(ELI5) when babies are raised with bilingual families, are they learning it as just one jumbled language, or as two separate languages?

Question

Also would it become difficult to discern and seperate them when they join school for example, and interact with people that only speak one

In: 37

Answer 1

In my experience the parent doing the raising favors heavily into how a kid will absorb a language. Mom was home with us and dad (Argentine) worked and never spoke Spanish to me or my brother. We heard him on the phone with family and talking to his workers but that never helped

Answer 2

When i was growing up in hongkong i spoke 4 languages, i didnt realize they were different languages. I just spoke to my Aiee in one way (Tagalog) my parents in another way (English) my teachers in one way (Mandrin) and strangers in one way (Cantonese)

In my head it was more about the person i was talking too, rather than the words themselves, like saying “cat” casually, “kitty” to little kids, or “feline” academically. The words are different, but the meaning is the same, you just use the different word depending on who youre talking to.

Answer 3

It depends on how they hear it and how often.
My 2 daughters 5 and 9 have grown with us talking to them in “Spanglish” (English with some Spanish thrown in). They would have conversations with us and each other in the same way. When they would go visit their grandparents they were spoken to in Spanish only. It wasn’t until my youngest was about 4 when she began to understand some of the words she used were Spanish and some were English. Not the best way to teach a child to be bilingual pero nimodo. So in our case they learned both languages as 1 and learned to separate it later.

Answer 4

I routinely mix up words in 4 separate languages. Other than my parents, wife… no one would ever understand me 100%

Answer 5

Two languages, but they might speak one in the other. My kids are Spanish speakers living and getting educated in France, they know it’s two languages but given the closeness of the languages, they can confuse some false friends. They use “amar” in Spanish (to love) as “aimer” is used in French (to like). So when speaking in Spanish they love or don’t love a lot of stuff.