What does it mean to be bilingual?
The real definition is being able to speak two languages fluently, and that’s what I can do.
In fact, Spanish and Italian are my mother tongues, and I think it is amazing because I can understand and speak two languages, but honestly it’s also hard to switch from one language to the other, sometimes it can be confusing.
I was born in South America where the official language is Spanish, but when I was 2 years old I moved to Italy with my family for political and economic reasons, so at school and with my friends I started to speak Italian, but at home I was always speaking and listening to Spanish because for my parents it was very difficult to learn another language with a different pronunciation. Actually they can’t pronounce the double letters or the letter “V” or “Z”.
Now, I can speak and understand Italian very well as well as Spanish, but for this last one I understand more than I speak, in fact I usually watch Spanish TV series listen to people speaking Spanish. When I realized that I could understand another language without studying it, it was something weird, because it’s like something into me that I've learnt since I was a child and without any effort.
THE TYPES OF BEING BILINGUAL:
Depending on the situation and on how they acquired each language, bilingual people can be classified into three general types :
- COMPOUND BILINGUAL : Me for example, I've developed two linguistic codes simultaneously with a single set of concepts, learning both Spanish and Italian as I began to process the world around me.
- COORDINATE BILINGUAL : As my brother who worked with two sets of concepts, learning Italian at school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home.
- SUBORDINATE BILINGUAL : As my parents who have learnt a second language by filtering it through the native language.
Personally, I think it is easier to learn a new language for children because the plasticity of their developing brains lets them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere.
FOR MORE INFO, YOU CAN WATCH THIS VIDEO IN ENGLISH:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY