Super Baby, chapter 7: Why do I not have my own language?

Yes, today's topic is about languages, but first of all, let me introduce the author of the book since I don't think I ever mentioned about her. Dr. Jenn Berman is a family and child therapist and a mother of twins. I have been enjoying her insights everyday. I am reading a chapter about raising bilingual kids. It is probably not too hard for us, but I am learning a lot of tips which make me want my child to be a trilingual. In fact, Dr. Berman's children speak English, Spanish, and Chinese even though she is not even fluent in Chinese. My husband and I are discussing which language to add on to English and Japanese. Spanish? Arabic? Any suggestions??
Here is a story about Charles Berlitz, that changed my thought about learning language. Growing up, he was spoken to by different people in different languages; in German by his father, in Russian by his grandfather, in Spanish by his nanny, and so forth. "For many years, he thought every human being spoke a unique language and couldn't understand why he didn't have his own language." As a matter of fact, he spoke 32 languages.

According to Dr. Berman, there are windows to learn languages efficiently. The first window is between age 6-12 months. She will recognizes different sounds in the languages. Since I was not exposed to "L" and "R" sounds around that age due to the lack of those sounds in Japanese, I still have hard time differentiating between those sounds in English. The next window does not close until age 6 and then it gets harder for her to learn. So, at least, should I introduce different sounds in different languages?!

It is so tempting to use TV as a tool to facilitate language learning especially if you are not fluent in the target language. However, it is detrimental for a child under the age of two since the TV is passive. You want to use interactive ways to enhance the learning. Reading books, on the other hand, has positive effects since you can ask questions, point out pictures, and can have fun together. Hence this counts as an interactive activity. Just make sure that you are not "teaching" the child but having fun with her. Dr. Berman's children listen to Chinese and Spanish songs, but she dose not count the time as the language time since it is passive, but only counts the ones that are interactive. Whatever you do, which is interactive, you want to have 20 % of the child's awake time being exposed to the target language.