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Italy is known for many things, culture, architecture, but what about the famous Italian people? As you can imagine, there are more than a few. Italy is home to many famous things. Italy is much more than a country of good food and art. There are also many other important aspects to the country shaped like a boot, including religion (Catholicism) and famous mathematic and scientific concepts. Also, there are historic buildings like the Colosseum in Rome and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all over the country. Also found cosmopolitan cities, such as Rome, Florence and Venice. The food in Italy is known for: heavy, a single person can not have benefited from a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. One aspect of the country that isn’t spoken about as often, but is just as important, is the number of famous individuals from Italy.
<a href="http://italianlanguagelessonsonline.org" rel="dofollow">Italian Language Lessons</a>

Italy is known for many things, culture, architecture, but what about the famous Italian people? As you can imagine, there are more than a few. Italy is home to many famous things. Italy is much more than a country of good food and art. There are also many other important aspects to the country shaped like a boot, including religion (Catholicism) and famous mathematic and scientific concepts. Also, there are historic buildings like the Colosseum in Rome and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all over the country. Also found cosmopolitan cities, such as Rome, Florence and Venice. The food in Italy is known for: heavy, a single person can not have benefited from a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. One aspect of the country that isn’t spoken about as often, but is just as important, is the number of famous individuals from Italy.

I noticed you mentioned at the introduction that the child of your friend in El Salvador speaks the languages without any accent, I would like to point out that all of us speak with an ACCENT. Be it American accent, British accent (each claiming to be the "standard" English, personally, I think that the British accent is wonderful) or others. The accent, however, is only noticeable when you are speaking a second language with your native accent in a foreign land.

My first language is Spanish and my wife's primary language is Japanese. We speak to the baby in our native languages and we use English when my wife and me talk to each other. My baby is almost 2 years old and I feel that she tries to talk less than other babies that are about her same age.

The good thing is that she responds to all 3 languages when we ask her something that we have previously tought to her.

I also want her to enroll her in a daycare/pre-k where they can teach her another language.

I'm Irish, My wife's Italian and we live in Paris. I speak english to the kids, my wife Italian to them and the french they pick up in school. It's true that it slows down their speaking capabilities at first but by five years old my daughter was totally tri-lingual. What I'm not sure about is how to extend this into reading and writing.

As children my parents were very strict with us about speaking only Vietnamese at home. We were never allowed to speak English with them but between us siblings we predominantly spoke English. It was sometimes difficult for us but ultimately rewarding. My son is now being raised bilingual. My husband speaks English with him and I speak Vietnamese. At 2 years old it took him a little longer to speak but he's incredibly fluid between the two languages. He has two words for almost everything and doesn't in the least find it odd.

My parents spoke both Urdu and English when I was growing up. They didn't pressure me to speak one language more than the other, and sometimes I wish they had made me speak urdu more. I was usually more comfortable speaking English because that's what tv, radio, and other people spoke.

Today I can understand urdu but feel very shy speaking it. I do feel I had an advantage, though, because I feel it has been easier for me to learn other languages when I had to take classes.

I am from Germany, my husband from Panama but he grew up in New York. When our daughter was little, we moved to Puerto Rico for 3 years. Since she attended preschool there, she would speak a sentence and use german, english and spanish which worried me and I stopped speaking german to her. When we moved to Kansas, the school there had her tested for 'being behind normal development' because she did not know some words in english she apparantly was supposed to know. We lived in Germany for 7 years after that and both of our children spoke fluent german from talking to family, playing with children in the neighborhood, going to the german Kindergarden. When they were teenagers, it wasn't cool to speak german in public but my daughter lived in Germany for a year on a scholarship and taught in a german highschool and her german improved within a couple of weeks. Now grown-up they both can still speak and understand german. Neither one are fluent in spanish which would be really handy.

I was born in Taiwan and raised in Japan. My parents were both Taiwanese and spoke mandarine to me at home. I also went to a Chinese school in Japan. I'm native in Japanese and okay in mandarine. My family migrated to Australia later and I went to high school and college in Australia where learnt english. I'm now most I'm most comfortable in english and japanese. My mandarine remains okay.

My parents are immigrants so, growing up they spoke little to no English. My mother was better than my father, but this forced me to speak only Chinese at home. I picked up English from watching television, but really retained it and became fluent by going to preschool and elementary school. Since I was so young and a fast learner, I was never in any ESL classes. I can speak fluent Cantonese, but my grammar and vocabulary is lacking because I've had no formal lessons. I still speak only Chinese to my parents, but with greater difficulty since I rarely speak it outside of family.

I have no children of my own, so I don't know what I would do in encouraging bi- or trilingual childhood development, but I grew up in a bilingual household speaking Japanese (with the maid and the community at large), English with my father (and his buddies from the U.S. Navy base) and a hybrid "Japlish" with my mother and sister. When we moved to So. California when I and my sister were still fairly young (just under 9 and 8 years old, respectively), we lost the multicultural environment: Even though Southern California has a sizable Japanese-American community, we existed largely outside that community and found ourselves estranged in a middle-America, rural community (in the days before widespread suburbanization of Southeast L.A. County).

Neither my sister nor I developed the vocabulary in Japanese required for adult conversation but we both retained a cultural affinity for the nonverbal language that accompanies purely verbal linguistic skills. I can still revert to the hybrid Japanese-English creole with my mother, though my sister, who is a year younger and who adopted American popular culture more readily than I, has either lost the ability or is self-inhibited from reverting to this invented dialect.

I was born in Germany to Indian parents. I spoke Malhalam when I was very young, but this led to problems in kindergarten. My parents switched to German and it became my mother tongue. When I was six, my parents moved to France. They put me in an international school and a month later I was fluent in French. Astutely, my parents then put me in an advanced English class in school, knowing that they would move to North America at some point. I started to learn English from them, the school and at home. By the time I arrived in Quebec, Canada, I was trilingual.

My wife is an English speaker, she speaks a bit of French. Our kids will be raised multilingually.

Currently, I'm learning Mandarin.

I'm a polyglot. I grew up Israel and Italy speaking Hebrew, Italian, and English. Along the way I also picked up a little French and a smidgen of Spanish.

We are Israelis living in California, and we are raising our 4-year-old to be bi-lingual. We speak to him almost exclusively in Hebrew, reverting to English when we're around non-Hebrew speakers, which is usually at school, social events, or while out shopping/traveling.

This results in many interesting situations where languages intermix. Sometimes when asked how you say something in English our son will say the hebrew word with an English accent and vice-versa. Sometime he will project words or conjugations from one lanugage/grammar to another, which oftern results in humorous situations. For example, the pluraility suffix in English is "s" and in Heberw it's "im". When attempting to say the plural version of the Hebrew word for "Egg" - singular "Beytza" and plural "Beytzim" in Hebrew, our son said "Eggsim", which is roughly equivalent to saying "Eggses".

Most Israelis learn English in school, and revert to (very bad) English when they need to communicate amongst themselves and not have the kids understand. We don't have that luxury, as our son is fluent in all of our mutually shared forms of communications.

When I lived in Tokyo, my neighbors used the one-parent, one-language approach with their then 4 year old son. His mother spoke only Japanese to him; his father only English.

I don't know if anyone else experienced this, but there was an amusing unintended consequence:

For quite awhile, he spoke only Japanese to women, and only English to men.

After mastering both English and Spanish, I decided, at a later age (college) to learn more... I believe that having this solid foundation in not only two languages, but the actual process of learning them, helped me quickly learn and become fluent in both French and Spanish. I am not trying my hand at Japanese!

My parent's taught us both English and Spanish. I think it's ridiculous to assume that speaking another language makes you less "American." While growing up, it was always stressed the advantages we would have by this. However, we were also fully incorporated into the American mainstream because we also did not stay within culturally homogeneous neighborhoods. If they did anything to help us, my parents taught us the value of patriotism to the hand that feeds us (if you will), which is more than I can say for some non-bilingual Americans I see on the streets and TV.

I was born into a Spanish-speaking family who moved to the US. In order for their children to quickly learn English, speaking it was highly encouraged at home despite having a mother who was learning along with us. This enabled four young children to learn and become fluent at an amazing speed that astonishes me even now (I remember being able to carry on full conversations and thoughts one month after moving here).

While our English improved to a level where no one would have guessed our native language, English became our main language; we gradually became less and less fluent in spoken Spanish.

It wasn't until we moved back to our native land, that we were thrown into the same 'sink or swim' position … reversed, that we picked up what was lacking in our Spanish.

This was as opposed to learning them both simultaneously because it allowed me to naturally learn one while still keeping the 'code' to the other in my head. When we first tired learning English, I had to put the not fully-developed 'code' for the first on the back burner while I learned and developed the second.

I think we only became completely bilingual when we were forced to use both individually but not simultaneously. I haven’t seen this happen with other friends and family who are 'bilingual' in that they tried learning both at the same time, so what they end up speaking is not a very articulate version of the language in what sometimes is also influenced by a bad accent.

Our kids (now teen agers) were born in NY and first went to PS. We thought that speaking French at home, taking them in the summer in France and having French speaking babysitters would maintain the language. At home we spoke either language depending on social circumstances. However, Slowly they lost their French. Eventually they refused the other language and culture to assimilate.
Fluency is not only speaking it is also reading and writing; to achieve that, kids must be in a school environment that is at least bilingual or where the "foreign" language dominates since again the local language will take over.
As for Bryan's question: why we want to keep the mother-tongue? some parents want to do so for intellectual or economic reasons; but for parents who come from another country and culture this is the connection with your roots and family left in your country).
The French speaking community is very active at introducing French in NYCDOE schools in the form of dual language programs. See www.efny.net

My husband and I are Swedish natives,with 3 kids ages 15, 13 and 8. The oldest is fluent in English, Swedish and Hebrew as the children go to a Jewish Day School and have family in Israel. As our first born grew older, it became harder to maintain the Swedish since his main influence was English (friends, nannies,etc) and by living in New York City, Spanish. He became a little "embarrassed" about his Swedish because no one of his friends had even heard of it, let alone spoke it. Now however, he appreciates the knowledge, as does his 2 sisters, who don't speak Swedish as well as their brother by virtue of being younger; by the time they were born, English became more prevalent at home. It's complicated, especially with a narrowly spoken language like Swedish.

My almost 4 year old son is trilingual in English, Italian and Dutch. I am Italian, his father is Flemish (Belgium). We speak to our son respectively in Italian and Dutch. He picked up English at the day care. We also have a Dutch speaking nanny from Belgium. Based on our personal experience, what works well is exposing the child to mother tongue people in his languages as much as possible. We often travel to Italy and Belgium where he gets fully exposed to his cultural roots. One of the reason of our choice is we prefer the school system in Europe and want to give him the choice of pursuing his higher education there.

About 10 years ago, I was a banker and most of my customer contacts were expatriot Korean bankers. The Korean bankers struggled with English, but they all explained they had been eager to accept their NY positions so that they could enroll their elementary school-aged children in US, English-language school so that their children would become native English speakers.

I'm Russian, and my husband is American. My son understands a lot of Russian, and can speak it. His Russian was much better when he was little. My son is 17 now. As he started getting older (around 7 years old), he started thinking more in English, and so at some point I had to make a decision on whether I was going to tell him to only speak Russian to me and thus interrupt the flow of thought and emotions that my son wanted to present to me.
So I let him speak to me in whatever language he felt like. I speak both languages to him.
One thing I have to say for a child growing up bilingual is that all foreign languages come so easy to him. He speaks almost fluent French now (taking AP course), can understand and speak some Italian and Spanish

MY mother is from Germany, she never spoke her native tongue in our home (expect during rare visits from my grandmother (oma))
I feel the loss of my culture is permanent I've tried to reconnect to my heritage but fear it is lost forever.

worldwide, only Americans seem to be incapable of being bilingual.

I've friends who raised their children speaking Croatian, French, English, and Esperanto.

our children speak both english and swedish without a problem. i always spoke english to them my wife swedish and yes they did start speaking later than most but now have the richness of both worlds to draw upon.

home=native tongue.
school=esl.

My parents are both trilingual being Trinidadian, Puerto Rican with Lebanese roots. We want our children speaking English only because historically, that's what immigrants always did to retain the flavor of the red, white, and blue in this country. As it is now, the scent of cumin is in the air.... and we reject it.

I know a little girl who learned all at once: cantonese, italian, spanish, english. She didn't start speaking till later than usual (people around her were saying, oh! she's autistic!) but she turned out to be, as Noam Chomsky says of children under 7 - a linguistic genius. And so many others, one learning persian, french and english all at once-

My friends are Polish and Spanish. Their six-year-old speaks to him in Polish and to his wife in Spanish. Sometimes she will translate what her mom says into Polish for her dad and vice versa! But she does not like him to speak in Spanish or her in Polish. Her English seems fine.