First, I need to confess. I know a half of a dozen of different languages, among them I use 3 of them on a daily basis. Even though I’ve started to learn most of them relatively early due to lack of practice and absence of communication with native speakers my accent is thick. I also do a lot of typical mistakes influenced by my native Slavic language (i.e. I miss the nouns most of the time when I use Germanic-based languages).
But what has recently struck me is that if you know more that one foreign language and you use them day-to-day some tumbler in your head switches and suddenly you’re able to absorb new languages by means of pure anticipation and understanding of common principles that all languages are based upon.
Interestingly, the same idea has struck my daughter who’s already multilingual even though she’s only 5. I wonder how many languages will she be able to speak whilst she’ll be my age.