Mandarin on deck in British schools

My son, nearly three, has a firm grasp on both English and French, and enough Spanish to get by in a pinch. I speak French fluently and we have mornings in French, afternoons in English. At this point, he alternates between the two with ease.

He also has a little friend of the same age who recently relocated from Israel, speaking not a word of English, and so the boys have taken it upon themselves to teach each other their native tongues. I loved Monday's exchange --

"That's my Mommy. That's your Ima."
"Monnie?"
"No, not money, Mom-mie."

As for languages that I'd like him to know, because of where we live and where we primarily travel, I feel that French and Spanish will be most useful, and in my own life have found that having a grasp on both of those automatically gives you enough understanding of Italian to get by. So, I think he's pretty well set.

It is amazing to watch their sponge-like acquisition of language at this age. I am always saddened by the cultural tradition of waiting until kids are well past the age of being able to truly master a language, to take it as simply another part of their own thought process, and this is when we choose to throw it at them. Don't waste these precious early years!

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Here is would be Spanish although our oldest thinks she'd like French. It's a shame they don't start languages sooner in the public schools here. Kids are little sponges. It's much harder when they're older.

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My lifelong goal is to be able to read all the major holy books in their original languages, and to converse with the majority of the world's people.

OK, I'm not nearly there, so I am working on Spanish, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Telugu. Next in line will be Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, Korean, Vietnamese, Swahili, Zulu, and Sanskrit. Let's see how many incarnations it will take to get to the third list . . . .

My kids will speak Spanish and English from infancy, and I'll introduce other languages while they are tots, to see how interested they are. I would focus first on those that are widely spoken in the modern world.

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I personally want the languages in danger of disappearing taught, specifically the local Native languages. I took Tlingit (thank you Mrs. Shea!) in grade school, and wish it would have continued on into high school. There is something about thinking in a different language that is important in transmitting the culture. If this country could be a little like "Fahrenheit 451" with language and small groups of us were vessels of that language it would be a wonderful thing.

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De-lurking to point out a slight error in the post. Hindi, not Urdu, is technically the second most spoken language in the world. The distinction is important because although both are very similar, Urdu is primarily spoken by Pakistanis whereas Hindi is spoken by Indians. On top of that, the scripts are completely different as is much of the lexicon. Urdu relies a lot on words of Arabic origin (and script) while Hindi is derived from Sanksrit (using the Devnagri script).

Aside from that little pedantic detour, i agree with importance of knowing multiple languages. With globalization of business becoming the norm rather than the exception, the number of people who want a piece of the pie has risen exponentially. Learning another language is a sure-fire way to get our kids to the front of that pie line.

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