriented little doll.

See that's the thing that impresses me the least. That's the one thing that children will be able to do. There's tons of literature to back this up - it's totally normal. If she wasn't able to do that, I would assume there was some sort of neurological issue at play. It's also completely and utterly normal for adults to never be able to master a "native" accent.

[Serpent]

Worst thing: The adult asked in German "Machst du mir einen Knicksen?" which is rather wrong. The German word for courtsey is "Knicks" or "Hofknicks"., but not "Knicksen". Besides that, it is a word which is rarely used in any language. And the girl understood it althought the woman didn't pronounce it correctly? I doubt that a German child instantly would have known what it is supposed to do.

Книксен also exists in Russian, from Knikschen or Kniksen (the noun). Not sure how likely she is to know it but maybe if she enjoys princess stories? (or if her parents are going for a "classical" upbringing that also includes dancing, etiquette etc)

Also I thought some of the adults were not random native/fluent speakers but her tutors?

[lavengro]

Just for clarity: I am absolutely not attacking a child, just questioning what seem like exaggerated claims made by adults.

Pending learning of a new (new to me) definition of being “fluent in “X” language” as not meaning actually being fluent in that language but instead of being fluent for a “Y” year old, or of learning that one can assert fluency when what is intended is not actual fluency, but some percentage (1% to 99%) fluency (“I know I said my buddy is “fluent in Arabic” but what I really meant is that he is some unexpressed “percent fluent”, (I am probably just being naïve, but I have always understood “fluent” to be a binary issue), I took the liberty of working up a study schedule to see if becoming fluent in seven languages (Russian, French, “Chinese”, English, Spanish, German and Arabic) by age 4 could conceivably be possible.

Seems like it could be.

Year One – just passive absorption, and eventually at some point during this first formative year, some crawling around and eating crayons and other things that humans technically are not supposed to eat.

Years Two and Three – becoming fluent in Russian. I would suggest providing the luxury of two full years to become fluent in Russian because it seems hard, there are those squiggly letters, and a complex and challenging system of declensions, it would have been her first language, certain downtime for the “terrible twos” phase, etc.

Year Four – the power year

Month 1 – French - knocking the easy one out of the park. With sufficient tutoring and learning opportunities, it is hard to imagine that more than one month would be required to become fluent.

Month 2 – Spanish – capitalizing on having mastered (the other word used in materials about this person in relation to foreign languages) French the previous month, becoming fluent in Spanish should be super easy-peasy. Condolences to those of you who may wind up taking longer than a month to fluency.

Months 3 and 4 – German – a little extra time for German, ‘cos it’s German rather than an easy Romance language.

Month 5 – becoming fluent in English. I know some of you may suggest that it would take more than one month to become fluent from scratch in English, but really, isn’t English just a bit of a mish between French and German (which you have already become fluent in earlier in the year).

Months 6, 7 and 8 - Mandarin – I clearly do not know what I am talking about, but of the languages generally considered as “Chinese” I would suggest Mandarin because of the fewer number of tones, and adopting a simplified rather than traditional approach. Is three months enough to become fluent? Sure, why not!

Months 9, 10 and 11 – Arabic – complete mystery to me. There are lots of things I don’t know in life, and some things I think I know. The only thing I know with certainty in life is that I would never be able to become fluent in Arabic. But then again, I am not a four year old. I am prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to any accomplished polyglot with a, by then, established track record of having learned so many other unrelated languages.

Month 12 – revision and maintenance of all seven languages.

Accordingly, I withdraw my skepticism….

[Serpent]

Fluency can mean a lot of things depending on the context.
When we say a 10 year old is fluent, do we expect them to do things they can't do in L1 yet? Of course not.
Some exams have junior levels for teens, the rest just expect you to master the needed skills regardless of how well you know the topic in L1. Same goes for language classes - I've definitely had to learn more about ecology and politics than I knew at the time.

Nobody is claiming the girl would pass an exam.

I would suggest providing the luxury of two full years to become fluent in Russian because it seems hard, there are those squiggly letters, and a complex and challenging system of declensions, it would have been her first language

Not sure if that's a joke but only the cursive letters are squiggly, and she probably doesn't know them perfectly yet. Russian isn't anyhow harder to learn as a native language.
And I'm pretty sure she got exposure to more than one language from the beginning (maybe English?), and has never taken an extended break unless there was a practical reason. At this age kids can easily forget their native language if they lose contact with it for long enough, not to mention one of their 5-8 languages.

[aokoye]

Year One – just passive absorption, and eventually at some point during this first formative year, some crawling around and eating crayons and other things that humans technically are not supposed to eat.

Years Two and Three – becoming fluent in Russian. I would suggest providing the luxury of two full years to become fluent in Russian because it seems hard, there are those squiggly letters, and a complex and challenging system of declensions, it would have been her first language, certain downtime for the “terrible twos” phase, etc.

There are a lot of flaws in your logic, but I'll only really address two of them because I don't want to rehash a FLA course. Learning Russian as a first language is not any more difficult than English, Mandarin, Finnish, Spanish, Hawaiian, Georgian, etc etc. Yes there are some consonants that children acquire later than others, but that's true across the board. That's also about being able to physically make the sound with their "vocal apparatus" - do they have enough motor control to do so or not. Additionally, children actually typically have no problem learning things like case and vowel harmony (I realize Russian doesn't have vowel harmony) and tend not to make mistakes, at least not in their spoken language. The same is true of tones in tonal language - the whole infants being able to distinguish all speech sounds as well as prosody thing. We actually know that fetuses can distinguish prosody as well (yay for the high-amplitude sucking procedure!).

Additionally, the "squiggly letters" thing is a, slightly offensive, and b. so not related to a 3 year old's ability to learn a language. Literacy is not required to learn an L1, or an L2 for that matter. Yes literacy is obviously required to learn to read but most three year olds aren't reading anything. I suggest finding a first language acquisition text and thumbing through it. A lot of what you're saying flies in the face of what we know about FLA.

[lavengro]

Although I am surprised that it is necessary for me to say this, let me confirm I was being entirely facetious in my post.

[Cavesa]

I think both parts are true here.
She wouldn't have achieved this without extraordinary efforts and money investment from her parents.
But it is a huge achievement nonetheless, even if it is mostly scripted.

I wouldn't worry that much about attrition due to school in her case. I guess her parents will keep supporting her, so she might have a very high level in a few of those languages and passable in the rest. If she wants to, if her parents don't push her too much, if she doesn't find any reason to not pursuit this (such as a different passion to invest her time into)

[
Thanks aokoye, but with respect, is that the question?

I had not been aware that the concept of fluency is age-related. I recall very extended forum discussions particularly on the old forum (yeah, Serge, thinking of you here in part) and am fully appreciative that there is some controversy as to what "fluency" means precisely, but I would be surprised to learn that in addition to some "fluidity" as to what fluency means generally, there are age-graded evaluations of that.

Yes, fluent children sound differently even in their native language at various ages. And there is a huge individual variability. So, it's logical there aren't any objective tests. Even if we had a few thousand kids in Bella's situation, it still wouldn't be that simple to draw any conclusions from that group. A group of six year olds varies a lot in speaking, that's normal.
....................

Year One ...

The beginning of the overview before full joking is completely weird. Actually, a lot of questions in the pediatrics final exam were on child development Too much info was just on Year one. Don't forget that a huge part of learning one's first language is learning to make sounds. To make syllables, to invent funny words, experiment with it all. (Curiously, natives of the sign languages have similar phases of learning them)

Nope, there is no reason for a particular language to be harder for the children to learn

As to when you started joking about learning a language per month: parallel would make more sense. And it would actually be nothing that unheard of, even though unusual at such an early age and in our era. Actually getting a kid several tutors and making them use some languages with some people and others with other people, that is one of the oldest and powerful language teaching methods. That's how nobles had been learning for centuries (even though not eight languages usually, and not that distant ones). Actually, one of the last surviving and publicly known former count in my country mentioned something like this, when remembering his childhood. Several languages were normal in the family and taught to the children. They even had a day in the week for a language that was otherwise less used, if I remember correctly. It used to be normal for people from rich families to speak several languages. I can't see that much of a difference from Bella's case, truth be told. She's like a princess