Bilingualism

Yep. I'd agree with that.

So do I. I have no idea at all about pre-decimal currency (I was born in 1972) but I was taught metric throughout school.Whilst I have a perfectly good grasp of things like how tall people are in feet and inches, or how much they weigh in pounds etc. etc. metric measurments of such things generally makes much more instinctive sense to me.With the exception of miles and kilometres where I still have to convert km into miles to get a true idea of distance.

Working within the metric system is much easier than trying to work within the English system. And that is really the secret to teaching it: just have the students use it.However, visualizing a measurement is where the difficulties lie, since I've had to live with the English system for most of my life. Though the solution for that should be to live it for long enough. And, while I was working in construction during college, a carpenter pointed out that switching to metric would be hard for him because there are so many standard measurements for things that he'd have to relearn all over again.Money-wise, I heard stories of American tourists who would be so confused by a country's currency that they would just hold out their money and have the salesman take what he needed to pay for what they were buying. Even when that country had decimal currency. The very idea would boggle my mind. Every coin and bill I saw had the face value expressed in a numeral, so how much does it take to figure it out? US coins, OTOH, are notorious for withholding that information. It's all written in English. And if you didn't know how much a dime was worth, what good would it do you to read "ONE DIME"?

Our American clients do that all the time, but to be fair so do the English. I think it's because people aren't accustomed to reading their money - everyone knows the right colour/size/shape for the relevant coin or note, and so when you're shoved into a situation with different money it can be baffling. Especially if you're the sort of person who likes to pay for everything with a credt card and so isn't used to using any currency abroad.The habit I find much funnier when it comes to Americans and foreign currency is the widespread inability to refer to money as anything other than dollars. I regularly recieve emails asking to confirm that the price of something is '$1000 czk' (1000 dollar-crowns, maybe?), and to quote a client I spoke to on the phone recently 'Is that American dollars or Euro-dollars?'.ABE: You say 'even when that country had decimal currency'. Has anyone ever been to a country that doesn't have decimal currency?ABE2: Just wanted to mention something here in this thread quickly, as it contradicts what I was saying earlier. I just drew a total blank as to how 'assistant' was spelt in English, being now accustomed to writing the Czech 'asistent' at the end of emails. Maybe bilingualism can create a few spelling issues!Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

I think it is difficult to do studies on this matter, for the very simple fact that people who are bilingual tend to be more worldly, and people of this sort tend to be more intelligent. So, it is not unreasonable to assume that their children will be just like them, bilingual and intelligent.All I can say, as a linguistic apprentice, is that it is important to teach these things young and while studies showing correlation between increased lingualism and increased intelligence may be troubled, there are no studies at all that have shown knowing more languages makes a kid dumber.Kids' brains are very maliable, and they can straighten out the input into the right language with the greatest of ease.JonP.S. Imperial system”and its derivatives”rules

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You've been Gremled!

"How much is that in real money?"Actually, I enjoy reading money and have never been at a loss with any European or American (in the hemispherical sense of the word) currency. I especially enjoyed the French 20-franc bill from 1974. It was very colorful and looked like it had been clipped from a comic book. Well, England used to be non-decimal, but I don't know of any that isn't decimal. The point I was making was that that foreign currency is based on the exact same system as our own, so why can't they deal with it? It would be like a Ford driver having to drive somebody's Chevy. Sure it's different, but you use it in the same way so what's the problem? Actually, it had helped my spelling, at least while I was still current enough with French. "Assistant" is one of those words with different ways to spell the ending, all of which are pronounced with a schva (an unaccented vowel which in English kind of sounds like "uh"; in phonetic transcriptions it looks like an upside-down "e"). The other endings include -ble, -nce. What I found was that the French spellings tended to be the same as the English and, whereas English pronounced them all the same, French pronounced them exactly as they are spelled (albeit with a French accent). So all I had to do was to remember the French pronounciation and I would have the correct spelling. Of course, that was a few decades ago, so I can't rely on it anymore.Another way in which bilingualism helps spelling is that learning another language makes us aware that words actually mean something. You know better than to write stupid things like "Starting today, their will be ... " and "Please come and get you're stuff." and "Is that to hot?" Having learned a language, you no -- er, know {grin} -- that you choose a word because of its meaning and not because of its sound.I participate on a C programming forum which a lot of non-English speakers also frequent. The worst and most incomprehensible posts are by native speakers. They constantly use the wrong words. One classic example is a guy who wanted sample code for a Barber Poll. OK, we figured it must be some kind of statistical method we hadn't heard of before, so we asked for more information. "You know, that twirly thing in front of a barber shop." I really wanted to reach through the screen and rap him up the side of the head for that idiocy.Foreigners may not be able to express themselves that well and their sentences might be a bit strange, but most of the words they use are the right ones. Except sometimes which they chose the wrong word from their dictionary. We had one guy from Portugal who had a question about multithreading and lights. Huh? So he tried to describe what he was doing and I realized that he had meant "semaphores". As in Spanish, the Portuguese word for traffic signal (AKA "light") is "semforo". So I introduced him to Wikipedia and the fact that most articles are translated into other languages, so you can see the right words being used.Edited by dwise1, : typo

Not exactly, but when I was in Australia in 1969, this was less than 3 years after they went to decimal currency, they used both interchangably.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

A lot depends on the language they're coming from I think - false friends can cause problems. Czechs speaking English regularly use 'sympathetic' (or sometimes 'sympatic') to mean 'nice', because that's what the etymologically linked word in Czech means.Incidentally, I looked up non-decimal currencies on Wikipedia. It seems the only two currently in use are the Mauritanian ouguiya and Madagascan ariary, both of which use a base-5 system.

I had the luxury of growing up in areas of the US that are predominantly hispanic. But even still I can only really get by with what I call "restaurant spanish." The problem is my father didn't instill in us the importance of making us bi-lingual. He regrets this very much now. In fact his own mother, who is of direct German-Irish descent, taught me more Spanish growing up than he did or even my Ecuadorian grandfather.My bother-in-law is Cuban, so my nieces and nephews are already being groomed as bi-lingual children.My point is that being that you are married to an Argentine woman, the best way to do this is starting them off as young as possible, as children are little sponges ready to soak up an incalculable amount of stimuli. Having your wife speak to the child in both Spanish and English is the best way.My father is self-taught in Portuguese, Swedish, Russian, French, and a few other languages. But he's dedicated to it and he enjoys learning it. You most likely won't have that same dedication in a youngster. So the easiest way is just talking to them from the time they are little. I would get started on that immediately to maximize success. At 3 years old he's still young enough to easily retain this information.

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"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. " Thomas Paine

My kids were half Korean, were somewhat bi-lingual. My Mother-in-law, who spoke no English. My kids spoke mostly English but were adequately capable of understanding and communicating with my mother-in-law and her Korean friends. The bilingual capability was useful in a number of ways, such as my communicating with my mother-in-law with my kids as translators.

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008

I am amazed to say that even in the week or two since I first wrote this stuff his Spanish has come on remarkably. He has full on conversations with his mum and with family in Argentina on the phone.He then comes and tells me what he has been talking to them about (in English). He has even started laughing at me and calling me silly when I don't understand his favorite Abeja Maya cartoons.I can see the day when him and his mum will be ripping the piss out of me in front of my face while I stand looking in confused monolinguistic bewilderment.I am gonna have to do some secret Spanish classes.........Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.