Can one raise a quadrilingual child in a predominantly English environment? I’d like my daughter to learn Japanese because I like it, Korean because she’s 3/4 Korean, and Mandarin because I just found out that it may help her attain perfect pitch. Maybe we can study Korean and Mandarin together. We’ll see, she’s not even 1 year old. 
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Sure, the ealier you begin, the easier it will be. My 2 kids (6 & 4 years now) speak french native), hebrew (native), english (near native), and we try to teach them japanese.
The only difficulty we had, is that to learn a language/be fluent with it and have a good vocabulary, the child has to hear a lot of that language, but each language will be spoken less, compared to other people. So, compared to other kids in school (in France, most of them speak only one language), they were a little late in speech development. But they were able to catch up, and now are on par with others.
So your work will be to divide the time for each language correctly and read many many many books to them
Luc
Thanks, I feel encouraged about my chances.
She’ll probably not be fully native in all four languages (to be bilingual, you generally have to grow up around native speakers of both languages; one supposes the same thing would apply to being multilingual in more than two tongues), but studying them with her could be worthwhile anyway, and may help her in any number of ways later. Even if she doesn’t end up using those languages in particular, she’ll have a better natural ability to understand language in general. Also, learning is itself a learned skill, so doing it early and often is advantageous per se.
Well, the only source of English I had growing up was a couple of hours of English television everyday, and I like to to think of myself as bilingual.
I hope to raise à trilingual child myself, for similar reasons! Good luck to both of us
Well, I’ve been trying to speak some simple Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese to her. Hopefully, my accent isn’t too bad to mess her up especially with Mandarin and Korean. So far, the response has been “da da” and “ma ma”.
I can’t think of anyone I know who has grown up quadrilingual but I have known several trilingual people (yes, I’m jealous!!!!) so I don’t see why not. Another commenter mentioned this but don’t be surprised or worried if your daughter seems slower to speak than monolingual kids. This seems to be very common for kids who grow up bilingual.
It is possible to raise a child but the amount of time spent on communicating in 4 different languages will have to be the same.
I am bililingual from young (learning English and Chinese). I have learnt Korean Language for about 4 years and am currently self studying in Japanese Language. I hope to learn an European Language after I attained a certain proficiency in Japanese. Your website really helps me a lot! Keep up the good work!
Do check out my Korean Language blog: http://bitsnpiecesofkorea.wordpress.com
Please feel free to give me comments and correct me if I am wrong!
Thanks! ^^
It’s possible and it’s actually common in some cultures and regions. You’ll have to provide a lot of input from all the languages. I would suggest putting on some music in Mandarin and Korean so your child hears the proper sounds. A big hurdle later on is getting your child to actually speak the languages. It’s a big reason why people who grow up bilingual aren’t as good as they should be in one of their languages. They resort to speaking the one they’re more comfortable with at any opportunity.
I believe that its really possible if there is environment around the kid or both parents r Multilingual or at least both of them r Language Appreciative kind.
I myself love speak 3language which are native and 1 foreign language that is Japanese. I also love Korean and Mandarin cause I’m too close to their culture and Lifestyle because of
1.I read abt it all the time
2.Watch alot of Dramas and Movies.
So having a love for language can create quadrilingual child.
^_^
Course! I grew up a trilingual (self working on the quadrilingual part, jap that is, as long as I can master it before 18 it would still count as growing up knowing four, right?)
I live in taiwan pretty much 99% of my 16 year old life. My mom’s taiwanese and I’m also half american, so I can speak both of these perfectly, Taiwanese not as well possibly due to it not being frequently written (It technically doesn’t have a writing system, just adapted one from mandarin) and I tend to learn mostly from reading. (which caused me to mix uk and us english often) it didn’t cause any pressure to me growing up, and it’s awesome show off material, lol. I guess you have to find the best media, for me it was books. On the other hand, genes do count, I took after my father and had good language skills, and was able to finish my first novel time cat around 9 yrs old with my father busy my mother not knowing english and no english media but picture books. my sister is 13 now and still can’t spell and read as well as I do when I was 9 @_@