Post Nº 5... You, Neuromyth, go away!

The myth I'm going to write about says: "A young child's brain can only manage to learn one language at a time."

Many people believe that learning a new language is problematic for the native language. Those who believe this imagine the brain as a closed box, with different little boxes in it, one of which is the "language's box". Thinking in this way, is easy to think that an additional language should be a hindrance for the native one.

Other people think that the new language does not involve a "capacity" problem, but it is a problem because the new language is not linked to the native in anyway. So, those things that have been learnt in one language have not been learnt in the other, and this disconnection generates confusion in the young child's mind.

The truth is that those children who learn more than one language in early ages have not any of these problems.

They can learn more than one language when they are very young, and it doesn't involve problems with the native language.

These children understand very well the structure and logic of the languages they manage, and because of this they have a good performance both in the oral and written language.

About the "no connection" between the two or more languages

If they learn things in one of the languages they manage, they get the knowledge as words, but also as images and as an idea. So, if they have the enough vocabulary, they are capable to explain and apply the new knowledge using any of their languages, and not only that used to learn it. Even, people who manage many languages learn things using their different languages, and after a while they don't remember in which language they learnt something or other.