Multilingual at which age?

[tartempion]

I was bilingual at 10, trilingual at 15, quadrilingual at 18, learned and forgot most but not all of some others like Portuguese and Spanish later on.

I read hundreds of books in their original language until midnight in my bed, having a hard time to get up at 7.30 to get on time at school...

I now have a 2 years 8 months young girl living in Thailand and she speaks a mixture of Thai and English with me, mostly Thai but also Lao mixed with English with her mother. Every day she asks me the English words for usual objects and colors.

I am eager to learn her French,German and Dutch, but think I need to wait say until she 5 for the next language and 8 for the next one.

Any experiences/suggestions are welcome.

[singa-traz]

My kids learned 4: French, Thai, English and Chinese.

For the first 3, there is an envionment for them to use it. For Chinese, still trying to figure out where/when we could put it to use ... thinking of employing them as my tour guide for a trip in China :-)

Read that learning additional languages will also consolidate/strenghten the existing one.

But I would make sure they see a purpose in learning additional one.

[cooked]

We had a rule at home, that the kids speak Swiss German with their mother (their mother tongue, very important) and English with me. When we moved to the French part of Switzerland later, the dinner table got tri- and occasionally quadrilingual. Both sons have good jobs in part because they are so polyglot, don't worry about the age, just do it. I am sure the OP would pick up his Portuguese and Spanish very quickly if he needed to.

However in my personal experience I don't think that having too many languages milling about in the speech centre of your brain is good for you, there is only so much room in there for goodness' sakes!