Originally Posted by 1sexsmith

Not against you... but I wish people would stop saying children suck up languages like sponges. It is very misleading As a language teacher 25 years of teaching- a family of multiple language speakers plus a reader of lots of stuff on second language learning- I can assure you kids no more suck up languages than adults. It's just adults make a demarcation between active study and other activities. A child learns a language quite slowly in fact. But what they do is a lot of interaction - hours and hours of it. Language acquisition is proportional to input and output. My son came to Spain at 10 with no Spanish. It took at least 3 years before he could participate in any meaningful way in school and even then it was limited. By 16 he was able to do well in class but only by coming home and covering stuff done in class by using YouTube tutorials in English. This year he has done an A level in Spanish where he should get an A grade but not the higher* which native speakers would get. He can of course speak Spanish very well but will still make mistakes and will struggle with more specific colloquial stuff. But the point is he had to learn all this. It was all active not passive which the sponge metaphor suggests. If you add up the number of hours at school over 8 years it is thousands of hours where the brain receives the language input- and that only works if the child is acting on the input. Many simply switch off. Many British kids born in Spain who attend Spanish schools have very poor Spanish by leaving age.

Originally Posted by 1sexsmith

Not against you... but I wish people would stop saying children suck up languages like sponges. It is very misleading As a language teacher 25 years of teaching- a family of multiple language speakers plus a reader of lots of stuff on second language learning- I can assure you kids no more suck up languages than adults. It's just adults make a demarcation between active study and other activities. A child learns a language quite slowly in fact. But what they do is a lot of interaction - hours and hours of it. Language acquisition is proportional to input and output. My son came to Spain at 10 with no Spanish. It took at least 3 years before he could participate in any meaningful way in school and even then it was limited. By 16 he was able to do well in class but only by coming home and covering stuff done in class by using YouTube tutorials in English. This year he has done an A level in Spanish where he should get an A grade but not the higher* which native speakers would get. He can of course speak Spanish very well but will still make mistakes and will struggle with more specific colloquial stuff. But the point is he had to learn all this. It was all active not passive which the sponge metaphor suggests. If you add up the number of hours at school over 8 years it is thousands of hours where the brain receives the language input- and that only works if the child is acting on the input. Many simply switch off. Many British kids born in Spain who attend Spanish schools have very poor Spanish by leaving age.

Originally Posted by 1sexsmith

Not against you... but I wish people would stop saying children suck up languages like sponges. It is very misleading As a language teacher 25 years of teaching- a family of multiple language speakers plus a reader of lots of stuff on second language learning- I can assure you kids no more suck up languages than adults.

Originally Posted by astera

Anyway, I'm in the Canary Islands so NONE of that bs affects me whatsoever. Feel sorry for those that it does though, especially if they have kids who they want to send to a local school and think that moving to Barcelona is a good idea. OUCH.

Originally Posted by 1sexsmith

Not against you... but I wish people would stop saying children suck up languages like sponges. It is very misleading As a language teacher 25 years of teaching- a family of multiple language speakers plus a reader of lots of stuff on second language learning- I can assure you kids no more suck up languages than adults. It's just adults make a demarcation between active study and other activities. A child learns a language quite slowly in fact. But what they do is a lot of interaction - hours and hours of it. Language acquisition is proportional to input and output. My son came to Spain at 10 with no Spanish. It took at least 3 years before he could participate in any meaningful way in school and even then it was limited. By 16 he was able to do well in class but only by coming home and covering stuff done in class by using YouTube tutorials in English. This year he has done an A level in Spanish where he should get an A grade but not the higher* which native speakers would get. He can of course speak Spanish very well but will still make mistakes and will struggle with more specific colloquial stuff. But the point is he had to learn all this. It was all active not passive which the sponge metaphor suggests. If you add up the number of hours at school over 8 years it is thousands of hours where the brain receives the language input- and that only works if the child is acting on the input. Many simply switch off. Many British kids born in Spain who attend Spanish schools have very poor Spanish by leaving age.

Originally Posted by DLC

How can I put this, your perception of what goes on in Catalonia is probably tainted by having not having first-hand experience of Catalonia. When Catalonia is mentioned in the national media it's usually not complimentary.