2023-03-15_How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Young_Age-Help_Them_Develop

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00:00:30.620 | - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance,

00:00:31.700 | a show dedicated to providing you

00:00:32.720 | with the knowledge, skills, insight,

00:00:34.200 | and encouragement you need to live a rich

00:00:35.900 | and meaningful life now,

00:00:37.060 | while building a plan for financial freedom

00:00:38.460 | in 10 years or less.

00:00:39.760 | My name is Josh Rasheeds, I'm your host,

00:00:41.100 | and today we continue our

00:00:42.540 | How to Invest in Your Children When They're Young series.

00:00:45.140 | Not the catchiest of titles,

00:00:47.040 | but it is something that I believe very passionately

00:00:50.040 | is under-discussed and under-appreciated

00:00:52.540 | in the marketplace of ideas,

00:00:53.940 | which is why I'm taking a significant amount of time here

00:00:56.760 | in the podcast to go through it.

00:00:58.620 | We began by talking about all of the basic things

00:01:03.480 | that make up your child's genetic material.

00:01:06.020 | Then we talked about investing

00:01:07.300 | into your child's body in various ways.

00:01:09.700 | And now we're talking about investing

00:01:11.440 | into your child's mind.

00:01:12.700 | We talked about word acquisition, literacy,

00:01:15.700 | and mathematics, and numeracy.

00:01:19.740 | And now I want to pivot to multilingualism,

00:01:22.940 | because I think multilingualism,

00:01:25.940 | meaning helping your child to acquire

00:01:27.980 | more than one native language,

00:01:30.220 | is a very clear example,

00:01:33.020 | not only of how you can make your children smarter,

00:01:37.540 | both in, I believe, the physical sense

00:01:40.500 | of actively stimulating the gray matter

00:01:42.980 | that's between their ears,

00:01:44.660 | but also kind of in the more commonplace sense,

00:01:47.800 | meaning you're smarter when you know more things,

00:01:50.140 | you're smarter when you have a greater appreciation

00:01:52.540 | of the world, and multilingualism accomplishes

00:01:54.460 | both of those senses.

00:01:56.140 | Not only is this a good example

00:01:57.500 | of making your children smarter,

00:01:59.580 | but it's also a good example

00:02:01.500 | of the importance of beginning while young.

00:02:05.020 | So before I talk about the benefits of multilingualism,

00:02:07.640 | I want to take a few minutes and emphasize

00:02:09.860 | the importance of starting when you are young.

00:02:14.860 | And I want to begin that with a story.

00:02:17.460 | I want to share with you the story

00:02:18.660 | of how I learned my first second language,

00:02:21.440 | which was Spanish.

00:02:23.220 | I grew up in South Florida.

00:02:24.540 | I was surrounded by Spanish-speaking people on occasion,

00:02:29.060 | but I had no consistent exposure to the language.

00:02:32.820 | I remember at one time when I was very young,

00:02:35.020 | my family decided we were gonna learn some Spanish,

00:02:37.260 | and so we wrote some Spanish phrases on flashcards,

00:02:41.180 | and we tried to learn and memorize those phrases,

00:02:43.220 | and it didn't work.

00:02:44.660 | My parents didn't have the,

00:02:46.760 | whatever they were missing.

00:02:49.040 | My parents didn't follow through.

00:02:50.640 | I didn't follow through.

00:02:53.860 | No one forced me to do it,

00:02:55.140 | so I was aware that Spanish was a thing,

00:02:57.620 | but I didn't have any exposure to Spanish.

00:03:00.020 | But I did have some elder siblings

00:03:02.140 | who had successfully learned Spanish,

00:03:04.500 | some to a very high level of fluency.

00:03:07.380 | And because of that,

00:03:09.300 | I understood that it was useful to speak Spanish.

00:03:12.860 | So in high school, I took two years of high school Spanish,

00:03:16.060 | Spanish one and Spanish two.

00:03:18.180 | Don't remember exactly the grades.

00:03:19.560 | I'm gonna guess 10th and 11th grade.

00:03:21.060 | Could have been 9th and 10th.

00:03:21.940 | I don't remember exactly.

00:03:23.620 | And in those Spanish classes,

00:03:26.140 | I found that it wasn't particularly difficult to me.

00:03:29.300 | I did my homework.

00:03:30.660 | But because I observed

00:03:32.300 | that Spanish was something that was useful,

00:03:34.220 | I did something that most of my peers did not.

00:03:37.340 | And that thing that I did was I tried to use

00:03:40.980 | the basic and broken Spanish that I had

00:03:44.020 | when I had opportunity.

00:03:45.520 | When I was in high school,

00:03:46.540 | I worked on a farm for several years.

00:03:49.220 | I worked on lawn maintenance crews,

00:03:50.960 | and so I was around a primarily

00:03:52.660 | Spanish-speaking immigrant population.

00:03:54.780 | So there were lots of chances for me

00:03:55.940 | to try out my little Spanish with them.

00:03:57.500 | And of course, they were happy to talk with me,

00:03:59.620 | and that inspired me and motivated me to keep going.

00:04:03.380 | I also, I didn't have a lot of instruction

00:04:07.140 | on how to improve my Spanish,

00:04:08.860 | especially as an autodidact.

00:04:12.100 | I had the instruction that I had in Spanish class,

00:04:15.260 | but no one taught me how to go on learning.

00:04:17.660 | In hindsight, I desperately wish

00:04:19.820 | that my teachers had given at least a class period or two

00:04:24.340 | to say, "Hey, if you're interested in learning more

00:04:26.780 | "than what I've been able to teach you in this class,

00:04:28.600 | "here are some of the things that you can do."

00:04:30.500 | It took me about 15 years until I finally started,

00:04:34.700 | actually more than that, until I finally had a plan

00:04:37.580 | to how to improve my own level of Spanish

00:04:40.700 | through self-study.

00:04:43.200 | I thought I just needed to talk more in order to get better,

00:04:45.380 | which was a completely wrong-headed assumption that I had.

00:04:48.860 | But back to my Spanish,

00:04:50.620 | I also developed a simple technique

00:04:53.100 | that helped me to achieve a significant level of fluency,

00:04:57.180 | or I would rather say fluidity,

00:04:58.860 | because there's so much misunderstanding

00:05:00.180 | about the use of this term fluency in language learning,

00:05:03.100 | but it helped me to develop fluidity

00:05:06.620 | with my ability to express myself in Spanish,

00:05:08.740 | and that technique was I just simply practiced translating

00:05:11.660 | in my head when I was listening to people talk,

00:05:13.800 | listened to lots of classes, went to speeches, seminars,

00:05:17.460 | church meetings, et cetera,

00:05:19.060 | and when I would hear people speak to me,

00:05:20.620 | I would keep my mind busy by just figuring out

00:05:24.360 | how to do simultaneous translation.

00:05:26.540 | And that skillset of constantly searching for ways

00:05:28.920 | to describe something

00:05:29.780 | when you're missing the vocabulary necessary

00:05:32.020 | helped me to achieve a much higher level of fluency,

00:05:35.460 | meaning the ability to express my thoughts

00:05:37.220 | in a fluent and flowing way, than many other people.

00:05:41.220 | It was only many years later

00:05:42.520 | when I look back on that experience,

00:05:44.460 | and I started to figure out why

00:05:46.420 | what I did worked and why what other people did not work.

00:05:51.420 | And quite simply, it is a function of time,

00:05:55.940 | time spent with the language.

00:05:58.060 | The single most important metric to study

00:06:02.420 | when you are thinking about acquiring a foreign language

00:06:05.140 | is time with the language.

00:06:08.140 | Every language can be learned,

00:06:10.720 | even if you don't start when you're young,

00:06:12.500 | we'll cover some of those myths later in the episode,

00:06:14.660 | just a matter of taking and spending the time

00:06:17.060 | with the language.

00:06:17.880 | If you spend a lot of time with the language,

00:06:20.780 | and you're going to acquire the language

00:06:23.420 | in the fullness of time.

00:06:25.020 | But if you only spend a little bit of time with the language,

00:06:27.540 | you're not gonna acquire the language.

00:06:29.540 | So I went back and I started doing some math.

00:06:31.520 | And let me show you the math

00:06:32.980 | of what it takes to learn a language.

00:06:36.560 | First, let's begin with a baseline.

00:06:38.620 | In the United States,

00:06:39.740 | there is a governmental organization

00:06:41.740 | called the Foreign Service Institute.

00:06:44.340 | And the job of the Foreign Service Institute

00:06:46.300 | is to provide language training and culture training

00:06:49.300 | to US government employees who need to learn a language

00:06:52.300 | for various reasons, frequently diplomats, et cetera.

00:06:55.260 | Foreign Service Institute has been doing this job

00:06:57.720 | for in excess of seven decades.

00:07:00.100 | And during that time,

00:07:01.940 | the teachers have acquired a great deal of expertise

00:07:05.300 | in what it takes to teach English speaking persons

00:07:08.480 | a foreign language.

00:07:10.260 | And what they have done is they have provided

00:07:12.820 | publicly available at state.gov,

00:07:14.540 | you can look it up yourself.

00:07:16.580 | They have provided a chart or a set of rankings

00:07:19.980 | for how long it takes to learn a foreign language.

00:07:23.460 | They provide this chart in terms of a number of weeks

00:07:27.020 | of instruction and class hours.

00:07:29.500 | And they divide languages into categories

00:07:32.020 | one, two, three, four, and five.

00:07:35.380 | I'm not gonna go over all of these,

00:07:36.460 | but first let me define a few terms.

00:07:38.460 | When the Foreign Service Institute indicates

00:07:41.580 | that someone is proficient,

00:07:44.940 | they use their own internal scoring.

00:07:48.220 | Here's what they say on their website.

00:07:49.500 | The following language learning timelines

00:07:51.780 | reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages

00:07:54.720 | to US diplomats and illustrate the time usually required

00:07:59.300 | for a student to reach, quote,

00:08:00.860 | "professional working proficiency in the language,"

00:08:04.660 | or a score of speaking three, reading three

00:08:07.780 | on the interagency language round table scale.

00:08:11.300 | These timelines are based on what FSI has observed

00:08:14.400 | as the average length of time

00:08:16.200 | for a student to achieve proficiency.

00:08:18.220 | Though the actual time can vary based

00:08:19.980 | on a number of factors,

00:08:21.060 | including the language learner's natural ability,

00:08:23.620 | prior linguistic experience,

00:08:25.060 | and time spent in the classroom.

00:08:28.180 | So this definition of fluency,

00:08:32.860 | they call it professional working proficiency.

00:08:35.940 | We might, I think of this as about a B2 or a C1

00:08:39.540 | on the common European framework for languages

00:08:43.060 | that is most commonly used today

00:08:45.180 | to discuss linguistic ability, et cetera.

00:08:48.220 | And what they use is, let's go for example,

00:08:51.700 | category one languages,

00:08:52.780 | or languages that are very similar to English,

00:08:54.660 | or more similar to English.

00:08:56.060 | And these languages take anywhere from 24 to 30 weeks

00:08:59.940 | for the student to learn.

00:09:02.400 | Now, when they say weeks,

00:09:03.780 | what they define that as is five days,

00:09:06.700 | excuse me, five hours of classroom instruction

00:09:10.140 | for a language learner, five days per week.

00:09:14.300 | So a total of 25 hours over the course of a week.

00:09:19.300 | I don't think this is an all encompassing number.

00:09:22.500 | Their students are encouraged to go

00:09:24.660 | and spend more time and self-study outside of the classroom,

00:09:28.060 | but this is their baseline number,

00:09:29.460 | is five hours a day, five days a week.

00:09:32.260 | And they estimate the category one languages,

00:09:34.500 | such as Danish, Italian, Romanian, Dutch,

00:09:37.820 | Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish,

00:09:40.460 | these are all 24 week languages.

00:09:42.540 | So if you multiply 24 times 25,

00:09:45.300 | you wind up with 600 hours.

00:09:47.000 | And so they estimate that Spanish

00:09:48.940 | is a 600 class hour language.

00:09:51.260 | Also included in this category

00:09:53.340 | would be a language like French,

00:09:54.420 | which they say is a 30 week language.

00:09:56.420 | So 750 class hours to acquire the French language.

00:10:00.660 | And this gives us a good baseline.

00:10:02.660 | Now we go up, category two languages

00:10:04.940 | are a little bit less similar to English,

00:10:07.380 | but still fairly close.

00:10:08.460 | These are 36 week languages or 900 hours.

00:10:11.460 | This would include German, Malay, Swahili,

00:10:13.420 | Indonesian, Haitian, Creole,

00:10:15.300 | lots of category three languages,

00:10:17.040 | which require 44 weeks or 1100 class hours.

00:10:21.820 | This would be Albanian, Burmese, Estonian,

00:10:24.460 | Georgian, Hindi, Kazakh, Lithuanian,

00:10:26.580 | Nepali, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Turkmen, Uzbek,

00:10:29.980 | Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Tagalog,

00:10:32.300 | Slovak, Russian, Latvian, Icelandic,

00:10:34.840 | Hebrew, Finnish, Bulgarian, et cetera.

00:10:37.220 | Greek, you know, Lao, Macedonian, Polish, et cetera.

00:10:40.920 | So these are 1100 hour languages.

00:10:44.140 | And then you go up to category four languages,

00:10:45.980 | which they classify as languages

00:10:48.720 | which are super hard languages.

00:10:50.140 | Languages that are exceptionally difficult

00:10:51.680 | for native English speakers

00:10:53.100 | because of their dissimilarity from English.

00:10:56.500 | And category four languages require 88 weeks

00:10:59.180 | of classroom instruction or 2200 class hours.

00:11:02.740 | These languages would include Arabic,

00:11:04.700 | Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera.

00:11:07.780 | So this gives us a baseline.

00:11:09.400 | So now let's go back to my high school experience

00:11:13.760 | and let's think and talk about what actually happened.

00:11:17.580 | Remember that in this high school,

00:11:19.180 | we were on what is a traditional schedule

00:11:22.500 | in the United States.

00:11:23.740 | In the United States, schools do 180 days

00:11:27.000 | of classroom instruction per year.

00:11:29.100 | That's fairly common on a global average

00:11:32.420 | within kind of the Western European nations,

00:11:34.540 | 180, 190 is the norm of numbers of days per year

00:11:39.240 | of classroom instruction.

00:11:40.580 | I think Japan is, what is it, 220?

00:11:42.660 | I don't remember exactly.

00:11:43.660 | So there's some that are higher,

00:11:45.060 | but about is 180 hours, excuse me, 180 days in a year.

00:11:49.900 | When I was in school, our classes were 50 minutes in length

00:11:54.500 | and that was counted as an hour,

00:11:56.180 | but it was 50, five, zero minutes.

00:11:59.060 | And of course, if we think about the amount of time

00:12:02.980 | that a classroom teacher has to teach in class,

00:12:06.100 | it's something less than the amount of time on the schedule.

00:12:09.760 | I'm gonna estimate that if you have 50 minutes

00:12:12.380 | in a classroom period, a superbly prepared teacher

00:12:17.260 | could perhaps deliver 30 to 35 minutes

00:12:20.040 | of actual instruction.

00:12:22.100 | You have five minutes to welcome everybody,

00:12:24.400 | get everyone settled down, everyone in their seats,

00:12:26.260 | when the bell rings, et cetera,

00:12:27.840 | make announcements, et cetera, get the class started.

00:12:30.860 | You're gonna be interrupted at some point in the lesson

00:12:32.980 | for various five minutes here and there.

00:12:35.820 | And then you're gonna have five minutes at the end

00:12:37.340 | where you're basically winding down.

00:12:39.020 | So a superbly prepared teacher who's very, very

00:12:42.400 | on top of his game could probably do 35

00:12:44.700 | to maybe 40 minutes of instruction in a period.

00:12:48.380 | And then of course, in the course of an academic school year

00:12:52.020 | there are many days that are lost

00:12:55.080 | to various other activities.

00:12:57.200 | You might have homecoming week,

00:12:59.200 | you might have teacher absent days,

00:13:01.980 | you might have testing or some kind of school activities

00:13:05.720 | that are causing you to disrupt your normal schedule.

00:13:08.220 | The first few days in from summer vacation

00:13:10.920 | are largely wasted and say the last week

00:13:13.860 | before summer vacation is largely wasted.

00:13:16.220 | So you're gonna get something less than 180 days.

00:13:19.140 | But let's assume for the sake of analysis

00:13:21.440 | that you could provide one hour of instruction

00:13:26.120 | in a 50 minute class,

00:13:27.700 | and you could do that for every single school day.

00:13:30.180 | Well, you have 180 hours of instruction

00:13:33.180 | in a first year Spanish one class.

00:13:36.700 | Multiply that times two years and you have 360 hours.

00:13:40.760 | Of course, maybe there's some homework time,

00:13:42.540 | some things, other assignments that are assigned

00:13:44.820 | by the student, by the parent, excuse me, the teacher

00:13:47.540 | that allow the student to spend time studying,

00:13:50.920 | but still maximum I think is about 360 hours of instruction.

00:13:55.200 | Do you see the problem?

00:13:57.500 | Is it any wonder that the vast majority of students

00:14:02.300 | who complete the required two years

00:14:04.980 | of foreign language instruction in high school

00:14:07.740 | do not come out of those two years

00:14:10.580 | with even a basic level of ability

00:14:13.980 | to communicate and enjoy a language?

00:14:17.500 | Even if that completely optimal scenario

00:14:21.080 | were somehow to be possible of 360 hours,

00:14:24.240 | we're still at about half

00:14:26.520 | of what the Foreign Service Institute needs

00:14:29.000 | to teach a highly motivated professional

00:14:32.120 | a foreign language like Spanish.

00:14:34.280 | So what is the solution?

00:14:36.480 | Well, we could talk about pedagogy

00:14:38.760 | and helping the student to have more efficient ways.

00:14:42.480 | We could talk about ways to motivate the student, et cetera.

00:14:45.120 | But the simplest and most direct path

00:14:48.540 | to improving the outcome,

00:14:50.780 | if the desired outcome is to help a student

00:14:53.780 | to be fluent in a foreign language,

00:14:56.700 | the simplest and most direct path

00:14:59.420 | is to simply increase the amount of time spent

00:15:02.340 | in that study.

00:15:05.400 | If we made Spanish one, two, three, and four

00:15:09.740 | the norm in our high schools,

00:15:12.100 | rather than Spanish one and two,

00:15:15.060 | I think most of our students

00:15:16.980 | would probably get close to fluency

00:15:20.040 | because their teachers are doing their best

00:15:21.600 | to use good methodology, good materials, et cetera.

00:15:24.540 | They just don't have enough time.

00:15:26.500 | But if we know that we need 600 hours

00:15:28.560 | and we know that we are gonna get something

00:15:30.600 | less than 180 hours in a year,

00:15:33.320 | even at 150 hours, again, take it out over four years,

00:15:36.880 | we could teach a student a foreign language

00:15:39.820 | before that student graduates from high school.

00:15:42.960 | And once you understand the math on it,

00:15:45.080 | it just becomes powerful when you recognize the result,

00:15:48.120 | the things that could happen.

00:15:50.740 | We'll talk in a moment about why they don't do that,

00:15:54.160 | but let's play with the math a little bit.

00:15:56.280 | What if you started a little bit earlier?

00:15:58.920 | What if, for example,

00:16:00.640 | instead of foreign language instruction

00:16:02.920 | being something that was relegated

00:16:04.840 | to the required two years in high school,

00:16:08.320 | what if it was something that was done all the time?

00:16:12.640 | What if you had one hour every school day,

00:16:16.160 | so one hour, you had 180 hours per year

00:16:18.520 | over the course of a 12-year course of study of school?

00:16:22.060 | Well, that would give you 2,160 hours

00:16:26.960 | that is available for you if you did this

00:16:29.960 | for a one-hour period every school day for 12 years.

00:16:33.740 | What could a language teacher do with 2,160 hours?

00:16:38.200 | I think pretty easily the student could learn

00:16:40.920 | something like Spanish, 600 hours.

00:16:43.160 | French, Foreign Service Institute would say 750 hours,

00:16:48.160 | but if the student already knew Spanish,

00:16:49.800 | I would say less than 600 hours based upon my experience.

00:16:53.360 | Let's just say 600 hours for French,

00:16:55.200 | and then German, 900 hours,

00:16:57.600 | and you still have a little time left over to spare.

00:17:00.240 | So if we did one hour per school day

00:17:02.800 | for 183 days per year over 12 years of school,

00:17:06.280 | then a student could come out with three languages learned.

00:17:09.400 | Alternatively, we could take that time

00:17:11.440 | and we could invest it into some of those harder languages,

00:17:14.260 | those languages that are less similar to English,

00:17:17.920 | Arabic, or Chinese, 2,200 hours of instruction needed,

00:17:22.440 | and we could help a student achieve

00:17:23.960 | a very high level of fluency in these languages.

00:17:26.660 | What if you were motivated and you expanded

00:17:32.160 | the amount of time beyond the school year?

00:17:35.200 | In most working adults,

00:17:40.200 | you don't spend 180 days per year working,

00:17:43.280 | you spend something like 250 days per year working,

00:17:46.960 | depending on the country.

00:17:48.200 | And so what if instead of doing this 180 days per year,

00:17:54.160 | we did 250 days per year, just one hour?

00:17:58.000 | Well, one hour times 250 school days per year

00:18:01.720 | times 12 years of school is 3,000 hours.

00:18:04.360 | Once again, the student could learn pretty simply

00:18:07.480 | three, maybe four languages, maybe Portuguese, 600 hours,

00:18:10.420 | Dutch, 600 hours, Swahili, 900 hours,

00:18:13.280 | maybe Greek, 1,100 hours, with those 3,000 hours.

00:18:17.760 | What if you increased the amount of time still more?

00:18:21.080 | What if you did two hours per day?

00:18:23.620 | I probably should have started the podcast with this,

00:18:25.780 | but in my family, we've gone in the last three years

00:18:29.040 | from being, last three and a half years,

00:18:31.760 | from being a monolingual family to now,

00:18:34.720 | at varying levels, depending on the student,

00:18:36.800 | achieving a pretty high level of fluency in four languages,

00:18:40.080 | and we're starting the study of our sixth

00:18:42.560 | and seventh languages.

00:18:43.800 | And so what if you, but we do more than an hour a day.

00:18:49.040 | I break it up, but what if you did two hours per day?

00:18:52.360 | Two hours per day, and you did it, say, 300 days per year,

00:18:57.360 | because you used better techniques and methods

00:19:01.320 | that made it not onerous and burdensome,

00:19:04.240 | but rather joyful and enjoyable.

00:19:06.720 | Well, two hours per day times 300 days per year

00:19:09.160 | over 12 years, that's 7,200 hours.

00:19:12.320 | So in that 7,200 hours, a student could very feasibly

00:19:17.320 | learn Italian, 600 hours, Greek, 1,100 hours,

00:19:21.800 | Hebrew, 1,100 hours, Korean, 2,200 hours,

00:19:24.640 | and Arabic, 2,200 hours.

00:19:27.320 | And then finally, let's play with the math

00:19:29.160 | still one more way.

00:19:30.600 | What if instead of language acquisition being something

00:19:33.760 | that was constrained to schoolwork,

00:19:37.360 | it was something that was part of your family culture?

00:19:40.760 | What if you gave yourself a total of 16 years of time,

00:19:44.280 | starting at age two instead of at school age,

00:19:49.280 | and so you had 16 years from age two to age 18?

00:19:52.080 | Well, two hours a day, 300 days per year, 16 years,

00:19:56.240 | that's 9,600 hours.

00:19:58.400 | So in theory, a student on that kind of schedule

00:20:02.120 | could learn Spanish, 600 hours, French,

00:20:04.680 | let's call it 600 hours, German, 900 hours,

00:20:06.920 | Greek, 1,100 hours, Hebrew, 1,100 hours,

00:20:09.480 | Russian, 1,100 hours, Arabic, 2,200 hours,

00:20:12.000 | and Mandarin Chinese, 2,200 hours.

00:20:14.380 | So the point is that that's what's available

00:20:17.620 | if you have more time.

00:20:19.240 | Is it impossible to do that?

00:20:22.960 | No, it's not impossible to do that.

00:20:24.640 | It's just that most of us don't either have the interest

00:20:27.880 | or the system to do it.

00:20:30.640 | There's one guy, I should have looked up his name,

00:20:32.560 | forgive me, a Canadian guy on YouTube

00:20:35.400 | and has a little channel devoted

00:20:36.920 | to helping develop multilingual children.

00:20:39.800 | And in his family, his children all speak natively,

00:20:44.280 | five languages.

00:20:46.120 | He, I believe, speaks Mandarin Chinese natively.

00:20:49.120 | He's of Chinese ethnic origin.

00:20:51.480 | So his children speak Chinese with their father.

00:20:54.720 | His wife is Japanese.

00:20:56.080 | They speak Japanese with their mother.

00:20:58.880 | They have a Spanish-speaking nanny who lives in the home

00:21:02.840 | and speaks Spanish with the children.

00:21:04.680 | And they live in, I think, Quebec, Canada,

00:21:08.660 | where they speak French and English natively

00:21:11.620 | with their friends and in their academic studies.

00:21:14.760 | And so all of his children, basically from birth,

00:21:17.760 | are taught five languages.

00:21:20.000 | If his children desire to intensively study language,

00:21:23.440 | they would fairly easily pick up several more.

00:21:25.880 | And because they have learned such diverse languages

00:21:29.120 | from birth, it cuts down the learning,

00:21:31.680 | the acquisition time necessary

00:21:33.280 | for virtually all of the world's languages

00:21:35.000 | to far less than somebody who only speaks English

00:21:37.320 | and is now going and studying Japanese.

00:21:39.600 | Because as you learn more languages,

00:21:41.340 | you have more connections, you have more cognates,

00:21:43.600 | it becomes faster and easier to learn languages.

00:21:47.120 | So the key thing here is time.

00:21:49.320 | If you start early, you can achieve far bigger results

00:21:54.320 | than in the long run.

00:21:57.720 | So the question is, why don't we do this for our children?

00:22:02.000 | Why don't our schools require four years of language study

00:22:07.000 | instead of two years in order to graduate?

00:22:09.760 | Well, let's assume the best.

00:22:11.080 | Let's not engage in conspiratorial thinking.

00:22:13.160 | Let's assume the best, that the school administrators

00:22:16.500 | and program designers are trying to do their very best

00:22:20.520 | to help a student be prepared.

00:22:22.200 | Why?

00:22:23.040 | If we know that a student needs a minimum of 600 hours

00:22:25.600 | of classroom instruction to achieve fluency in Spanish,

00:22:28.080 | why are we only devoting, say, 360 hours,

00:22:31.680 | or more realistically, far less,

00:22:33.900 | to that student's instruction?

00:22:35.820 | The answer is the opportunity cost.

00:22:39.680 | If you are sitting down and designing

00:22:43.080 | any kind of academic curriculum,

00:22:45.120 | you have to choose what goes into it,

00:22:47.040 | and you have to choose what goes out.

00:22:49.680 | And this is one of the big reasons

00:22:51.360 | why we should start language acquisition at a young age,

00:22:55.920 | because the opportunity cost of studying languages

00:22:59.080 | at a young age is very, very low.

00:23:03.560 | But as the student ages,

00:23:05.440 | the opportunity cost becomes more significant.

00:23:08.640 | Let's imagine your 16-year-old is coming to you,

00:23:13.120 | and your 16-year-old is saying,

00:23:14.480 | "You know what, I'm super interested in Japanese,

00:23:17.280 | but I also have just been offered

00:23:21.080 | this really great summer job,

00:23:22.680 | or this really great internship,

00:23:24.320 | working in the kind of business

00:23:25.920 | that I think would be cool to work in in the future."

00:23:29.160 | Your child has only so many hours available to him,

00:23:32.360 | so what advice are you gonna give him?

00:23:34.440 | Should he spend his time studying Japanese,

00:23:36.760 | or should he spend his time going and doing the summer job,

00:23:39.880 | or the internship?

00:23:42.240 | Now, in fairness, he can probably do both,

00:23:44.840 | because even as a teenager,

00:23:47.160 | teens still have huge amounts of time available to them

00:23:51.080 | to accomplish anything they can dream of,

00:23:53.320 | or anything you can dream up for them.

00:23:55.800 | But you see the point.

00:23:57.960 | That summer job is actually very important.

00:24:00.520 | When you look at the subjects that are necessary,

00:24:03.960 | I may cover a subject like learning to code.

00:24:07.880 | I don't think learning to code is important

00:24:09.760 | for a four-year-old, or a six-year-old, or an eight-year-old.

00:24:13.720 | I do think learning to code is important

00:24:15.800 | for a 14-year-old, or a 16-year-old, or an 18-year-old.

00:24:19.720 | And so what's gonna be more valuable in life,

00:24:22.960 | learning Mandarin, or learning to code?

00:24:26.760 | Generally speaking, I would say probably learning to code,

00:24:29.880 | depending on the interests of the child.

00:24:32.000 | But what if you could do both?

00:24:34.760 | The way you can do both is by moving it younger.

00:24:37.920 | So when you look at the young ages of a child,

00:24:40.760 | and you think about what's necessary for that child,

00:24:43.640 | and what should a child be focused on

00:24:45.840 | during his younger years,

00:24:47.640 | language acquisition is a very natural fit

00:24:51.960 | for the development of the human brain.

00:24:54.080 | Speaking of coding, I have looked for a very long time

00:24:57.920 | to try to find all of the best information I can

00:25:00.360 | about teaching a child to code.

00:25:03.440 | And while it's becoming more normal

00:25:05.920 | that coding is becoming part of the school curriculum

00:25:09.640 | from K through 12 in many cases,

00:25:12.280 | I have not yet found compelling evidence

00:25:14.840 | that a child really needs to be exposed

00:25:17.880 | to learning to code from kindergarten onward.

00:25:21.360 | It seems to me that there's plenty of time

00:25:23.560 | in the middle school years and in the high school years

00:25:25.720 | to introduce the subject of coding

00:25:27.680 | when it seems a little bit more developmentally appropriate,

00:25:30.200 | at least to me.

00:25:31.040 | When you look at mathematics,

00:25:33.400 | I shared some of the arguments against

00:25:36.240 | intensive early study of mathematics.

00:25:39.480 | What else?

00:25:40.320 | What about something like music?

00:25:41.480 | I think music is really valuable,

00:25:43.520 | but I also have spent quite a lot of time as a young child

00:25:47.800 | wrestling against my parents and against my music teachers

00:25:50.320 | 'cause I didn't wanna learn music.

00:25:51.920 | I spent some time wrestling with my own children,

00:25:53.960 | trying to get them to learn music.

00:25:55.720 | And when you look at how slow the progress is

00:25:58.400 | for a very young child to learn music

00:26:01.120 | versus how quick the progress can be

00:26:02.760 | when the student is a little bit older,

00:26:04.560 | I'm not convinced that forcing music study

00:26:07.560 | on young children is productive for most people.

00:26:09.920 | If you have a prodigy, if it fits your culture, go for it.

00:26:12.360 | I think it's awesome,

00:26:13.400 | but I'm not convinced it's necessary to force it.

00:26:16.240 | So what are you left with?

00:26:17.800 | Well, you're left with all the natural, normal things

00:26:19.520 | of childhood, character development,

00:26:21.520 | virtue development, et cetera,

00:26:23.240 | lots of time playing outside, playing with friends,

00:26:26.040 | free play, art, et cetera.

00:26:28.280 | But at its core, language acquisition is a core function.

00:26:32.680 | And so in the same way that I spoke extensively

00:26:35.000 | about the value of studying your primary language

00:26:37.240 | at an early age and the number of words,

00:26:39.560 | the same thing applies to acquiring multiple other languages.

00:26:43.360 | These are golden years

00:26:44.880 | in which there are few competing choices

00:26:48.600 | for the time that are productive,

00:26:51.040 | and yet we can help a child be set up to be far ahead

00:26:54.720 | with later options

00:26:57.680 | if we help a child to be multilingual from birth.

00:27:01.560 | So what I've just shared is clearly an extensive discussion,

00:27:05.560 | but when you understand the math,

00:27:07.440 | you can understand how powerful it is

00:27:10.200 | to invest into your child at a young age.

00:27:13.120 | Many, many college students all over the world go to school

00:27:19.640 | and spend a lot of money and a lot of time

00:27:22.840 | to take a degree in English, in Spanish literature,

00:27:27.760 | in Japanese language and culture, et cetera.

00:27:31.360 | And I would say that if you had a coach

00:27:34.160 | and you had the right materials,

00:27:36.040 | you can pretty well set the foundation

00:27:39.880 | to where your child can acquire the equivalent knowledge

00:27:44.520 | fairly easily just in his spare time

00:27:47.760 | long before he ever graduates from high school.

00:27:50.880 | I've spent a good amount of time

00:27:52.480 | trying to find the best universities,

00:27:54.440 | going and finding all of their syllabus,

00:27:59.160 | their syllabi that they have for their students.

00:28:01.280 | I go and try to find their reading lists

00:28:02.880 | for their Spanish literature major,

00:28:04.440 | their French literature major, et cetera.

00:28:06.520 | And then I go and try to look

00:28:08.120 | and make lists of the resources, right?

00:28:11.880 | I'm a homeschool dad, this is what I do, make reading lists.

00:28:15.040 | And while not all of it is appropriate to,

00:28:18.640 | certainly much of it is not appropriate to a young mind,

00:28:21.320 | I'm convinced that an average teenager

00:28:24.000 | who's been taught the language from an early age

00:28:27.160 | can just simply pretty easily absorb the reading list

00:28:30.160 | of one of these majors just for fun in his teenage years.

00:28:34.000 | And while he's not gonna have the discussion

00:28:36.120 | and the argument and whatnot in a college classroom

00:28:39.520 | and probably not appreciate all of the piercing insights

00:28:43.040 | that you could have in analyzing literature

00:28:44.800 | at the collegiate level, you can get 80% of the way there

00:28:48.320 | to the value of a Japanese language and culture degree

00:28:52.120 | just simply through acquiring a language at a young age.

00:28:55.960 | It's a powerful, powerful idea

00:28:58.120 | when you understand the math.

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00:29:30.280 | - Thus far, I don't think I've said anything

00:29:33.640 | that is particularly controversial.

00:29:36.400 | Most people, if asked, do you think it's a good idea

00:29:41.160 | that a child be taught a second language?

00:29:43.760 | Most people would agree, absolutely it is.

00:29:45.960 | If you're, depending on what language you're talking about,

00:29:50.000 | I would say that most people outside of the English world

00:29:54.440 | would say it's essential that your child

00:29:57.240 | be taught a second language.

00:29:59.720 | I don't think there is a wealthy, knowledgeable, educated

00:30:04.720 | set of parents out there who,

00:30:08.960 | if English is not the native language of their child,

00:30:11.640 | does not consider English language acquisition

00:30:14.640 | and instruction a high priority for their child's education.

00:30:19.640 | There certainly are, in the English-speaking world,

00:30:23.320 | many parents who don't think it's a high priority

00:30:26.600 | for their child to learn a second language,

00:30:28.840 | but they do think it's a good idea.

00:30:30.640 | I wanna now talk about the concept of,

00:30:34.000 | is a child better at learning languages?

00:30:37.280 | There is, in bringing this subject up,

00:30:39.480 | an oft-repeated refrain which simply says,

00:30:42.600 | oh, children should learn a second language

00:30:44.400 | while they're young because they can just learn it better

00:30:46.520 | than when they're older.

00:30:47.920 | I do not believe that myself that this is true,

00:30:51.640 | or at least if it is true,

00:30:53.400 | I can't find any good data or evidence to back it up.

00:30:58.360 | And when we think of the circumstantial evidence

00:31:00.360 | that all of us have of observing children acquire languages,

00:31:04.160 | I don't think that it bears out the idea

00:31:06.960 | that children are better at learning languages.

00:31:10.520 | In fact, I think that adults or motivated young people

00:31:15.520 | who are not children are actually better

00:31:18.000 | at learning foreign languages

00:31:20.080 | because they have a whole set of tools

00:31:21.840 | that young children cannot apply.

00:31:24.560 | Adults can use tools like self-discipline,

00:31:27.920 | focused study, grammar instruction, et cetera,

00:31:31.800 | to help them to learn a foreign language

00:31:34.400 | much more effectively than children can.

00:31:37.800 | Children basically are wandering around the world

00:31:40.480 | sort of kind of understanding at some point,

00:31:42.360 | and they don't generally have the motivation,

00:31:44.560 | the self-discipline, et cetera, to make fast progress.

00:31:48.320 | I think the reason people say

00:31:51.120 | that children are better at acquiring languages

00:31:53.120 | has more to do with the amount of time

00:31:55.240 | that children spend on language acquisition versus adults.

00:31:59.480 | Remember that language acquisition is a function of time,

00:32:02.760 | and children have the great benefit

00:32:04.960 | that their parents take care of everything for them,

00:32:08.040 | and about their only job is to learn languages.

00:32:11.040 | I have a baby in the other room,

00:32:12.600 | and that baby is sitting either in his mother's arms

00:32:16.160 | or in a little carrier or a little seat or something,

00:32:19.440 | and all that baby has to do is look around the room

00:32:23.080 | and listen to the sounds that are around him

00:32:25.200 | and start to decipher them and figure them out.

00:32:27.800 | And for the first couple years of his life,

00:32:30.160 | the only thing he will have to do for himself

00:32:33.120 | is just sit and listen.

00:32:34.760 | And after a couple years, he'll start making a little,

00:32:37.120 | you know, some noises and unintelligible,

00:32:39.520 | you know, single-word constructions here and there,

00:32:42.240 | and then after a few years,

00:32:43.880 | he'll start to spontaneously speak

00:32:46.120 | in the beginning with many, many mistakes,

00:32:48.440 | and in the fullness of time,

00:32:49.600 | when he reaches seven, eight, nine, somewhere in there,

00:32:52.640 | he'll speak with smooth, sophisticated grammar

00:32:55.520 | and start to develop a complex vocabulary.

00:32:58.240 | Takes him many, many years to develop language ability,

00:33:01.520 | and that's all he has to do,

00:33:03.600 | spending eight, 12, 16 hours a day on this one task.

00:33:08.160 | As an adult, when you go to study language,

00:33:10.360 | you often have 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day,

00:33:13.600 | because you've gotta feed and clothe

00:33:15.640 | and earn the money and everything that's necessary

00:33:17.400 | to support all of those other ones

00:33:18.840 | that are depending on you for their language acquisition.

00:33:21.440 | So children spend far more time learning language

00:33:25.960 | than adults do, and that's one reason

00:33:28.920 | why they seem to be so good at it.

00:33:31.880 | The second reason that we consider children

00:33:34.320 | to be so good at language is the level of language output

00:33:38.280 | that we expect of them is fairly simple and unsophisticated.

00:33:42.760 | As an adult, an educated adult,

00:33:46.240 | we consider, we think of language in a very complex ways.

00:33:50.440 | Our thoughts are very complex and sophisticated.

00:33:53.120 | And so when we wanna speak in a foreign language,

00:33:55.280 | we get frustrated if we can't express

00:33:59.000 | complex, sophisticated language.

00:34:01.960 | Whereas children, their language is generally simple,

00:34:05.440 | very repetitive, very action-oriented, et cetera.

00:34:08.640 | It's the simplest form of language.

00:34:11.340 | The third thing that I think does come into play,

00:34:14.700 | when people talk about children learning languages better,

00:34:17.840 | after these factors, I think they're often impressed

00:34:21.080 | by the accent that children have.

00:34:23.560 | There does seem to be some evidence

00:34:25.720 | that children who do not use,

00:34:28.960 | who do not listen to certain sounds at a young age,

00:34:32.360 | lose the ability to easily hear those sounds

00:34:34.960 | if those sounds are not reflected in their mother tongue.

00:34:38.840 | And so it may be the case that adults

00:34:40.960 | may not be able to easily hear certain sounds,

00:34:43.000 | but that can be trained and improved.

00:34:45.020 | But children often don't have a filter.

00:34:47.600 | And so when they hear somebody speak in a certain way,

00:34:50.400 | they unconsciously acquire that accent.

00:34:54.040 | And they sound very native because they don't have a filter.

00:34:57.340 | Whereas adults, we are filled with experiences

00:35:01.080 | and prejudices and opinions and whatnot

00:35:04.200 | that cause us to be careful

00:35:08.960 | and reserved about the accent that we express.

00:35:12.320 | We do this in our native language.

00:35:14.320 | I would never speak like a New Yorker, right?

00:35:16.720 | I would never speak like a Southern redneck.

00:35:18.920 | These accents are repulsive to me.

00:35:20.680 | I just don't like them.

00:35:21.800 | I don't wanna be associated with them.

00:35:22.920 | I don't wanna sound anything like them.

00:35:24.400 | And so if all of a sudden I move to the deep South

00:35:28.680 | and living out in Hicktown,

00:35:30.580 | or if I moved to the Bronx or Brooklyn,

00:35:33.920 | I would never sound, no matter how long I lived there,

00:35:37.040 | I would never sound fully native

00:35:40.680 | because of this prejudice that I have

00:35:44.160 | against New Yorkers or against Southern rednecks.

00:35:47.600 | On the other hand,

00:35:48.520 | children don't generally have those prejudices.

00:35:51.500 | If I moved to the deep South or I moved to Brooklyn,

00:35:54.720 | my children would start to unconsciously acquire

00:35:57.760 | that local accent

00:35:59.200 | because they don't share my cultural prejudices.

00:36:02.160 | Well, now bring it over to a foreign language

00:36:03.980 | and the same thing happens.

00:36:05.880 | As adults, we often,

00:36:08.160 | if we're learning a foreign language that we like,

00:36:09.900 | it may be easier to adopt the persona of that culture

00:36:14.120 | and really embrace it.

00:36:16.600 | But sometimes we're learning a foreign language

00:36:18.640 | that we wanna learn the language,

00:36:19.680 | but we don't love the culture.

00:36:21.160 | And we don't necessarily want to sound exactly

00:36:23.400 | like everyone else there sounds.

00:36:25.960 | And so we often have those filters,

00:36:28.280 | but children don't have those filters.

00:36:30.520 | They just naturally and unconsciously absorb the sounds.

00:36:33.080 | And so they can often speak

00:36:35.120 | with a more native sounding accent

00:36:37.460 | because they fully embrace the culture

00:36:40.160 | that is surrounding them.

00:36:41.600 | So to conclude this section of when should you do it,

00:36:45.420 | when should you teach your children languages,

00:36:47.680 | you should teach your children languages earlier,

00:36:50.960 | not because it's easier to learn,

00:36:53.320 | but because you have the time

00:36:56.000 | to help your children launch as adults

00:36:58.400 | with a much higher level of fluency

00:37:01.960 | than you will have if you wait and wait and wait.

00:37:05.600 | And also because this activity of language acquisition,

00:37:10.600 | this is how the child's brain is wired at that early age.

00:37:14.120 | It's the most natural thing to do,

00:37:15.960 | and that's the time in which

00:37:17.440 | it has the lowest opportunity costs.

00:37:20.300 | Let's pivot now to why should you learn a foreign language?

00:37:24.200 | Why should you teach your children foreign languages?

00:37:27.300 | Because even if you didn't start early,

00:37:29.800 | I still think you should start for a number of reasons,

00:37:33.320 | not the least of which to grow your children's brains.

00:37:37.140 | Let me read you a short excerpt

00:37:38.960 | from an article at parents.com recently updated.

00:37:42.360 | The benefits of learning a second language as a child.

00:37:45.520 | Raising kids to speak more than one language

00:37:47.560 | can offer emotional and academic benefits.

00:37:50.520 | Here's how to help your kids pick up another language.

00:37:53.400 | I'm going to skip the introductory paragraph

00:37:55.240 | and start with the benefits of being a multilingual child.

00:37:58.960 | In a study published in January, 2021,

00:38:02.120 | in the journal Scientific Reports of 127 adults,

00:38:06.600 | two cognitive benefits for early bilinguals,

00:38:10.040 | those who learned two languages as children, were identified.

00:38:13.680 | The first was their ability to notice visual changes

00:38:17.020 | faster than those who picked up

00:38:18.360 | a second language later in life.

00:38:20.520 | The other revealed early bilinguals had more control

00:38:23.760 | over their ability to shift their attention

00:38:25.760 | from one image to another,

00:38:27.500 | which may stem from practicing shifting quickly

00:38:30.200 | between two languages.

00:38:31.960 | While these are all wonderful perks,

00:38:33.600 | there are even more benefits to being bilingual

00:38:35.680 | and of course multilingual

00:38:37.360 | that experts are still learning about.

00:38:39.900 | Encourages empathy.

00:38:42.120 | Children who are raised with at least two languages

00:38:44.400 | have been found to have greater social understanding,

00:38:47.640 | says Oren Boxer, PhD,

00:38:50.080 | a neuropsychologist and advisor at BumoBrain,

00:38:53.000 | a platform supporting parents looking for options

00:38:55.600 | aside from traditional schools.

00:38:57.840 | For example, a 2013 article in Learning Landscapes journal

00:39:02.220 | found bilingual kids tend to demonstrate empathy better

00:39:05.880 | than their monolingual peers.

00:39:07.840 | Specifically, bilingual children were advanced

00:39:10.340 | in understanding the following,

00:39:12.120 | other perspectives, other thoughts,

00:39:14.980 | other desires, other intentions, tone of voice.

00:39:18.700 | Part of this strength has to do

00:39:20.260 | with a more robust language system

00:39:22.220 | that can more readily detect

00:39:23.500 | certain features of communications,

00:39:25.600 | such as prosody, which is the rhythm of speech

00:39:28.240 | and tone of voice, says Dr. Boxer.

00:39:30.940 | It is hypothesized that this developmental experience

00:39:33.820 | is different from monolingual children

00:39:35.980 | and it facilitates a more robust understanding

00:39:38.820 | of another perspective or theory of mind.

00:39:42.740 | However, encouraging empathy alone

00:39:44.460 | isn't enough to be seen as a benefit.

00:39:46.380 | Dr. Boxer says it's important to know how to cope

00:39:48.880 | with these empathic feelings

00:39:50.120 | and be able to distinguish one's own needs

00:39:51.760 | from the needs of others.

00:39:53.920 | Boosts brain function.

00:39:55.900 | Being bilingual is good for a child's brain development.

00:39:58.980 | Quote, "They are better at planning, problem solving,

00:40:01.660 | "concentration, and multitasking," says Kristen Denzer,

00:40:05.280 | CEO and founder of Tierra Encantada,

00:40:08.000 | a Spanish immersion education program.

00:40:10.880 | Denzer, whose background is in psychology

00:40:13.440 | and educational policy,

00:40:15.200 | says these cognitive advantages can be seen quite early.

00:40:18.260 | Quote, "Infants immersed in a dual-language environment

00:40:21.240 | "have demonstrated their advanced executive functioning

00:40:23.960 | "as young as seven months old

00:40:25.900 | "when compared to monolingual peers," she says,

00:40:29.020 | pointing to a study published in 2009

00:40:31.500 | in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

00:40:34.000 | of the United States of America.

00:40:35.780 | And she says, "These benefits may continue into older age

00:40:38.500 | "by preventing brain disorders

00:40:39.860 | "that commonly present themselves in the mid-60s."

00:40:42.500 | Quote, "Bilingual individuals are even able to ward off

00:40:46.100 | "the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's

00:40:48.560 | "an extra four years on average

00:40:50.640 | "compared with those that speak just one language,"

00:40:52.980 | says Denzer.

00:40:54.380 | That's based on 2017 research

00:40:56.480 | in Clinical Interventions in Aging

00:40:58.380 | that reviewed bilingualism as a strategy

00:41:00.240 | for delaying Alzheimer's disease.

00:41:02.120 | I'm gonna skip down, talks about how that's controversial

00:41:05.440 | and not unproven.

00:41:06.620 | Academic advantage.

00:41:07.980 | "Bilingual children may also have an advantage in school,

00:41:10.660 | "including with literacy."

00:41:12.080 | Quote, "Studies have shown

00:41:13.340 | "that when a child learns a second language," says Denzer,

00:41:16.020 | "they show accelerated progress when learning to read

00:41:18.400 | "compared with monolingual peers."

00:41:21.020 | Denzer refers to a 2000 paper on bilingualism and literacy

00:41:24.780 | presented at the Research Symposium

00:41:26.260 | on High Standards in Reading

00:41:27.680 | for students from diverse language groups

00:41:29.300 | in Washington, D.C.,

00:41:30.780 | which explains that bilingualism provides children

00:41:33.340 | with heightened skills necessary for literacy.

00:41:36.500 | According to 2021 research in Frontiers in Psychology,

00:41:39.860 | learning two languages at an early age

00:41:42.380 | may reduce proficiency in a dominant language.

00:41:44.960 | However, earlier studies also show literacy benefits,

00:41:48.180 | including bilingual children's better performance

00:41:50.260 | than monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tests

00:41:53.220 | and acquisition of new words.

00:41:54.940 | Goes on, talks about other academic advantages.

00:41:58.580 | The point is, when you learn two languages or more,

00:42:02.420 | there's good evidence that you become smarter.

00:42:04.640 | You become better at academics.

00:42:06.780 | Your cognitive functioning is enhanced,

00:42:09.780 | possibly even on a physical level,

00:42:11.940 | possibly even such that you can stave off Alzheimer's

00:42:16.380 | for an extended period of time.

00:42:19.380 | To cite that argument, I turn to chapter 18 of a book

00:42:22.540 | called "America's Bilingual Century,

00:42:25.220 | How Americans Are Giving the Gift of Bilingualism

00:42:27.820 | to Themselves, Their Loved Ones, and Their Country."

00:42:30.300 | Author is Steve Levine.

00:42:31.440 | This book was published in the last year or so.

00:42:34.140 | "Giving the Gift to Our Loved Ones.

00:42:35.800 | For the first half of the 20th century in America,

00:42:38.060 | bilingualism was thought to be bad for children.

00:42:41.060 | In 1939, the same year the New York World's Fair

00:42:43.860 | debuted its City of Tomorrow

00:42:45.700 | and the first demonstration of television,

00:42:48.140 | an American psychologist named Medora Smith

00:42:51.300 | published a study of bilingual children in Hawaii.

00:42:54.620 | She concluded that bilingualism caused a retardation

00:42:57.980 | of language development that could be counted in years

00:43:01.260 | compared with monolingual children.

00:43:03.860 | Her study presented lots of data.

00:43:06.380 | In fact, it was a quote, "monument to quantification,"

00:43:09.860 | according to the linguist Kenji Hakuta.

00:43:12.580 | The take-home message was that bilingualism

00:43:14.940 | in American children, whether arising from native languages

00:43:17.700 | or immigrants' languages,

00:43:19.420 | was something like a medical ailment

00:43:21.420 | that needed to be cured by an inoculation

00:43:23.700 | of modern monolingual English language education.

00:43:27.580 | Not until 1962 did two Canadian researchers,

00:43:31.060 | Elizabeth Peale and Wallace Lambert of McGill University,

00:43:34.340 | challenge this view.

00:43:35.900 | They studied 10-year-old children in Montreal

00:43:38.460 | and, unlike prior studies,

00:43:40.820 | carefully controlled the selection of samples.

00:43:43.900 | Their results turned a half-century of studies upside down.

00:43:48.020 | The bilingual children outperformed the monolingual kids

00:43:51.100 | in verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests.

00:43:54.540 | It was a watershed moment.

00:43:56.580 | Lambert summed up the science that existed

00:43:58.700 | in the first half of the 20th century, quote,

00:44:00.900 | "Earlier studies over a 50-year period

00:44:03.540 | "had concluded strongly in favor of monolinguals

00:44:07.060 | "because, it turns out, they had not matched

00:44:09.940 | "bilingual and monolingual groups

00:44:12.780 | "on factors such as social class background,

00:44:15.900 | "nor had they measured the bilinguality

00:44:18.620 | "of those presumed to be bilingual."

00:44:21.700 | Bilingualism begets brainpower.

00:44:25.700 | Social science, like all science,

00:44:27.220 | progresses in a fitful, uneven manner

00:44:29.780 | toward becoming less wrong about the world.

00:44:32.460 | After Peale and Lambert, scientists around the world

00:44:35.260 | began careful studies trying to parse out

00:44:37.340 | cognitive differences that might exist

00:44:39.740 | between bilingual and monolingual children.

00:44:42.580 | They have continued to find advantages

00:44:44.260 | for bilinguals having to do with their thinking,

00:44:46.460 | creative abilities, and empathy.

00:44:48.900 | Also, scientists have found that being bilingual

00:44:51.780 | may help with the acquisition of additional languages.

00:44:55.340 | Any delay among bilingual children

00:44:57.380 | in learning one language over the other

00:44:59.220 | appears to be temporary,

00:45:00.940 | while their total vocabularies are greater

00:45:03.180 | than those of monolingual children.

00:45:05.820 | At the other end of the age continuum,

00:45:07.660 | another Canadian research psychologist, Ellen Bialystock,

00:45:11.260 | has found mental health advantages

00:45:13.100 | in bilingual older adults.

00:45:15.180 | They appear to have an improved cognitive reserve,

00:45:18.220 | resulting in a later onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer's

00:45:21.700 | by approximately four years.

00:45:24.460 | Adding to these mental health benefits

00:45:26.380 | are economic reports that show measurable benefits

00:45:28.900 | to bilinguals in landing jobs,

00:45:31.060 | earning more money, and advancing in their careers.

00:45:34.140 | Other studies show that these individual successes

00:45:36.620 | stack up to societal economic advantages as well.

00:45:40.260 | In the words of the polyglot author Gaston Doran,

00:45:43.100 | "The benefits of bilingualism have, in recent years,

00:45:47.060 | "been piling up like laundry."

00:45:49.780 | If you're interested in that book,

00:45:51.900 | it's called "America's Bilingual Century."

00:45:53.900 | It's an okay book.

00:45:55.420 | I won't say it's bad, it's okay.

00:45:57.460 | It just didn't floor me,

00:45:59.780 | but it's a good, useful discussion of the value

00:46:02.740 | and the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism.

00:46:08.820 | When you can speak multiple languages, you become smarter.

00:46:12.740 | You get more brain function,

00:46:14.540 | your brain fires more, more indifferently,

00:46:17.540 | you get more creativity in your thoughts,

00:46:20.380 | and you get better test results.

00:46:23.580 | To the extent that tests are effective

00:46:25.340 | at measuring intelligence, you get better test results.

00:46:28.820 | One set of data that is interesting on this topic to look at

00:46:31.620 | are SAT scores for students who study languages.

00:46:35.740 | You can find these easily online

00:46:37.340 | if you just search SAT scores.

00:46:39.180 | Usually, you find this trumpeted

00:46:40.940 | by the proponents of teaching Latin,

00:46:43.260 | because in general, those who study Latin

00:46:47.460 | have the highest SAT scores.

00:46:50.220 | If you look at all the different languages,

00:46:52.460 | students of Latin have the highest SAT scores.

00:46:55.220 | Now, I don't know if this study has been done

00:46:58.500 | by somebody who has compared the social class

00:47:02.060 | of those who study Latin and their SAT scores.

00:47:06.260 | I don't know if Latin is causal

00:47:08.860 | to their SAT score maximization,

00:47:12.100 | or if it's correlated to their, I have no idea.

00:47:15.100 | I assume it's both, it's probably both,

00:47:17.660 | that smart students study Latin,

00:47:19.740 | and students who study Latin become smart.

00:47:22.500 | The trick is, I don't know where you get on that trick,

00:47:25.660 | get on that trend, other than just to start,

00:47:27.660 | and become smarter by studying Latin,

00:47:29.260 | and then study Latin because you're smarter.

00:47:31.500 | What's interesting is, while Latin is always the highest,

00:47:34.700 | Hebrew is often, students who study Hebrew

00:47:37.340 | is often the second highest,

00:47:38.900 | then French and German sometimes take the place for third,

00:47:42.380 | and then Spanish is always kind of the lowest

00:47:46.380 | of the class languages in terms of impact on SAT scores.

00:47:51.380 | But what is interesting is that even Spanish,

00:47:53.780 | as the least effective of the languages to raise SAT scores,

00:47:57.740 | has a dramatic increase in SAT scores

00:48:01.100 | of those who study Spanish,

00:48:02.460 | as compared to students who don't study a foreign language.

00:48:06.020 | And so, studying foreign languages

00:48:09.660 | improves your test results, it genuinely does.

00:48:13.500 | It allows you to look at the world more creatively.

00:48:17.300 | One thing you learn when studying foreign languages

00:48:19.620 | is how you can't express the same thought in all languages.

00:48:24.140 | And so you start to look at the world,

00:48:25.460 | and realize that your vision of the world,

00:48:27.980 | the way you look at the world,

00:48:29.140 | is constrained by the language that's in your head.

00:48:32.320 | Your thoughts happen due to language.

00:48:35.380 | And if you don't possess,

00:48:36.880 | and you are imprisoned to the language that is in your head.

00:48:41.880 | And so, I won't belabor the point,

00:48:44.340 | but you look at the world more creatively,

00:48:46.380 | and in a different way when you speak multiple languages.

00:48:50.100 | I think a huge benefit also of teaching your children

00:48:53.140 | a second language,

00:48:56.020 | is what was alluded to in one of those articles,

00:48:58.580 | that once you learn your first second language,

00:49:02.300 | you then gain confidence in your ability

00:49:04.860 | to learn other languages.

00:49:07.100 | And you become better at it.

00:49:09.280 | I am a better learner of languages now,

00:49:12.860 | having studied several,

00:49:14.380 | than I was when I was studying my first one of Spanish.

00:49:18.220 | I observe in my children,

00:49:19.780 | that my children are very good at learning languages,

00:49:23.900 | much better than I am,

00:49:25.020 | because they have now acquired several languages.

00:49:28.020 | And they see things that I don't see.

00:49:30.180 | They understand etymology in a way

00:49:31.880 | that I don't, they're better at it than I am,

00:49:34.440 | because they've done more of it.

00:49:36.780 | And also importantly, it opens the world to you.

00:49:40.460 | If, especially as a native English speaker,

00:49:42.220 | if you're a native English speaker,

00:49:43.820 | there's only a small part of the world

00:49:46.120 | in which society is genuinely and truly English speaking.

00:49:51.060 | You have basically the United States, Canada,

00:49:55.460 | with the exception of the French speaking areas,

00:49:58.020 | England, Ireland.

00:50:00.620 | And then from there, it's all variations.

00:50:03.380 | You can go to areas where there are lots of English spoken,

00:50:06.580 | Singapore, Malaysia, many parts of Europe.

00:50:09.780 | You can go to the cosmopolitan areas, et cetera.

00:50:12.420 | But it's hard to find,

00:50:14.180 | and make sure I'm not missing anybody important,

00:50:16.860 | any fully English speaking countries.

00:50:19.360 | I'm sure I'm missing a couple,

00:50:21.820 | but it's hard to find where the entire society is in English.

00:50:26.060 | Rather, you find intense bilingualism

00:50:29.600 | of English in many places.

00:50:30.980 | But how it happens is,

00:50:33.340 | even if there is a high level of bilingualism,

00:50:35.580 | and you can get by just fine with English,

00:50:38.260 | the world is not nearly as friendly to you

00:50:40.760 | if you don't fully understand a local language

00:50:43.800 | and a local culture.

00:50:45.300 | And so if you ever decide to move around the world,

00:50:48.380 | or you ever want your children to move around the world,

00:50:51.080 | just the knowledge and the confidence

00:50:53.420 | that comes from having learned another language,

00:50:56.520 | to know that, hey, give me a year, give me two years,

00:50:59.080 | maybe three, but I can master this language

00:51:01.860 | and be fully comfortable and competent in this language

00:51:04.580 | in one to three years,

00:51:06.420 | that opens up the world to you in a really neat way.

00:51:09.920 | Also importantly, language learning is one of those things

00:51:14.720 | where learning just a little bit is still great.

00:51:19.000 | You're better off learning a thousand words

00:51:22.380 | in a foreign language

00:51:23.780 | than learning no words in a foreign language.

00:51:25.980 | You're not gonna be fluent or conversant

00:51:29.280 | with a thousand word vocabulary.

00:51:31.360 | But knowing those thousand words

00:51:33.680 | is much better than knowing zero words.

00:51:36.700 | And language learning also is one of those things

00:51:38.680 | where it's very hard to get worse at it.

00:51:41.440 | It's not impossible.

00:51:43.400 | If we don't speak a language on an ongoing basis,

00:51:47.020 | our ability to speak and create that language

00:51:50.200 | extemporaneously quickly slides away.

00:51:53.640 | I think our brain kind of tucks it away and says,

00:51:55.540 | "Hey, this is not necessary right now."

00:51:57.080 | So you lose the ability just to speak off the cuff

00:52:00.960 | unless you're using it constantly.

00:52:03.020 | But it's still not that far away.

00:52:05.580 | You can give yourself a couple of days in the country

00:52:07.880 | where you're speaking the language

00:52:09.000 | and your brain all of a sudden

00:52:09.880 | brings all that knowledge to the forefront.

00:52:12.200 | And so while it's not totally true,

00:52:15.320 | I'm pretty confident making statements like,

00:52:17.120 | "You don't get worse.

00:52:18.280 | "You don't get worse.

00:52:19.880 | "You might get better very slowly,

00:52:21.540 | "but you don't really get worse in a foreign language."

00:52:24.440 | And so learning a little bit

00:52:26.180 | sets someone up to learn more later

00:52:27.880 | and makes it easier in the fullness of time to do it.

00:52:31.040 | Finally, why should you do it?

00:52:32.720 | If you believe that there's no benefit

00:52:36.480 | to learning a foreign language,

00:52:38.560 | I would just submit to you that it's still a major factor

00:52:42.700 | at some of the most elite universities and schools

00:52:44.880 | that you can find.

00:52:46.480 | Recently, I was studying all the information I could find

00:52:49.980 | from Eton College in England.

00:52:52.980 | Eton College is kind of the classic, one of the classic,

00:52:56.160 | I don't know if it's the most elite,

00:52:57.280 | but one of the classic elite private prep boarding schools

00:53:01.080 | for boys in England.

00:53:03.360 | I think it was started in the 1400s.

00:53:05.040 | This is incredible long history,

00:53:06.860 | all the sons of kings and princes

00:53:09.000 | and all the hoity-toity who go to Eton College.

00:53:12.840 | So I was looking through their promotional materials

00:53:15.040 | and trying to understand what their biases

00:53:18.500 | and what their, not biases, just their framework,

00:53:22.240 | their concepts of education are.

00:53:24.080 | How do they do it at an elite college, boys college,

00:53:28.120 | high school, for high school students.

00:53:32.240 | And I was just interested to see that every student

00:53:35.480 | who goes to Eton College is required to study English,

00:53:39.720 | is also required to study Latin,

00:53:43.000 | is also required to study two different

00:53:47.640 | modern foreign languages,

00:53:49.880 | and then some additionally have the option

00:53:52.240 | if they want to study ancient Greek.

00:53:54.940 | So at a minimum, every student who attends Eton College

00:53:58.600 | will have studied four distinct languages,

00:54:02.120 | English, Latin, and two other foreign languages.

00:54:05.840 | I doubt that their students achieve

00:54:08.420 | high levels of proficiency.

00:54:10.320 | I don't know.

00:54:11.760 | But they have the same problem

00:54:14.320 | with the amount of time available

00:54:15.520 | that we previously discussed.

00:54:17.160 | But they still consider it to be important.

00:54:19.720 | And I think there are various reasons for it.

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00:54:53.120 | - Let's assume that you're persuaded at this point in time.

00:54:55.800 | Let's go on to what language should you teach

00:54:59.120 | and how do you do it?

00:55:01.520 | What are some techniques that can work for it?

00:55:04.020 | So let's start with what language should you teach?

00:55:07.440 | Well, first, I think the obvious one

00:55:09.320 | is if English is not your native language,

00:55:13.600 | then you certainly should teach English.

00:55:16.320 | English is the dominant lingua franca of the world today.

00:55:20.320 | It is likely to be the dominant lingua franca of the world

00:55:23.320 | for a significant period of time.

00:55:25.840 | I don't currently see where the competitor to English

00:55:30.280 | as the world's lingua franca would come from.

00:55:33.080 | That's not to say it still will be the case in 300 years,

00:55:36.240 | but at the moment, it's not evident to me

00:55:39.120 | where a competitor to English would come from.

00:55:41.640 | And I think that English,

00:55:43.120 | while it has its own set of difficulties

00:55:45.260 | that make it in some ways a difficult language,

00:55:47.960 | I think there is a whole opposite set of arguments

00:55:51.120 | as to how easy English is to learn and how flexible it is.

00:55:56.080 | And so there are multiple reasons why English is becoming

00:56:00.880 | and is, sorry, is the world's lingua franca.

00:56:03.840 | And those are not all having to do with jobs,

00:56:07.160 | business, economics, the power of the United States

00:56:10.920 | as the world's lone superpower,

00:56:12.240 | being an English-speaking nation, et cetera.

00:56:14.640 | But there are other basic factors of the English language

00:56:17.440 | that make it very flexible and very useful.

00:56:20.220 | English is the world's most spoken,

00:56:24.120 | most studied foreign language.

00:56:26.200 | And it is, well, not the world's most spoken language

00:56:30.340 | with number of native speakers.

00:56:32.220 | It is basically the world's most spoken language today.

00:56:36.240 | There's different ways you can slice those charts,

00:56:38.440 | but English is the language that,

00:56:39.960 | if it's not your native language,

00:56:41.280 | needs to be the first one.

00:56:43.320 | Also, English is the world's language

00:56:45.680 | with the largest vocabulary at this point in time

00:56:49.000 | and the fastest growing vocabulary

00:56:51.240 | of any language in the world.

00:56:52.560 | And so studying English should be clearly

00:56:56.280 | the first priority.

00:56:58.320 | And helping your children to achieve

00:57:00.280 | a very, very high level of English

00:57:02.880 | should be your first priority.

00:57:05.160 | That is the clear winner

00:57:07.480 | as to what language should you teach.

00:57:09.680 | What about more than that?

00:57:11.200 | Well, any other language that you wanna teach

00:57:13.640 | is perfectly good.

00:57:15.000 | So if you have a language that you're connected to

00:57:17.000 | for some reason, or that's important to you,

00:57:19.240 | then teach that language.

00:57:21.400 | I think you can look at this practically.

00:57:23.260 | I think the most practical language to teach

00:57:25.720 | for me and for many of my US American listening audience

00:57:32.000 | is the language of Spanish.

00:57:34.960 | My arguments are a fewfold.

00:57:37.360 | Number one, for Americans,

00:57:39.760 | Spanish is the most dominant second language

00:57:43.560 | other than English at the moment.

00:57:45.080 | The United States, I haven't checked this data

00:57:47.200 | in a few years, could be out of date,

00:57:48.640 | but as of last time I checked,

00:57:51.080 | the United States was the fourth most populous

00:57:53.520 | Spanish-speaking country in the world.

00:57:56.040 | And the United States is predicted

00:57:58.200 | to be the second most populous

00:58:00.480 | Spanish-speaking country in the world in the year 2050.

00:58:04.280 | The first, the most populous

00:58:08.320 | Spanish-speaking country in the world today,

00:58:11.040 | as well as in 2050, is the immediate neighbor

00:58:14.520 | of the United States, which is Mexico.

00:58:17.160 | And if you look at most of the neighbors

00:58:20.160 | of the United States, Spanish is the dominant language.

00:58:23.600 | It's the dominant language of the islands of the Caribbean.

00:58:25.800 | It's the dominant language of Central and South America,

00:58:28.880 | with the exception of the Portuguese in Brazil

00:58:31.080 | and the French-speaking communities in Quebec,

00:58:33.680 | Spanish is the most dominant language.

00:58:36.760 | When you look at the number of countries

00:58:38.280 | that you could travel to, work in, et cetera,

00:58:40.480 | that share one language, Spanish is,

00:58:43.440 | I think, the leading language in that regard as well,

00:58:46.480 | in terms of the official language

00:58:47.880 | of a larger number of countries.

00:58:50.600 | And the population of many of those countries

00:58:52.600 | is very, very high.

00:58:54.080 | The population of Latin America, South America,

00:58:56.320 | et cetera, is very high.

00:58:57.600 | And because this is a continent

00:59:01.160 | that is united by a few basic languages,

00:59:04.120 | Spanish is just a wonderfully useful language.

00:59:07.160 | In addition, Spanish has the benefit

00:59:08.960 | of being exceedingly easy to learn.

00:59:11.520 | Every language has its own quirks,

00:59:14.160 | but Spanish is easy to learn.

00:59:16.520 | The first thing that makes it easy to learn

00:59:18.080 | for English speakers is, excuse me,

00:59:20.400 | is its close connection to English

00:59:23.320 | that shares lots and lots of cognates.

00:59:26.240 | Cognates are words that are connected,

00:59:29.240 | or excuse me, that sound the same in both languages.

00:59:31.720 | And Spanish and English have lots and lots of cognates.

00:59:34.680 | So you could have computer, right,

00:59:37.120 | or in Spanish, computadora.

00:59:39.400 | There are many, many versions of that that exist.

00:59:43.560 | This is because of the Latin origins

00:59:45.840 | of much of the English language

00:59:48.440 | as well as the Spanish language.

00:59:50.400 | And so Spanish also is easy to learn

00:59:53.940 | because there are lots of wonderful materials

00:59:56.040 | available for it.

00:59:57.880 | A language that doesn't have

00:59:59.240 | a lot of great learner's materials is hard to learn,

01:00:02.440 | but a language that has lots of materials

01:00:04.240 | is easy to learn.

01:00:05.200 | And for an English speaker,

01:00:07.180 | the world of language learning materials in Spanish

01:00:09.200 | is just, it's top notch.

01:00:11.560 | And you have lots of people with whom you can speak it.

01:00:14.480 | It can be difficult to learn a language

01:00:16.840 | when you don't have anyone to speak it with

01:00:18.640 | and practice it with and listen to it.

01:00:20.720 | But across the United States and in many parts of the world,

01:00:23.760 | of course today, anywhere in the world with internet radio,

01:00:25.820 | but across the United States,

01:00:26.760 | you can find a Spanish-speaking radio station

01:00:29.240 | on your local dial.

01:00:30.840 | You can find lots of Spanish speakers

01:00:32.480 | with whom you can interact.

01:00:33.560 | It's just an easy language to learn.

01:00:35.560 | And it's fairly straightforward,

01:00:37.000 | great simple pronunciation system

01:00:39.240 | and very, very simple and straightforward language.

01:00:41.720 | So I think Spanish should be the,

01:00:43.680 | is the obvious first language to learn.

01:00:46.580 | From there, in terms of practicality,

01:00:48.140 | you can go to any language that would fit

01:00:52.100 | where you would desire to live

01:00:53.660 | or what you would want to do.

01:00:55.280 | In a Western tradition from Western Europe,

01:00:59.160 | from the Western world,

01:01:01.280 | the European languages make a lot of sense.

01:01:04.000 | And so after Spanish, French is pretty easy.

01:01:08.400 | And so what I did was I taught Spanish and then French

01:01:12.520 | because French language structure is very analogous to

01:01:17.520 | and comparable with Spanish.

01:01:21.600 | And yet the vocabulary of French is very highly known

01:01:25.680 | between English and Spanish.

01:01:27.640 | A huge portion of English vocabulary

01:01:30.360 | comes directly from the French language.

01:01:33.240 | And because much of that is descended from Latin,

01:01:36.480 | you have a close connection between the,

01:01:39.080 | you have just a massive leg up on ability

01:01:41.040 | to read the language, understand it, et cetera.

01:01:43.540 | So after you learn Spanish,

01:01:45.040 | it's pretty easy to learn French.

01:01:46.920 | From there, you could continue

01:01:48.360 | with kind of the classic European trio of adding in German.

01:01:52.060 | I think German makes a lot of sense for English speakers

01:01:54.980 | because while it's not all that significant

01:01:57.780 | of a language in the world today,

01:01:59.080 | it was formerly a very important language

01:02:01.360 | in scholarship, et cetera,

01:02:02.960 | but Germany has faded in many ways from global significance.

01:02:07.000 | But still English is a Germanic language

01:02:09.720 | with a Latin vocabulary.

01:02:12.560 | And so there's a close correlation

01:02:15.420 | between English and German, a lot of connections,

01:02:18.120 | and it can be a useful language.

01:02:20.640 | The language that I find most useful

01:02:22.320 | traveling around the world is often German

01:02:24.040 | because the Germans are committed travelers.

01:02:26.600 | You meet lots of wonderful Aussies and Kiwis

01:02:29.000 | and Brits and whatnot,

01:02:30.400 | but you're very likely to meet Germans

01:02:32.240 | in many corners of the world.

01:02:33.840 | And so I enjoy that as a traveling language.

01:02:36.880 | So then if you want to go further

01:02:39.040 | as with English being your dominant,

01:02:41.460 | the final languages that you could discuss

01:02:43.760 | would be Latin and Greek, kind of the classic languages.

01:02:47.520 | Why?

01:02:48.360 | Well, if you look at English vocabulary,

01:02:49.720 | 26% of English vocabulary comes

01:02:52.120 | from the Germanic head language,

01:02:55.800 | or let's just call it German.

01:02:57.060 | So 26% of English language is Saxon or German.

01:03:00.740 | 29% of the English vocabulary comes directly from French

01:03:06.560 | and 29% comes from Latin.

01:03:09.180 | So total of about 60% of English vocabulary

01:03:12.340 | is coming from the Romance languages,

01:03:14.980 | which is why there's so many connections

01:03:17.100 | between Spanish, French, English, Latin, et cetera.

01:03:20.240 | Then you have 6% of the English vocabulary

01:03:22.540 | that comes from Greek.

01:03:24.200 | And so you could look at those classical languages.

01:03:26.900 | I think classical languages

01:03:28.500 | are really interesting and useful.

01:03:30.460 | We're in a classical language phase in our family now.

01:03:34.620 | So I introduced Latin a while back

01:03:37.800 | and then we've recently started on Ancient Greek.

01:03:41.640 | And these languages are important to me,

01:03:44.300 | not necessarily because they're classical languages.

01:03:47.260 | Latin is not super important to me,

01:03:48.900 | but after you speak the other Romance languages,

01:03:50.740 | Latin is pretty simple and straightforward.

01:03:53.140 | So I figure, it's simple and easy, a few hundred hours,

01:03:56.260 | let's toss it in.

01:03:57.740 | But with regard to Greek,

01:03:59.220 | then we get to the heritage languages

01:04:01.380 | or religious languages that are important to me.

01:04:03.320 | So of course, the Christian, the New Testament

01:04:05.360 | was written in Greek, in Koine Greek,

01:04:08.660 | and the Old Testament was written in Ancient Hebrew.

01:04:11.940 | And so I think religious languages

01:04:14.620 | are really useful and valuable.

01:04:17.020 | I think that if you're looking for,

01:04:19.780 | if you're from the Christian world,

01:04:21.780 | I think learning Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew

01:04:24.260 | should be at the top of your list

01:04:25.660 | in terms of languages to study.

01:04:27.860 | This is one thing that I actually admire deeply

01:04:29.660 | about the Muslims.

01:04:30.780 | Muslims have a strong commitment to Arabic

01:04:33.940 | and many, many Muslims all around the world study Arabic

01:04:37.720 | because of it being the language

01:04:40.580 | in which the Quran was written and delivered.

01:04:43.500 | And I think that's a really healthy kind of religious trend.

01:04:46.900 | And in many cases, Muslims put Christians to shame

01:04:49.240 | on that topic.

01:04:50.080 | And I think that you should consider

01:04:51.660 | if there's a religious language that's important to you,

01:04:53.820 | I think that has a huge level of value.

01:04:57.460 | Then also consider heritage languages,

01:04:59.260 | things that reflect your culture,

01:05:01.540 | cultural significance that you would like to keep alive.

01:05:05.660 | And then you can argue about the classical language.

01:05:08.140 | I'm gonna save the classical languages for another time.

01:05:11.220 | The key thing is once you've learned a second language,

01:05:14.740 | then the whole process becomes a lot less daunting

01:05:18.420 | and your confidence grows.

01:05:20.380 | So in my story, if we went back four years,

01:05:23.740 | ago we were a monolingual family

01:05:25.940 | and I had zero confidence in my ability to teach

01:05:30.540 | or even to acquire for myself another foreign language.

01:05:34.500 | Fast forward four years later,

01:05:36.460 | and again, I'm not being cagey with describing things.

01:05:39.520 | It's just that each child is different.

01:05:40.920 | I have five children.

01:05:41.940 | And so I'm trying to be accurate with my comments,

01:05:46.360 | but also realistic with the fact

01:05:48.520 | that all the children are at different levels.

01:05:50.540 | And my older children are far ahead

01:05:52.060 | of my younger children, et cetera.

01:05:53.740 | But since then we have made tremendous strides.

01:05:57.420 | And at this point in time,

01:05:58.780 | I'm seeking to homeschool my children

01:06:02.820 | with fully integrated of four languages,

01:06:06.680 | English, Spanish, French, and German.

01:06:08.500 | And then we're doing quite a lot of Latin reading

01:06:10.660 | and we've just started ancient Greek.

01:06:12.700 | So possibly in a couple of years,

01:06:15.020 | then Greek and Latin will be a bigger component

01:06:17.460 | of our curriculum.

01:06:20.980 | But we're doing homeschooling completely

01:06:22.740 | in those four languages.

01:06:24.340 | Every day, using all the languages

01:06:25.980 | and not just studying them as languages,

01:06:27.780 | but simply using them as a tool for acquiring knowledge,

01:06:30.940 | speaking them whenever possible, et cetera.

01:06:33.780 | And so that confidence has grown with each language.

01:06:38.060 | And today I have full confidence

01:06:40.480 | that not only can I myself learn,

01:06:43.240 | but I can teach any language to my children

01:06:45.940 | that were motivated to teach.

01:06:47.540 | And so it becomes a matter of,

01:06:50.040 | are we willing to put in the time?

01:06:51.540 | Is there a reason for it?

01:06:52.940 | And is this the highest and best use of the time?

01:06:56.280 | Think back to what I said about a 16 year old.

01:06:57.980 | I don't think that acquiring languages

01:06:59.500 | is always the best thing for a 16 year old to do.

01:07:01.820 | Maybe a healthy activity,

01:07:03.060 | but it's not the most important thing.

01:07:05.140 | But for young children, it is very healthy

01:07:08.780 | and there's not a high opportunity cost for it.

01:07:13.700 | And once you get past the first few hundred hours

01:07:16.780 | of language study,

01:07:18.140 | where you're studying the language as a language,

01:07:20.460 | and you just get into the point of using the language

01:07:22.700 | as a normal part of life,

01:07:24.160 | you get to the point where you can watch a movie

01:07:26.140 | and just enjoy the movie with subtitles on,

01:07:28.700 | read a book and just enjoy the book for its own sake.

01:07:31.940 | That's the magic point,

01:07:33.100 | because then it just becomes part of the lifestyle

01:07:35.460 | that yes, I use this language,

01:07:37.460 | but I use it for enjoyment, for life.

01:07:40.340 | And the fact that I'm getting better at it

01:07:42.460 | is a useful add-on.

01:07:46.180 | We now turn to how to do it.

01:07:48.620 | How do you actually do it?

01:07:50.300 | Well, there are many ways,

01:07:52.060 | and I'm not sure that one way

01:07:55.880 | is necessarily better than another.

01:07:58.740 | I'm a little jealous of that Canadian guy

01:08:00.900 | who speaks Mandarin and has a Japanese wife,

01:08:04.020 | and a little jealous of that.

01:08:06.500 | But I don't have any of those things.

01:08:08.220 | If you do have those things,

01:08:09.820 | meaning if you do have that linguistic background,

01:08:12.500 | the first thing is use what you have.

01:08:14.600 | If you and your wife or your mother

01:08:19.540 | or someone speaks a heritage language, just use it.

01:08:24.060 | There are so many people

01:08:26.220 | who don't use their family languages.

01:08:29.060 | And in today's world,

01:08:31.540 | if we went back in the United States 100 years,

01:08:33.700 | there was a strong push

01:08:36.100 | to get everyone to be English-speaking.

01:08:39.180 | And that was seen as kind of the part

01:08:41.660 | of the cultural fabric of the United States,

01:08:43.940 | and so when you moved to the United States,

01:08:46.320 | you stopped speaking Norwegian and you spoke English,

01:08:49.160 | and you didn't try to teach it to your children, et cetera.

01:08:52.460 | In today's world, I think people appreciate

01:08:54.720 | more of the benefits of multilingualism.

01:08:57.680 | And I think that you certainly should teach your children

01:09:02.160 | the language of the country that you live in,

01:09:03.800 | so you gotta teach English.

01:09:05.640 | But maintaining that cultural language

01:09:07.760 | is such a benefit to your children.

01:09:10.480 | It opens up doors for them,

01:09:11.920 | and again, all the benefits we've already discussed.

01:09:14.740 | So just use it.

01:09:16.020 | Use the heritage language that you have.

01:09:18.660 | Now, one reason many people don't do this

01:09:21.500 | is they often feel insecure.

01:09:23.420 | This was the case with me, with my own Spanish ability.

01:09:27.320 | When we had our first babies, my wife and I talked about,

01:09:29.940 | should we try to teach our children Spanish?

01:09:31.340 | Should one of us just speak in Spanish to them all the time?

01:09:35.140 | And we decided that I couldn't do it.

01:09:38.900 | My Spanish wasn't good enough,

01:09:40.180 | and I was worried about teaching them poorly, et cetera,

01:09:42.820 | and it just wasn't working.

01:09:45.780 | I didn't think I could do it.

01:09:47.380 | Today, what I would say to myself,

01:09:48.940 | if I were coaching myself back then,

01:09:51.060 | would be, all right, Joshua,

01:09:52.420 | you may not be able to do it really well,

01:09:54.020 | but you don't have to do it really well.

01:09:56.140 | All you have to do is get the basics done.

01:09:58.540 | And so if you speak a basic level of Spanish,

01:10:02.140 | or if you speak a basic level of Norwegian,

01:10:04.980 | because your grandmother taught it to you,

01:10:07.100 | just use some of it to help your child to get started

01:10:12.100 | and then supplement with all of the normal

01:10:16.180 | native language resources that are at your fingertips.

01:10:20.300 | And if you can just give the basics, right,

01:10:24.940 | even a thousand words,

01:10:26.540 | and you get a thousand words to your child

01:10:28.980 | that you know, the basic thousand words,

01:10:31.380 | and then you fill the house with Norwegian picture books,

01:10:34.300 | and you watch Norwegian movies,

01:10:36.300 | and you go to Norway, et cetera,

01:10:38.020 | then your children can do the rest

01:10:39.360 | of the hard work themselves.

01:10:41.160 | And so that's how I see it now,

01:10:42.740 | is that my job is basically to introduce the languages

01:10:45.580 | and introduce the materials,

01:10:47.140 | and then in the fullness of time,

01:10:48.500 | they'll just absorb the materials,

01:10:49.940 | and the materials is what teaches them the language.

01:10:52.860 | So when I teach my children languages

01:10:54.740 | that I don't speak well,

01:10:56.140 | I don't worry too much about the fact

01:10:57.680 | that I make tons of pronunciation mistakes

01:11:00.740 | and accent mistakes, et cetera,

01:11:02.740 | because I know that I'm not ultimately

01:11:04.260 | gonna teach them the language.

01:11:05.700 | My job is just to get them started in it,

01:11:08.020 | and then they're gonna learn their accent

01:11:09.580 | from a professional audio book narrator.

01:11:11.540 | I just gotta buy the books

01:11:12.620 | and then make them listen to them.

01:11:14.500 | And they'll learn their accent from the professionals

01:11:16.480 | who have a great accent and who speak with proper grammar,

01:11:18.940 | and the professional writers, et cetera.

01:11:21.060 | So my job is to get them started.

01:11:23.260 | So if you have a heritage language,

01:11:25.420 | use it and just start,

01:11:27.220 | and speak to your children in that.

01:11:30.580 | This of course leads us to,

01:11:32.280 | can you intentionally create a language environment

01:11:37.140 | around your children?

01:11:38.140 | And the answer is, many people can.

01:11:40.300 | All around the world,

01:11:41.580 | the elite of the world send their children

01:11:44.000 | to private schools,

01:11:46.200 | and a key selling point of those private schools,

01:11:51.200 | at the minimum, is going to be a bilingual education.

01:11:54.300 | And so this is increasingly happening

01:11:57.420 | in English-speaking parts of the world as well.

01:11:59.540 | You can find bilingual schools,

01:12:01.260 | and so you might enroll your child

01:12:02.580 | into a true bilingual school,

01:12:05.940 | or trilingual, or more.

01:12:07.820 | Again, many schools advertise themselves,

01:12:11.180 | and from the very beginning,

01:12:13.180 | they work in multiple languages.

01:12:15.300 | You can also do this in a homeschool.

01:12:17.420 | One of the things that I have sought to do

01:12:21.340 | is to create in our own homeschool

01:12:23.780 | some of the major benefits of a school like that.

01:12:27.000 | I can't do all of it, but I can do a lot of it.

01:12:30.060 | And so we can put books in multiple languages,

01:12:32.340 | we can use Khan Academy in multiple languages,

01:12:34.860 | we can do all kinds of stuff in multiple languages.

01:12:38.060 | So you may not be able,

01:12:39.500 | you have to get your children over that initial hurdle,

01:12:41.660 | but then it's just a matter of bringing in the books

01:12:43.420 | and the resources and the materials.

01:12:45.380 | And if you can cultivate a love of learning

01:12:47.340 | in your children,

01:12:48.500 | they pretty much teach themselves your native language

01:12:51.660 | by reading to themselves.

01:12:53.340 | And so get them started on a little bit of pronunciation,

01:12:55.740 | and they'll teach themselves the other languages

01:12:57.760 | by reading to themselves as well.

01:13:00.500 | If you need to, so if you can't use a school,

01:13:05.500 | you may consider doing something like using family help.

01:13:08.500 | You may hire a nanny, a maid, an au pair,

01:13:12.800 | someone who is gonna be around your house.

01:13:15.280 | You might choose a piano teacher in a foreign language,

01:13:18.660 | somebody who's going to interact with your children

01:13:21.380 | in a foreign language.

01:13:23.300 | These are all good options,

01:13:24.920 | it's bringing in professionals that are gonna help you.

01:13:27.760 | You may choose to live in a community

01:13:29.800 | in which the foreign language is more broadly spoken.

01:13:33.160 | Go to a church where that language is broadly spoken,

01:13:36.200 | et cetera, all depends on your level of comfort for it.

01:13:39.700 | Or you can just simply use tutors, classes, et cetera.

01:13:43.560 | The basic method that I use to teach my children languages

01:13:47.120 | is bilingual translation.

01:13:49.040 | I read to them in a foreign language

01:13:52.460 | and I translate into English.

01:13:53.920 | I use translation tools,

01:13:55.600 | primarily my favorite language app, LingQ.

01:13:58.160 | I mentioned it a bazillion times,

01:13:59.440 | I ought to start getting an affiliate LingQ with them,

01:14:01.760 | L-A-N-G-Q, and I use that to read them children's books

01:14:04.840 | and whatnot, and I can use the built-in translation function

01:14:08.320 | which is basically accessing Google Translate

01:14:10.640 | to translate and help me to do it.

01:14:13.780 | You can also use other courses.

01:14:17.080 | I prepare audio files for my children of books and stories.

01:14:21.200 | That allows me to use translation functions

01:14:23.780 | that I can find online and native speakers,

01:14:26.520 | and then I just replay those many times

01:14:28.400 | until they acquire and learn the knowledge.

01:14:30.800 | There's a whole movement of what's dubbed

01:14:33.840 | comprehensible input channels for many languages.

01:14:37.420 | So you can go and you can find input

01:14:39.200 | and just have your children watch

01:14:41.520 | those language learning videos, et cetera.

01:14:46.000 | There are many kinds of language acquisition things

01:14:48.160 | that you can learn.

01:14:49.480 | Most of the adult-focused ones

01:14:52.440 | aren't effective with children.

01:14:54.000 | So if you get to a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 15-year-old,

01:14:58.140 | you've got the world of Pimsleur

01:14:59.640 | and all the wonderful kind of adult language programs.

01:15:03.640 | Those are great, but not for children.

01:15:05.000 | They're just too, children aren't that interested.

01:15:07.960 | But you can find them good input and they can be interested.

01:15:11.240 | And then you can use media.

01:15:12.640 | I'm convinced, I've heard enough stories.

01:15:16.040 | First of all, if you go around the world

01:15:18.000 | and you find somebody who is not a native English speaker,

01:15:21.340 | but who speaks English very well,

01:15:23.720 | with a very clear and understandable accent,

01:15:26.400 | with smooth, with excellent prosody, et cetera,

01:15:29.840 | and you ask them how they learned it,

01:15:31.940 | 80% of the time, they're gonna say something about,

01:15:34.240 | well, I watched a lot of American TV, right?

01:15:36.480 | I watched "Friends" all the time.

01:15:38.680 | And all around the world,

01:15:39.840 | there are people who just speak perfect English,

01:15:41.720 | and they get that way through a lot of media exposure

01:15:44.760 | to the English language.

01:15:46.300 | The same exact thing works in reverse if you want it to.

01:15:50.680 | I've heard plenty of stories, people who,

01:15:54.120 | one story that Steven Krashen tells

01:15:57.280 | is how he worked with somebody who spoke perfect Mandarin.

01:16:00.120 | And the way he learned Mandarin was they had,

01:16:02.240 | his family had a Mandarin-speaking housekeeper

01:16:05.700 | that would come to the house to clean the house,

01:16:07.740 | and she would put on cartoons in Mandarin for the boy,

01:16:11.360 | and the boy wanted to see what was in the cartoons,

01:16:13.160 | and eventually he learned Mandarin.

01:16:14.480 | He didn't care about learning Mandarin.

01:16:16.080 | He never wanted to learn Mandarin.

01:16:17.520 | He never had lessons in Mandarin.

01:16:18.960 | He wanted to watch the cartoons,

01:16:20.160 | but this happened for years and years.

01:16:21.680 | And as an adult, he could go to China,

01:16:23.480 | he could speak Mandarin.

01:16:24.320 | He couldn't read or write, but he could speak Mandarin.

01:16:26.720 | And then when he left China,

01:16:27.800 | he never even thought about Mandarin.

01:16:29.040 | It just was there for him because he watched cartoons.

01:16:31.640 | And so if you expose your children to enough media,

01:16:35.480 | they can learn the language.

01:16:36.840 | It'll just happen.

01:16:37.840 | It may not happen in the most efficient manner possible,

01:16:42.400 | but it will happen in the fullness of time.

01:16:45.600 | And so think back now

01:16:47.040 | to some of my harsh and critical comments

01:16:49.160 | that I have made in previous episodes

01:16:51.480 | when I was talking about the value of literature

01:16:53.720 | and words, et cetera,

01:16:55.440 | and I was saying how if you want your children

01:16:57.320 | to be really good at English,

01:16:58.440 | you wanna read to them a lot,

01:16:59.480 | you want them to read a lot

01:17:00.520 | 'cause that's where they develop their vocabulary

01:17:02.000 | and their grammar,

01:17:02.840 | and I was saying how it's more efficient, et cetera.

01:17:05.560 | All of the stuff that is a negative

01:17:09.660 | with regard to your native language of English

01:17:13.160 | now becomes a positive with studying a foreign language.

01:17:16.960 | So if you're going to have your children play with apps,

01:17:20.840 | if you're gonna stick an iPad in your three-year-old's hand,

01:17:23.400 | at least put the iPad in Indonesian.

01:17:25.920 | Your child's gonna figure it out.

01:17:29.320 | There's those cool studies where they took,

01:17:32.000 | I can't remember who to cite on it,

01:17:33.360 | but there was a story where they took a computer

01:17:35.600 | and they stuck it in an African village

01:17:37.120 | where nobody spoke English

01:17:38.480 | and they didn't give any instructions.

01:17:39.740 | They just stuck it there and turned it on.

01:17:41.120 | And they came back some months later

01:17:42.600 | and the children were learning English.

01:17:44.480 | They were accessing all the websites and everything,

01:17:46.480 | and they just figured it out.

01:17:47.480 | Children figure it out.

01:17:48.380 | So just, if you wanna have something fun,

01:17:50.800 | just go and take your child's iPad and stick it in Chinese

01:17:53.980 | and walk away and don't tell them how to change it back.

01:17:56.760 | And in the fullness of time, they'll figure it out.

01:17:59.440 | So you can do this, right?

01:18:00.820 | There's an interesting Spanish YouTuber that I watch,

01:18:03.580 | and he himself is multilingual.

01:18:06.180 | I think he speaks six or seven languages.

01:18:08.680 | And he and his wife have this strategy with their daughter.

01:18:13.280 | And he speaks Swiss German with his daughter.

01:18:15.120 | His wife speaks Spanish.

01:18:17.120 | They speak English with other friends.

01:18:19.040 | The cartoons are always in Italian,

01:18:22.280 | and the iPad is in Portuguese, something like that.

01:18:25.040 | So you can use this in that way.

01:18:27.800 | You can also use movies.

01:18:29.920 | This is something that I've tested out.

01:18:31.620 | For a long time, we did no movies.

01:18:33.720 | And then I started showing my children movies

01:18:35.960 | for a variety of reasons.

01:18:37.760 | And then I said,

01:18:39.120 | instead of just showing the movies in English,

01:18:41.080 | why don't I just use this as a foreign language opportunity?

01:18:44.640 | And so in the beginning,

01:18:46.080 | I would show the movie in English,

01:18:49.440 | and then a couple weeks later, we'd repeat the movie,

01:18:51.600 | and I'd put it in a foreign language.

01:18:53.560 | And I got a little bit of complaints

01:18:55.960 | for the first couple times,

01:18:57.580 | and then they just saw that if we're gonna watch a movie,

01:18:59.480 | this is the way it is.

01:19:00.720 | And so at this point in time,

01:19:02.340 | they don't complain about it anymore.

01:19:04.020 | If I say we're gonna watch a movie,

01:19:05.320 | then they say, oh, great.

01:19:06.280 | And they ask what language it's gonna be in,

01:19:07.720 | and I tell them what language.

01:19:09.480 | Recently, I have stopped even bothering

01:19:12.260 | to show the movie in English the first time around.

01:19:14.980 | And I just show it now in foreign languages.

01:19:17.600 | And I'm not committed to that all the time,

01:19:19.560 | because I think movies are wonderful, right?

01:19:21.040 | It's nice to have things that are in your native language,

01:19:23.480 | and really beautiful movies, great.

01:19:24.840 | But we often consume a lot of just fluff movies

01:19:28.120 | that aren't really great art pieces.

01:19:30.040 | They're just filling the time.

01:19:31.640 | Might as well put the time to good use.

01:19:33.040 | And so I've played around with doing foreign language dubbing

01:19:36.280 | and also foreign language subtitles.

01:19:38.440 | I've pretty well settled on that the best solution

01:19:41.400 | is to just play it with a foreign language track

01:19:44.040 | and play it with English subtitles.

01:19:46.880 | There's data that's cited in Jim Trulisa's book

01:19:50.680 | called "The Read Aloud Handbook,"

01:19:52.200 | where he identifies, I think there was research

01:19:54.760 | that was done in Finland,

01:19:56.400 | where they found that some of the Finnish schoolchildren

01:19:59.200 | were advanced readers.

01:20:00.600 | And the reason they figured that was happening

01:20:04.360 | is that because the nation was so small

01:20:08.940 | and had so little native language content,

01:20:13.100 | most of the media that was coming in on the TV station

01:20:18.480 | would be in a foreign language,

01:20:20.080 | but it would all be subtitled in Finnish.

01:20:22.880 | And so the children had lots of chances

01:20:26.760 | to improve their reading speed and reading skill

01:20:29.480 | by reading subtitles constantly.

01:20:31.600 | And so I think that this can be another tool

01:20:34.520 | in your toolbox.

01:20:35.480 | Put on the subtitles,

01:20:36.840 | and especially what's in a foreign language,

01:20:38.520 | the child wants to know what's going on.

01:20:40.560 | So the child will read the subtitles,

01:20:42.440 | that's improving reading ability,

01:20:44.240 | and also will over time be able to understand

01:20:47.000 | the foreign language more effectively.

01:20:49.760 | And then even when we come to the topic of books,

01:20:52.720 | in my tradition where we talk about Charlotte Mason

01:20:55.920 | and living books and whatnot,

01:20:57.200 | we use this word twaddle to refer to books

01:21:00.160 | that perhaps aren't the highest expression of excellence

01:21:03.920 | in that category.

01:21:04.840 | They're kind of repetitive

01:21:05.920 | or they're kind of amateurish or childish

01:21:09.000 | or not super awesome.

01:21:10.680 | But what's interesting is a lot of the twaddle

01:21:13.040 | that we would call in our foreign language,

01:21:15.040 | the reasons we call it twaddle,

01:21:16.320 | it actually becomes a benefit in a foreign language.

01:21:19.880 | I think I mixed up my words.

01:21:20.760 | The stuff that in our native language,

01:21:22.440 | we wouldn't want our children to read

01:21:24.000 | because it's just beneath them,

01:21:25.720 | in a foreign language now becomes really, really useful.

01:21:30.040 | And so we can take something that is,

01:21:34.120 | for example, series books,

01:21:36.000 | and just put them in a foreign language.

01:21:37.440 | And all that stuff, the simplified vocabulary,

01:21:40.960 | the simplified plots, et cetera,

01:21:43.520 | that can be a negative to your child

01:21:45.480 | achieving a really high level of literacy

01:21:48.280 | in his native language,

01:21:49.640 | but it's now a positive in the foreign language.

01:21:51.920 | That the repetition or the low level vocabulary

01:21:54.320 | is really useful because it makes it easier

01:21:56.260 | to learn that foreign language.

01:21:59.080 | At its key, you want to measure the number of hours

01:22:02.520 | of exposure that your child has.

01:22:04.880 | You want to expose your child to comprehensible input,

01:22:07.440 | something that they can understand,

01:22:08.680 | either through context, through translation, et cetera.

01:22:11.120 | And you want to maximize the number of hours.

01:22:14.880 | The way I do it, I don't test my children

01:22:16.680 | on their languages.

01:22:17.520 | I don't force anything.

01:22:18.720 | All I do is try to create the best,

01:22:21.560 | compelling, comprehensible input I can have.

01:22:24.360 | And then I require them to be exposed to it

01:22:26.980 | in moderate amounts.

01:22:28.040 | I don't want to be a hard taskmaster.

01:22:29.440 | I don't want to require hours and hours.

01:22:30.800 | I don't want to poison the well.

01:22:32.200 | And then associate that learning Chinese

01:22:34.120 | is something that stinks because it's just

01:22:35.600 | hours and hours all day.

01:22:37.200 | So I keep it in short little bite-sized segments,

01:22:39.240 | stick it in all over the place.

01:22:40.900 | But the goal is just to accumulate those hours.

01:22:43.160 | Accumulate those 600 hours, those 1,000 hours,

01:22:45.600 | those 2,000 hours, et cetera.

01:22:47.680 | You want to just start the clock working

01:22:49.640 | towards those hours.

01:22:51.200 | And then watch to see kind of what's working, what's not.

01:22:54.440 | Find other resources, et cetera.

01:22:56.480 | And then when possible, supplement with

01:22:59.000 | some form of immersion opportunity.

01:23:01.960 | At the moment, in my home for the last couple of weeks,

01:23:04.720 | and this week, I have a German tutor staying with us.

01:23:09.720 | My children have been being exposed to German,

01:23:13.140 | but they haven't had any chance to speak it.

01:23:14.600 | I can't speak it with them.

01:23:15.700 | I don't have a good opportunity.

01:23:17.640 | And so I basically have an au pair

01:23:20.480 | who's in our home for a few weeks.

01:23:22.120 | And it gives an opportunity for German immersion

01:23:25.240 | in the home.

01:23:26.240 | So we're doing a German intensive.

01:23:28.220 | We watch a German movie every night,

01:23:31.120 | which helps a lot to have language exposure

01:23:34.520 | for my youngest ones who aren't super interested at all

01:23:37.840 | in the lessons.

01:23:41.040 | The older ones are doing most of their reading in German,

01:23:43.640 | listening in German.

01:23:44.460 | And then we have the conversation opportunity.

01:23:46.240 | And I've just been amazed that,

01:23:48.120 | let me get my timing right,

01:23:51.200 | nine months ago, we had no German exposure.

01:23:54.240 | And today, my eldest can naturally and fluently

01:23:59.160 | converse in a normal way in the German language.

01:24:02.000 | But it came after lots of exposure

01:24:04.080 | and then having an activation opportunity,

01:24:06.880 | an immersion activation opportunity.

01:24:09.600 | I have other podcasts in the backlog

01:24:12.920 | where I've talked about methods and in detail.

01:24:15.640 | So I'm intentionally avoiding an in-depth conversation

01:24:18.400 | here on the methods of language acquisition.

01:24:20.640 | I wanna tell you any method can work,

01:24:22.440 | just basically exposure.

01:24:23.980 | And there's probably no bad method.

01:24:26.400 | It's just a matter of finding things

01:24:28.440 | that balance that metric between pleasure

01:24:32.200 | and kind of one of the child wanting to do it,

01:24:34.520 | not pushing too much,

01:24:35.480 | but making sure that there's an exposure

01:24:37.400 | and then consistency and diligence over time.

01:24:40.060 | If you can repeat the process multiple times,

01:24:43.560 | again, over enough days, enough weeks, enough years,

01:24:47.760 | you can make tremendous progress

01:24:49.300 | and it gets better and better.

01:24:50.880 | Years ago, I remember listening to,

01:24:53.600 | who knows, may have been Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy,

01:24:56.360 | some of my motivational speaker heroes.

01:25:00.400 | And one of them made a comment and said,

01:25:04.280 | how many languages can a child learn?

01:25:07.320 | And the answer was, well, as many as you could teach them.

01:25:10.280 | And I thought, yeah, that's cool, that's pretty cool.

01:25:13.280 | We should teach our children more.

01:25:14.840 | Then I had children

01:25:15.760 | and I had no idea how to teach child language.

01:25:18.040 | And I just felt like, maybe that was nonsense.

01:25:21.120 | So today I have figured out

01:25:22.720 | and learned how to teach a child a language.

01:25:25.160 | And so what I say is that your child

01:25:28.360 | cannot learn as many as you can teach him.

01:25:31.320 | Rather, he can learn as many as you can teach him

01:25:33.920 | and have the time to do it.

01:25:36.640 | So I think there is probably a pretty obvious cutoff

01:25:41.360 | with the number of languages that your child can master

01:25:45.040 | and can maintain over time.

01:25:47.080 | And I'm gonna guess that that number

01:25:48.560 | is somewhere between 10 and 20.

01:25:51.160 | I think 12 is pretty doable.

01:25:52.960 | 15 starts to get questionable.

01:25:55.000 | Maybe it's as high as 20.

01:25:56.840 | But if you look at some of the very experienced,

01:26:00.160 | motivated polyglots that are out there,

01:26:02.320 | you recognize that it becomes challenging

01:26:07.720 | to maintain a huge number of languages

01:26:11.760 | to the level that you would like.

01:26:13.360 | There are noted polyglots

01:26:15.400 | who have studied 50, 60, 70 languages, proven.

01:26:19.160 | Not the old ones where it was just fake,

01:26:21.520 | or we didn't have good records, but today, proven.

01:26:23.720 | And it's easier to be a polyglot today

01:26:26.120 | than it's ever been before

01:26:27.200 | because of the modern technologies

01:26:29.360 | where we can access these languages,

01:26:31.520 | we can access the materials,

01:26:32.800 | we can access all this great stuff.

01:26:34.680 | So it's easier today to be a polyglot

01:26:36.560 | than it ever was before.

01:26:38.560 | But it's hard to keep them all current

01:26:43.560 | and to have enough time to invest into all of them.

01:26:46.760 | And languages need to be maintained

01:26:49.280 | in order to keep them ready and usable.

01:26:52.680 | And so I'm gonna guess that the number

01:26:55.920 | that you probably couldn't really go beyond it

01:26:59.000 | is probably in that range, again, 10 to 20.

01:27:02.720 | And again, not that you can't go beyond it,

01:27:04.440 | I think you can, but in terms of a child

01:27:07.040 | who may not be motivated.

01:27:08.280 | Now, if you have a child who's motivated

01:27:09.880 | to be his own polyglot,

01:27:10.840 | yeah, you can go ahead and add another 10 on.

01:27:13.240 | And just like, think about that Canadian guy

01:27:15.520 | who his children from birth are speaking five languages.

01:27:18.200 | If he also embraced other things

01:27:20.760 | and added in more languages, he could go a lot farther.

01:27:23.960 | But there is a limit.

01:27:25.700 | The cool thing is that most of us

01:27:27.600 | are nowhere near that limit.

01:27:29.920 | I'm not at the limit yet.

01:27:32.080 | I'm guessing we've started some of the harder ones.

01:27:34.640 | Yes, the classical languages, I started Chinese recently.

01:27:39.200 | And so these are a big time commitment.

01:27:41.240 | It's 2200 hours is a lot more time than 600 hours.

01:27:44.960 | And so we'll see what happens in the fullness of time.

01:27:47.480 | We're not at that limit yet.

01:27:49.080 | And I'm guessing that most of us are not.

01:27:51.880 | So if you look at what is possible,

01:27:55.600 | and then you come back, I hope it can inspire you

01:27:57.800 | that it is much more feasible than you might have thought.

01:28:00.960 | If I think back to how hard I thought it was

01:28:03.000 | to teach my children Spanish,

01:28:06.000 | today I don't think it's hard.

01:28:07.720 | And this is where I wanna actually end.

01:28:10.180 | One of the things that you need to control for yourself

01:28:13.920 | as a parent and also for your children

01:28:15.840 | is the beliefs that they have around studying languages.

01:28:20.680 | First, you need to think about your own beliefs.

01:28:23.240 | Do you believe that learning a language is hard?

01:28:26.200 | I used to believe that.

01:28:27.720 | I no longer do.

01:28:28.860 | I don't think that learning a language is hard.

01:28:31.240 | It's not hard.

01:28:32.160 | Your brain is wired to learn language.

01:28:35.480 | It's just slower than you would like it to be.

01:28:39.120 | And it's frustrating because you would like

01:28:42.120 | to be able to remember that new word you learned

01:28:44.520 | the first time you hear it.

01:28:46.080 | But realistically, you probably need to hear it 10, 15,

01:28:48.960 | 20 times in order to remember it.

01:28:51.280 | So if you accept the fact that you need to hear a word

01:28:54.680 | 10, 15, 20 times, read a word 10, 15, 20 times,

01:28:57.940 | maybe 30 times before you remember it,

01:29:00.880 | just recognize it's not hard.

01:29:02.400 | It's just a matter of getting in the reps,

01:29:04.680 | getting your way there, working towards it.

01:29:08.520 | And so if you think it's hard,

01:29:11.640 | you can give that belief to your children.

01:29:13.760 | But if you can cut out that belief for yourself,

01:29:16.400 | language learning is not hard.

01:29:17.560 | You can cut it out for your children.

01:29:19.320 | So I have successfully cut out the belief to my children

01:29:22.800 | language learning is hard.

01:29:24.200 | It's just something they do.

01:29:25.720 | What about language learning is not fun?

01:29:27.560 | Well, certainly we can all acknowledge

01:29:29.480 | that we all have different definitions of fun.

01:29:31.920 | And you may have yours and I may have mine,

01:29:34.480 | but I genuinely enjoy it.

01:29:36.260 | I consider it an enjoyable thing to do

01:29:38.360 | that is fun in the way that a workout is fun.

01:29:41.760 | You go and you lift heavy weights,

01:29:44.000 | or you go on a long walk, or you go on a hike,

01:29:46.120 | and there's times in it when you're hurting,

01:29:49.160 | but you feel good when you're done.

01:29:50.800 | And I think language learning is an appropriate form

01:29:53.320 | of mental exercise.

01:29:55.120 | If you remember what I said

01:29:56.780 | when I talked in the math episode,

01:29:58.720 | if we're designing a perfect life, quote unquote,

01:30:03.240 | for ourselves and for our children,

01:30:05.220 | I think there are some things

01:30:06.380 | that are gonna be a part of it.

01:30:07.960 | There's a whole, a perfect day is gonna,

01:30:09.920 | a perfect day physically is gonna have high quality food,

01:30:14.620 | high quality extended rest.

01:30:17.520 | You know, no alarm clocks.

01:30:18.560 | You're gonna sleep until you're not tired,

01:30:20.360 | and you're gonna wake up, and you're gonna have good sleep.

01:30:22.280 | So lots of sleep, good sleep.

01:30:24.000 | High quality food, high quality air,

01:30:27.120 | high quality water, clean water, lots of it.

01:30:30.360 | You're gonna get lots of sunshine.

01:30:31.960 | You're gonna get lots of action, activity, movement.

01:30:35.540 | You're gonna sweat.

01:30:36.580 | You're gonna work.

01:30:37.460 | You're gonna work your heart.

01:30:38.460 | You're gonna work your muscles.

01:30:39.880 | You might work your balance.

01:30:41.200 | You might stretch.

01:30:42.120 | You might, those kinds of things.

01:30:43.320 | Or you can go down a list of all the physical things

01:30:45.680 | that lead into a perfect day.

01:30:48.180 | You can go down then the list of all of the mental things

01:30:50.600 | that lead to a perfect day.

01:30:51.620 | So you want your brain to work.

01:30:54.400 | So a good day is probably gonna include some math,

01:30:57.480 | make your brain really, really work,

01:30:59.120 | get a good math workout in,

01:31:00.440 | work on a hard problem that you don't know how to do.

01:31:02.680 | That's really good.

01:31:03.720 | A good day is gonna involve some foreign language study,

01:31:07.200 | some vocabulary acquisition,

01:31:08.720 | kind of keep that flexibility

01:31:10.120 | and plasticity going in your brain.

01:31:12.120 | A good day is gonna involve dwelling on some high thoughts,

01:31:17.120 | something inspiring, something motivating,

01:31:19.820 | a great story, something that inspires you,

01:31:22.360 | something that touches your emotions.

01:31:24.440 | A good day is gonna involve some instruction,

01:31:26.920 | feeding yourself with useful advice or instruction

01:31:30.680 | around some challenge that you're facing.

01:31:32.980 | A good day is going to involve a range of emotions,

01:31:36.320 | feeling love, feeling joy, feeling laughter, right?

01:31:41.320 | Laughing together with those that you love,

01:31:43.640 | having jokes, et cetera.

01:31:45.680 | These are all components of keeping your mind appropriate.

01:31:50.000 | And then you can explore the spirit, right?

01:31:53.120 | The spiritual side of dwelling on something

01:31:55.920 | that is beautiful, looking at a beautiful tree,

01:31:59.420 | looking at a beautiful landscape,

01:32:01.040 | looking at a beautiful piece of art,

01:32:04.000 | dwelling on something that touches your soul like music,

01:32:07.680 | playing a beautiful song

01:32:09.480 | or singing something that is uplifting,

01:32:12.900 | dwelling on a beautiful thought,

01:32:14.800 | meditating on the person of God or the love of God

01:32:20.080 | or the goodness of your neighbor

01:32:24.780 | or whatever it is that uplifts you.

01:32:27.000 | And so if you made a checklist of those 10, 15, 20 things

01:32:32.920 | and on any given day, you had five, 10, 15 of them done,

01:32:37.800 | you get together a long string of good days

01:32:40.120 | and you see improvements across all of those factors,

01:32:45.120 | physical, mental, spiritual improvements.

01:32:47.920 | I think that's the basic outline for children.

01:32:50.360 | That's how their life should be.

01:32:52.380 | We have physical, mental and spiritual nourishment

01:32:55.440 | on a daily basis.

01:32:56.640 | And we build an environment

01:32:58.120 | in which their bodies are stretched and recovered,

01:33:01.420 | meaning they're nourished with rest

01:33:06.160 | and they're stretched with activity,

01:33:08.360 | where their brains are nourished with rest

01:33:11.400 | and they're stretched with activity

01:33:13.240 | and their spirits are nourished with rest

01:33:15.720 | and they're stretched with activity.

01:33:17.440 | And that process is very,

01:33:19.920 | that's what it means to be human, that sense of growth.

01:33:23.420 | And so languages are a tool in the toolbox

01:33:26.000 | to stretch your brain, make you smarter,

01:33:28.040 | make your children smarter.

01:33:29.520 | They're not hard, no language is hard.

01:33:32.100 | It may be dissimilar, right?

01:33:33.820 | A language like Chinese is not hard, it's just dissimilar.

01:33:36.760 | Every language has its complex things.

01:33:39.180 | Spanish is a crazy easy language to learn,

01:33:43.060 | but to learn it well,

01:33:44.060 | you have to learn these complex conjugations,

01:33:47.100 | which are often challenging

01:33:48.780 | for non-native Spanish speakers, but they're not hard.

01:33:53.740 | You get used to them over time

01:33:55.180 | and then they tend to flow fairly naturally,

01:33:58.080 | but they're just dissimilar.

01:33:59.500 | Same thing with Chinese.

01:34:00.460 | Chinese has things that are dissimilar from English,

01:34:02.900 | the tonal system, the characters,

01:34:05.020 | but it doesn't have a whole bunch

01:34:07.200 | of those challenging features of Spanish.

01:34:08.500 | It doesn't have the complex conjugation charts, et cetera.

01:34:11.500 | Even if you get into the complex languages

01:34:13.460 | and the declension tables of Latin and Greek, et cetera,

01:34:16.140 | they're not hard, they're just dissimilar.

01:34:18.380 | And it takes time.

01:34:19.420 | And if you can build pleasure into the routine,

01:34:22.540 | then it can be part of it.

01:34:24.100 | And then back to kind of what your children say

01:34:26.700 | or what your children think.

01:34:28.100 | One of the things that I try to do

01:34:29.340 | is I try to control the environment of my children

01:34:31.860 | and brainwash them for positive thinking.

01:34:34.180 | So when I first set out on this three and a half years ago,

01:34:37.300 | I decided I was gonna do it.

01:34:38.620 | We started to teach Spanish.

01:34:39.780 | And then I thought,

01:34:40.620 | and as I researched and researched and researched,

01:34:42.460 | and I realized that my vision was so low,

01:34:45.380 | then I found examples of people

01:34:49.540 | who had succeeded at a very high level.

01:34:51.380 | I found, I've forgotten her name, Bella, I think,

01:34:53.180 | the little Russian girl that,

01:34:54.580 | you know, there's this great clip of her

01:34:57.740 | speaking seven languages on national TV.

01:35:00.340 | I recounted the stories of various polyglots

01:35:02.940 | who speak 15, 20 languages.

01:35:05.020 | And so when you surround yourself with that,

01:35:08.620 | you recognize, wow,

01:35:10.140 | to learn two or three languages is not that difficult.

01:35:12.500 | And then I try to cut out all the negative influence.

01:35:14.280 | I surround them with people who are multilingual.

01:35:16.300 | Just talk about multilingual.

01:35:17.940 | Look, this person over here speaks four languages.

01:35:19.820 | Very natural.

01:35:20.660 | And in fact, that was the other point I wanted to make

01:35:22.460 | is that on the whole, multilingualism is something

01:35:26.020 | that is very natural and normal for human beings.

01:35:28.700 | All around the world, there are societies

01:35:31.420 | in which it's completely normal and expected

01:35:35.800 | that you speak three, four, five, or more languages.

01:35:38.820 | These are distinct languages.

01:35:40.040 | You can find this in various tribal regions

01:35:42.900 | that going back many, many thousands of years,

01:35:44.740 | this just intense multilingualism, and even today.

01:35:47.700 | So the concept of being monolingual

01:35:51.100 | is much more unusual as a modern aberration

01:35:56.000 | than the concept of being multilingual.

01:35:58.020 | So just don't buy the lies.

01:35:59.460 | And even if you're not quite sure,

01:36:01.500 | it's very healthy for you to adopt a mindset

01:36:05.660 | where this isn't hard.

01:36:08.500 | This is totally doable.

01:36:10.740 | Learning a language is not hard.

01:36:12.020 | It's just dissimilar.

01:36:12.980 | It just takes time.

01:36:14.020 | I just need to get my thousand hours done.

01:36:15.500 | And when I get my thousand hours done, we're good.

01:36:17.500 | And so what can I do in those thousand hours

01:36:19.280 | that I'm gonna really enjoy?

01:36:20.460 | What can I, how can I do this

01:36:22.740 | where I'm enjoying the act of doing it?

01:36:25.220 | This is on every level.

01:36:27.140 | People who work a lot, they find pleasure in their work.

01:36:29.860 | People who work out a lot,

01:36:30.980 | they find pleasure in working out.

01:36:32.820 | And so we look to see how is this pleasurable

01:36:37.820 | and then that affects our results.

01:36:39.580 | And we should give that to our children.

01:36:41.260 | So in the same way I talked about exercise,

01:36:42.920 | that I don't want my children to ever think

01:36:44.420 | that exercise is a punishment,

01:36:47.380 | but rather the joy of exercise is the joy of exercise.

01:36:50.340 | It feels good to take your shoes off

01:36:52.740 | and run across the yard in the sunshine.

01:36:54.460 | It feels good.

01:36:55.300 | Every child naturally does that.

01:36:56.940 | So I don't wanna turn that into something

01:36:58.580 | that is a work that has to be done

01:37:01.340 | and it's somehow a penalty.

01:37:03.420 | I want it to always feel good and I wanna nurture that.

01:37:06.180 | It feels good to learn your first language.

01:37:09.740 | Babies love it and they just naturally learn it.

01:37:12.580 | And in the same way, it feels good to learn

01:37:15.020 | the second language and the third language, et cetera.

01:37:17.620 | And as you start to get that positive feedback of that,

01:37:20.340 | to be able to talk with more people,

01:37:21.580 | to be able to absorb more literature,

01:37:23.940 | you get the admiration of other people,

01:37:25.460 | it becomes a virtuous cycle that continues itself.

01:37:28.740 | And so all of these things that we want our children

01:37:31.740 | to acquire, it feels good to do them.

01:37:36.740 | And I just think we should be careful

01:37:39.980 | about introducing negative emotional baggage

01:37:42.360 | when it's just not necessary.

01:37:44.300 | If you reinterpret sensations in a different way,

01:37:49.300 | it can help with a completely different mindset.

01:37:53.980 | I wanna give one more example

01:37:55.300 | 'cause I think this is a powerful example.

01:37:56.860 | Recently on a Q&A show,

01:37:58.380 | someone was asking about pregnancy

01:38:00.140 | and I was describing the basic mechanics of childbirth.

01:38:03.260 | And my wife and I came up with a concept

01:38:05.140 | that we found really helpful, she found helpful,

01:38:07.140 | we found it, I think it's helpful,

01:38:08.380 | but I haven't ever given birth, of course.

01:38:11.020 | But we came up with a concept that we found really helpful

01:38:13.500 | is that once we understood, with our first baby,

01:38:16.260 | once we understood the basic mechanics of childbirth,

01:38:19.780 | what is labor, what is a contraction, et cetera,

01:38:22.740 | we just talked about it in the context of reworking it

01:38:27.740 | in the context of a muscular experience.

01:38:31.320 | We had been raised, like most people,

01:38:33.620 | our only experience of childbirth

01:38:38.620 | is watching some random TV program

01:38:40.940 | of a woman lying on her back screaming her head off.

01:38:43.380 | And this puts all these images in your mind.

01:38:45.380 | But what's interesting is people scream their heads off

01:38:47.980 | in all kinds of circumstances, but it's very different.

01:38:50.260 | And so we came to talk about childbirth and contractions

01:38:55.260 | as kind of like a heavy workout.

01:38:58.500 | And you know when you go in the gym

01:38:59.980 | and you lift heavy weights, it hurts, right?

01:39:03.140 | Your muscles scream and it hurts.

01:39:05.940 | Or if you find some weightlifter,

01:39:07.380 | go find a video of Ronnie Coleman working out

01:39:09.700 | and it hurts and he's screaming, it hurts.

01:39:13.800 | But because there's a context for the pain,

01:39:16.200 | you understand that this is a muscular pain

01:39:18.320 | that's gonna go away soon,

01:39:19.840 | your brain has a way to deal with it that's very healthy.

01:39:22.160 | And people that go to the gym all the time,

01:39:23.660 | they get addicted to the pain.

01:39:25.200 | They don't like the pain, they like the results.

01:39:27.560 | And so when we kind of talked about

01:39:30.380 | the muscular experience of childbirth in that way,

01:39:35.380 | it doesn't diminish necessarily the pain,

01:39:38.440 | although there's things you can do to diminish the pain,

01:39:40.800 | but it reinterprets it.

01:39:42.360 | And so I try to talk with my children about this

01:39:45.520 | with regard to doing hard things,

01:39:47.680 | math, language study, writing, whatever the hard thing is,

01:39:50.680 | that we do these hard things

01:39:52.680 | because it helps us to get stronger.

01:39:54.840 | And this is pleasurable because it's a growth opportunity

01:39:58.000 | to allows us to grow as humans.

01:40:01.240 | So language learning is not hard, you're wired for it.

01:40:04.080 | We do it naturally and easily,

01:40:06.040 | every baby around the world does it.

01:40:08.460 | It's just time consuming.

01:40:10.120 | And it's hard to sometimes to accumulate the materials

01:40:13.480 | that you're gonna connect with.

01:40:14.440 | And sometimes it's boring.

01:40:16.360 | It's boring for a few hundred hours

01:40:17.860 | till you can get to your native level materials,

01:40:19.680 | but it's not hard.

01:40:20.980 | So if you're interested in teaching your children

01:40:22.600 | to be multilingual, just recognize you can do it.

01:40:24.840 | There's lots of ways to do it.

01:40:26.280 | The most important thing is not the method.

01:40:28.120 | The most important thing is the desire

01:40:30.180 | and having the sufficient time.

01:40:32.400 | So start early and go from there.

01:40:34.960 | It's only hard the first time,

01:40:36.420 | it's only hard until you do it.

01:40:37.960 | Once you do it, you look back and you say,

01:40:39.840 | that was easy, but it's hard until you do it.

01:40:42.160 | So press through and do it.

01:40:44.360 | Things you can spend money on here,

01:40:45.960 | obviously you can spend money on courses,

01:40:48.760 | you can spend money on materials,

01:40:50.320 | you can spend money on tutors,

01:40:52.200 | you can spend money on schools.

01:40:54.240 | All of those are good and useful things to spend money on.

01:40:59.060 | I productively spend, I would estimate,

01:41:02.360 | I had to go back and check my records,

01:41:03.520 | but probably a few hundred dollars a month,

01:41:06.240 | varying obviously depending on

01:41:07.920 | if I've got a tutor in the home

01:41:10.240 | or if I'm buying a bunch of books

01:41:12.680 | or if I have courses, I have some app subscriptions

01:41:15.120 | and courses, et cetera.

01:41:17.400 | But it's definitely easy to spend

01:41:18.880 | a few hundred dollars a month very productively.

01:41:21.480 | But the key is not always the money, it is the time.

01:41:25.000 | So recognize that.

01:41:26.280 | Thanks for listening, I'll be back with you very soon.

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2023-03-15_How_to_Invest_in_Your_Children_at_a_Young_Age-Help_Them_Develop_Multilingualism