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For the last week I've been wondering about how bilingual children (English-Spanish) might struggle with the acquisition of the "ser"/"estar" copulas, considering how these are marked in Spanish & used in specific linguistic contexts while "to be" is the only option in English. I remember how hard the distinction was for me to learn as a non-native speaker so I'm just curious whether any inference from English might complicate matters even further...Are there any parents of bilingual children who have noticed certain challenges in this regard? It would be super interesting to hear about your experiences!

Thanks in advance for sharing!

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    shouldn't this be posted on Spanish or Language Learning SE???
    – user5306
    Commented Dec 5, 2021 at 22:36
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    this is unsourced and mostly supposition, hence not being an answer, but when you learn a language as an infant, you are building your models of how languages work from scratch, whereas when learning a language as an adult (or even a child, crucially after you have already acquired one language), you're going to tend to try to take shortcuts by mapping structures in the new language to those of one you already know
    – Tristan
    Commented Dec 6, 2021 at 15:15
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    In some cases that works well (e.g. learning perro = dog avoids you having to learn the concept of perro entirely from scratch), but in others where concepts or structures don't line up (as with ser/estar vs to be), trying to think in those terms will constantly trip you up. The shortcut looks tempting, so your brain repeatedly tries to take it, but by doing so makes mistakes. Because the infant learning both languages at once doesn't have that shortcut available, and so saves time in the long-run by not constantly tripping up
    – Tristan
    Commented Dec 6, 2021 at 15:21
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    I'm a Portuguese speaker with two bilingual children who live in an English-speaking area. They've shown some interference issues (mostly calques of idioms and collocations) but never used ser/estar in a way that rang unusual.
    – melissa_boiko
    Commented Dec 7, 2021 at 7:01
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    For English speakers, it sometimes helps to recall that estar comes from Latin verb stare 'to stand', so it's always used when you mean "be in some place" instead of ser. It's also used for movement and changeable predicates, again involving movement metaphor. If you think about it, it comes naturally after a while.
    – jlawler
    Commented Dec 8, 2021 at 17:06

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