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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds, I'm your host, and today I'm gonna share with you one of my 2021 projects, which was to teach my children French and track how much results I could get in one year.

And it was pretty exciting in terms of the actual results. I was able to take one of my children, my eight-year-old reader, from zero exposure to the French language to reading at grade level and enjoying the same content that is created for students of his own age in French in less than one year.

And this is very exciting to me because it has been a fairly pain-free process, it's been an enjoyable process, it hasn't been a battle in any way, it's been pretty exciting. So in today's show, I wanna share with you specifically what I have done that has worked so that you might have some tools to be able to try new things with your own children and get better results.

Now, why am I excited about this? I'm excited about it because this is the second time that I have done it. And the reason I made this a project for the year is I wasn't sure what kind of results I could get. We did this one time around with Spanish and I was impressed with the results there, but I hadn't measured them carefully, I hadn't paid much attention to the time, and so I didn't have the best of data.

This time around, I was like, "Hey, I think I've got some pretty good methods here. "Let me try this with my actual data "and see what happens." And I got even better results. And so now I wanna share some of those results with you. But to begin, let's back up to the topic of education.

Why am I talking about education and foreign language education here at Radical Learning? Why am I talking about education here at Radical Personal Finance? Well, quite simply, education and educational goals are at the heart of virtually any financial plan. If you talk to somebody about their financial goals, they will usually involve some expression of financial independence, financial freedom.

But if they have children, their number two category, and sometimes number one category, is always gonna be education. Having the very best education that we can possibly have for our children. And we spend a lot of money on this goal. Rightfully so. Given that we live in an information society, the most highly educated among us have a tremendous leg up.

And so spending money on our children's education is one of the best investments that is available to us as parents. The amount of money we spend is really, really significant. It doesn't all depend on college, although certainly it's not in any way uncommon for people to have a goal of saving six figures or multiple six figures to pay for their children's college education.

It starts at the very earliest of ages, where most wealthy people will quite happily spend five figures a year for private school tuition for their children. The numbers vary depending on what city you're in, depending on what school you're at, but it's not in any way uncommon to have children spend $10,000 to $20,000 per year for just kind of a middle-of-the-road private school tuition payment for their children's education.

But when I look at it, I always ask myself the question, what kind of results are we getting for this money? Are we getting a good return on investment? And I confess to you that many times my answer is no. We don't get very much of a return on an investment.

If you go and you look at kind of the middle-of-the-road private school in your town, and you compare the educational outcomes of the students of that school with the educational outcomes of the students in the local government school, there might be a difference, but it's not nearly as impressive of a difference as you often wish for.

And so I look at a lot of the money and I think, is there a way that we can get better results for this money? Is there a way that we can get more of a return on our investment? And I'm convinced that most of the time the answer is yes.

So I, like you, care a lot about the education of my children, and I invest heavily into the education of my children. But I'm trying to use my thoughtful analytical brain and my good research ability, etc., to get better results for less money. And thus that's where this particular topic comes from and why I want to share it with you.

Because I guarantee you this, there is not a foreign language school program-- excuse me, a foreign language program in any school where you or I live that has gotten the kind of high-quality results that I've been able to get in my home over the last year. And so I want to tell you what I've done, why I've done it, and give you some tools to do things for yourself.

Now, you know that foreign language acquisition is not the whole of an education. This is just simply one part. I consider this to be an important part of education. And let me take a moment and share with you why I consider this to be an important part of a good, high-quality education.

It's not that people don't understand that acquiring a second language can't be something that's useful. Most people say, "Yeah, that's a good idea." And in fact, in most of the school systems around us, just to get your high school diploma, you usually need to have at least two years of some kind of foreign language study.

So people understand that it's important. But those of us who are natives of the English-speaking world, we are spoiled by the dominance, the global dominance of English. And so we often don't give it as much thought as people from other parts of the world do. I've not met a wealthy man from a non-English-speaking part of the world who hasn't sat down as a basic requirement of success that his children learn English.

All around the world, it's understood that English is necessary for future success. But in the English-speaking world, we're not quite so tuned into it. So why is foreign language education so important? At its core, I consider that foreign language education is important because it helps to expand the brain of the person.

It makes the brain more plastic, more malleable, and it allows them to look at the world in multiple ways. I personally use for myself foreign language acquisition just simply part of a discipline of systematically getting smarter. I believe that the brain is a muscle, just like other parts of our body, and as such, it needs to be consistently exercised, consistently worked out.

While the good proper academic research is harder to nail down than perhaps those of us who do this kind of stuff might like, just the anecdotal observational evidence is pretty strong that when you use your brain, you can make it get stronger. And I think that you should get smarter every single day, just like we should get stronger every single day.

We should get smarter every single day. And so we should consistently do things that make our brains smarter. Our brain is a language organism, and as such, language acquisition and moving among languages is something that helps it to be smarter. And so I want to also give my children the gift of being able to thrive in a world of many different cultures, to be able to thrive in a world that is bigger than just simply the English-speaking world.

I have noticed over the years that those who only speak English have a, there's a large amount of the world that they can live in, but it's a very homogenous system. And they, because of their lack of a second language, they're kind of limited to the handful of native English-speaking countries where they can be most comfortable.

But if you give just one foreign language to that person, all of a sudden, they build the ability to go quickly and comfortably among different cultures. Even if it's not the culture that they're actually, that they speak the language, just by having the confidence in multiple cultural settings, multiple languages, makes a big, big difference in their skills in the world.

And then of course we know that I consider that, well, I consider that languages are just simply part of a talent stack. That if you look at the talent stack that we're trying to give to our children to say, "Here are some unique abilities, some unique skills that will be useful to you in different parts of life," languages are kind of a cheat code.

Because you can take a talent stack of one set of talents, let's say a talent such as being a skilled speaker, and all of a sudden, if you can just simply do that in two or three languages, it massively opens up the opportunities, and it makes you much more interesting, it makes you stand out, it helps to make it much more likely that you're going to have good employment opportunities, that you'll be able to see the world in a different way, et cetera.

So I think if you think about the opportunity to have a child who is monolingual versus a child who is bilingual or multilingual, it just seems like a powerful, powerful benefit. But why don't we often do it? Well, because it's often hard to do, it's time-consuming, and we just don't get great results.

If you look at the actual results that most formalized school systems get with language teaching, the results are atrocious. They will study for years and get very, very poor results. And most of the people who go through the classes won't stick with the language, they don't enjoy it, and they get very poor results.

And so I've had an interest to see, can we change that? And I did change that. The first language that I taught my children was Spanish. And let me explain to you why I've chosen the languages that I've chosen to teach them thus far. The simple and obvious one was Spanish, because both my wife and I spoke Spanish.

And so it was closer to us and more feasible for me to teach my children Spanish, because we both already spoke basic Spanish. In addition, of course, Spanish is an exceedingly useful language for those of us who are in North America. It is predicted that by the middle of this century, the United States will be the second largest, second most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world, second only to Mexico.

If you look at the population growth of Spanish-speaking persons in the United States, it is absolutely massive. And so it is expected that right now the United States is the fifth most populous Spanish-speaking nation, but by the middle of the century it's expected the United States will be the second most populous Spanish-speaking nation.

And so in the United States, we're quickly turning into a world in which being bilingual is something that's quite useful. And so that's obvious. In addition, of course, Spanish is a very widely, globally spoken language. And so it's often not a leading cultural language, it's often not a leading...

It's not a language of science, it's not a language of literature, it's a useful language in terms of the ability to travel in Central and South America, etc. And so we chose to speak with Spanish first. Then, when I looked at it, I decided to go with French next.

And the reason that I chose French was that French... there's obviously a very close connection between Spanish and French. And so once you've learned one Romance language, picking up another Romance language is of much lower difficulty than picking up a totally unrelated language. Romance languages would be languages that have come from Latin.

The most popular ones are, of course, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Those are usually the list of five that is considered to be the Romance languages. And so if you speak Spanish, you already have quite a lot. In French, for English speakers, French is a pretty easy language to learn because English has a very, very high concentration of French words in it.

Something like... it's estimated that about 40% of the English vocabulary comes directly from French. And when you start learning French, you see this everywhere. That so many of the words come directly from French, we've just adjusted the pronunciations. We don't pronounce them in a French way, we pronounce them in an English way.

So English is best understood to be a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary. And more than any other language in the world, if you learn French, then you're going to have a very, very strong overlay of cognates of words that are just gimmies, freebies, because you understand them perfectly between the two languages.

And I look for this as part of the benefits of learning a second language. So if you look, for example, in terms of a child's academic skills, people who speak a second language often have a much higher understanding of English. The highest verbal scores on the SAT and other standardized tests often come from those who have studied another language.

And Latin is perhaps the most effective language. Those who've studied Latin do very, very well in their English scores. I think there's a place for that, but I'm not too enthusiastic about studying Latin just because it's a dead language. And notwithstanding the academic arguments about, "Oh, it's the great thing to do," I don't have much interest in Latin.

But when I looked at things like the SAT verbal score results, just right below those who've studied Latin as those who've studied French. And so I don't see the point of studying Latin if you can just simply study a living language and pick up most of the benefits from the study of Latin.

So studying French will help your English in a dramatic way in terms of your vocabulary and your ability with the language. And so there's a lot of overlap between Spanish and French and English, and so they're kind of a gimme, right? You get one and it's just a little bit more to get the next.

That's why I chose French for the next language. So what are the results that I've achieved in the last year? And I tracked this to see what we could do in a year. The results that I have achieved have varied dramatically based upon the age and the ability of my different children.

And so I'll begin with the most impressive results, which are those of my eight-year-old. One year ago, at the beginning of 2021, he spoke no French and had been exposed to no French until I started this progress. Today, one year later, and I measured this right at the end of the calendar year, he is able to read at his grade level in French and is reading for enjoyment without distinguishing between French books versus English books versus Spanish books.

What I say distinguishing, I mean, of course he understands the language, but it doesn't show a strong preference. I don't have to try to get him to read a book in French. He enjoys the books in French equally as much as he enjoys the other books. And so he's reading material, best examples would be Le Club de Cinq by Enid Blyton.

He really enjoys those, and I've been able to get all of those in French. Other books, he enjoys La Cabane Magique, the Magic Treehouse books in French. He enjoys Roald Dahl books in French, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Glass Elevator, enjoys those books in French. He also enjoys reading encyclopedias in French.

I've purchased a number of encyclopedias, things like how it's made, different mechanical things, books on airplanes, books on trains, planes, trains, automobiles, etc. He enjoys reading all of those in French. And I work hard to get my hands on books. He's been enjoying the Geronimo Stilton books in French.

Anything I can get my hands on that is an interesting story for children, he enjoys reading in French. We haven't yet tried things like Jules Verne. That's been my kind of goal, is to go ahead and get him started on Jules Verne. But I've intentionally waited just a little bit, because I feel like it's not a matter of the language being too difficult, just simply a matter of the subject matter being a couple of years, and Verne's writing style, because it's so detailed, being just a little bit beyond where he's at intellectually.

And so that's been a great metric to see. So in terms of the four language modalities, we've been able to go from nothing to reading comfortably at grade level in French. When I say grade level, I go on Amazon, for example, and when I'm looking at a book, I look and it says, "Oh, this is for 8 to 12 year olds." And so I get it, and he's able to enjoy it.

And so I don't have a great list of all of the books that are assigned for 8 year olds, 9 year olds, and 10 year olds in the French education system. I haven't been able to come up with such a list yet. But just going with those basic indicators, he's basically reading in French like a French 8 year old is able to read, at least as best I can determine.

So that's reading. What about listening to spoken French? Well, we have very limited opportunities to listen to spoken French, and so he does enjoy listening to French audio books when I can find a good French audio book. It's difficult for me to screen the materials, to find the really high quality stuff, and to get good audio recordings of French audio books.

But with the ones that I have tried, he's able to enjoy them without the crutch of reading the words. He's able to follow the plot and enjoy the story and listen for pleasure and amusement with all of the normal expressions of delight, right? The normal following along with the story, laughing, enjoying it, understanding the plot, what's going on.

I've never tried to engage in any kind of measurement of comprehension. I don't know whether he's comprehending 90%, 80%, 95%, 70%. I don't know, and I don't care. I don't think that testing comprehension helps in any way from my studies. But he's able to enjoy, and I see evidence of him enjoying spoken French.

What we don't have is we don't have colloquial French. We don't have colloquial conversational French. And so I've been able to find no materials that I thought were useful for that purpose. I haven't been able to find a--I haven't really looked. It hasn't been important to me to look for, but I haven't looked for movies in French that were age appropriate, etc.

And so he doesn't have any exposure to that. And of course, we're not in France, so we don't have a good opportunity to play with other children. That all will come in time. It's not a concern to me, which I'll get to in a moment, but--so I don't have any evidence of that.

What about ability to produce the language, either in speaking or in writing? Again, I consider this to be not an important metric in the beginning years of language acquisition. And so it's not a big deal to me. I have a little bit of evidence that he's able to produce the language.

He'll from time to time say something in French. He'll compose something, but I have had no opportunities for him to be in a context where he's had the chance to produce a lot of language. And so at some point, I will create those opportunities, but I haven't chosen to go and artificially create them.

And then with creating verbal--excuse me--spoken--written French, no--I've made no efforts to require him to write in French at all. So I have no evidence of his skills whatsoever. So that's what we've achieved in a year. I think it's pretty fantastic in terms of the results for my 8-year-old. But, of course, there's more to do in the coming years, but I'm very, very pleased with that.

What about the younger children? Well, the younger children have made virtually no progress because of the fact that I've had minimal ability to expose them to the language. And so with the others, I am still reading to them, but I am still at the translation stage. So I read to them a little bit here and there, but I'm still translating.

I read in French, translate to English, read in French, translate to English. And I'm sure that they are acquiring vocabulary little by little, but I don't have any evidence of how much they understand. I do know that if I stop translating, then they don't usually enjoy that. They ask me to go back to translating, and so I haven't pushed it.

And I also know that I have struggled over the course of the year to find enough materials. And so we went months and months with doing nothing with French until I was able to go to France over the summer and get more books and find books that would actually work for us.

So we're making progress, but it's very, very slow. And I only have one child who is reading. My 6-year-old has demonstrated lots and lots of resistance to reading in English, in any language. And so because of that, I only have one child who is reading. And so it's been fascinating to see this just night and day difference between a reader and a non-reader in terms of ease with which the reader has been able to pick up the language versus the non-reader still struggling.

So we'll see. I keep pressing on, and I'm not going to stop. But it's been, when I say the most impressive results, it's one of my four children who is able to read. So over the coming years, I expect the 6-year-old to pick up the pace much more quickly once she's able to read.

But it hasn't happened yet. So let me tell you what I have specifically done and what has worked well. To begin with, I started by brainwashing my children, meaning that I have tried very hard to not set low expectations but to set higher expectations, especially in the subject of something like language acquisition.

I think that expectation is everything. We know that people, everyone in the world is able to acquire multiple languages, many languages they want to acquire. There is zero evidence that there are people who can't be bilingual or can't be multilingual. And there's abundant evidence from people who are raised in contexts where multilingualism is important that they're able to acquire as many languages as are necessary.

And we know that it's just a function of time and exposure to the language. And so the biggest handicap that most of us who are from English-speaking places face is that bilingualism or multilingualism is not valued in our cultures. It's not valued in the United States. It's not valued in the UK.

It's a little bit valued in Canada, but in practice, not much. And that's very different than if you're in a culturally intermixed place. If you're a Swiss, then you understand that it's perfectly normal that you're going to speak three to four languages. You are going to study in school three to four languages.

Everyone around you speaks three to four languages. And that's an expected thing. And so the Swiss have an orientation that's different than those of us in the native English-speaking world do. So what I've tried to do is I've tried to keep those negative influences out of my children. And I've tried to reset the reality.

And it's my opinion and observation that there's actually no reason why you can't speak ten languages very well. There are lots and lots of polyglots today who speak a dozen languages with very high degrees of fluency. Some who quite literally speak dozens. And so in the modern world, because of our ability to have access to the globe's best and brightest minds showing their best results, we're able to use that as a set point.

I remember a few years ago, for example, this wonderful Russian girl named Bella who was quite famous as a polyglot and appeared on all these different shows. And I showed my children a picture of Bella. He was this little four or five year old girl speaking six or seven languages, reading in all of them.

And I showed them that, look, this is available. I found other children who were quite multilingual and I showed them the input of just simply looking. This is expected. And of course, when I talk about languages, I have chosen to set the expectation of, oh, this is just something that we do.

When I speak about a language, I say this is the one we're learning this year and the next year we're going to learn a different one. And I just say it as a matter of course. Whether or not we actually do it on a 365 day calendar schedule doesn't matter.

I just made the comment, oh, when you learn Chinese, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or when you learn German, it's going to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I talk about that and I use the word jokingly brainwashing. But that is the first thing that I have chosen to do is I have chosen to set the expectation.

Same thing expectation I say with my children with math, right? Dad, why do we have to do so much math? I was like, you don't have to do so much math. When you finish calculus, you can quit, right? There's a big difference, though. If you tell a child when you finish calculus, you can quit math versus when you finish algebra, you can quit.

And so my expectation is when you finish calculus, you can quit. And so I believe this is an important tool for us with our children. I set an expectation for my children. You're going to have a college degree. It's just not optional. We're not the kind of people who don't get college degrees.

And even if I think that the utility of a college degree is lower and different than it once was, we're still the kind of people who get college degrees. We do it in our spare time at night school just to have it done so we can check the box.

And so be careful with what you say with your children because this is a powerful tool. We have the ability to brainwash our children, and we need to be careful that we're using that for the very best things. And so I try to always focus on very positive things.

I teach my children again and again, and I say, "You guys are going to be best friends, right? You're best friends. As siblings, you're best friends. We're the ones who we stand up for one another. We work together. We're a family team," and use that positive reinforcement to set their expectations in a different way.

And so I've done that with languages just like in other areas. In addition, I do model by example. I am not monolingual, and I study languages as a form of mental exercise. And so they see me reading a little bit every day in the language that I'm studying at the time, gaining enjoyment from it.

They hear me speak in foreign languages. They see that, and so I'm hoping that that modeling by example makes a big difference for them. So at its core, the method that I have focused on has been the use of books. I'm not convinced that's necessarily the best method, and I'll explain because there are different challenges for different languages.

For example, the languages that I have chosen to teach my children thus far have been languages that are pretty easily acquired through books because they work with a Latin alphabet. There are a lot of cognates to English. They're pretty accessible. That's different than Mandarin. Mandarin is less accessible because you have to learn the character system, and you have to memorize the characters before the books and the literature are accessible to you.

So when we get to Mandarin, I don't know whether we'll be living in Taiwan and we'll have access to resources there or whether we'll have to start using apps, et cetera. I'm just telling you what I have done. I'm not saying it's the best. I have chosen to focus on books as the primary tool.

Why books? Why books versus some of the other things? And I think this is often a false comparison. You don't need to have one or the other. There are many things that are excellent. YouTube is wonderful for language acquisition. We've just not chosen to emphasize that, at least thus far, and that can come with downsides.

But why books? Well, to begin with, when learning a language, I believe -- I'm convinced that it's all about comprehensible input, that the language is built inside of you based upon comprehensible input. You need to have input that you can understand, that you can comprehend. And if you can just get comprehensible input, the language will, over time, be acquired.

It will come to be inside of you. I'm also convinced that an input-heavy model is probably the best model. What I mean is it's not that producing the foreign language is unimportant. If you want to speak a foreign language well, you're going to eventually need to speak it a lot.

Speaking is its own skill. If you want to write a foreign language well, you're going to need to write it a lot. But especially in the beginning stages of acquisition, it's all about the input. It's all about your brain being comfortable with the input. And I've tested myself what some people call the activation hypothesis, the idea being that if you've studied a language for a long time with input, when you need the language, your brain can activate it pretty, pretty quickly.

And so I tested that myself with a personal experiment, and I'm convinced that it is true. Input is easy to arrange. Input is not difficult to find compared to output. So it's hard for me. My children don't have any French conversation partners. I could arrange it. I could go on italki, and I could hire a French tutor and put them in front of the computer screen and talk with them.

I may do that in the future. I could take them to France, and I may do that in the future. I could go to the local Alliance Francaise and go to their cultural events, and I may do that in the future. But all of those things, those ways of creating output for them as a language student, those are all difficult and time-consuming compared to input.

With input, I just need something for them to listen to or something for them to read that they can understand. And so that is the key that I focus on is input, just finding input. And if my children don't ever produce output until they need to, I'm totally fine with that.

So I haven't tested my 8-year-old son's verbal production. It doesn't matter to me. I only care that he's inputting the language because if he's inputting the language, then when he needs to create output, he will be ready, and he'll do it at that point in time. And if there's a huge amount of the language that's there as input, then the output will be available.

I want you to imagine somebody learning English, and imagine that person is from a very different culture, right? They grew up in, say, Korea or Japan or some place. But yet they are able to listen to native English content and understand it, and they're able to read native English content and understand and enjoy it.

If you take that person and you put them into a context, and they've never had a chance to speak to anybody, they've never had a chance to write the language, but then you quickly put them into a context, within a few days, they'll be very, very comfortably creating the language.

That's the input hypothesis. So books are a wonderful form of input. What's wonderful about a book? Well, a book has a lot of words, and at its core, language is words. In a book, you can access the words at whatever rate is appropriate for your brain to handle. So unlike with spoken language, where it's hard to pause or go back or repeat, in a book, when you reach a word that you don't understand, you can just simply look at it, and you can stop and puzzle about it, or you can just skip it and move on.

So if you look at the words per hour exposure, the words per hour exposure is higher when reading than any other discipline. It's significantly higher than even things like TV shows. Some people enjoy studying languages by watching TV shows, which is great, but you're exposed to fewer words per hour than with books.

And so books have the highest word exposure. In addition, books have the most varied vocabulary. So the biggest variety of words is going to come from reading books versus something like watching a TV show or a movie. Especially when you get to literature, the words that an author chooses in literature, native language literature, are very diverse and quite varied.

In addition, books allow you to see the way that words are spelled, which helps to see the etymological roots. One of the things that I find most interesting of watching my eight-year-old is that because he's acquired his languages mostly through reading, he's very good at etymology. He sees the roots in words, even though I've never formally taught him anything with etymology.

And there'll be words that will come across when I'm reading, and I'm puzzling over the word. And he's like, "Oh, Dad, it's just, it's such and such." Because look, if you look here, right here, this little root in the word, that's related to this other word and this other word and this other word, and so it probably means such and such.

And so in a book, you can see that. And at least for me, I find that when I'm listening to the language, I'm not tuned into those etymological roots. And so I often can't figure out a word when I'm just hearing it. So books are easy. Books are easy to acquire.

They're full of words. They're cheap. When you look at the percentage of words, they're just, they're wonderful. And when you go to books, you have a lot more resources to pull on, especially when you're working with children. There are lots and lots of books that have been written over the centuries for children versus suitable TV shows and things like that that you're appropriate.

So I start, I have started with books and continue with books. If you're learning a language that's not so accessible, if you're studying Chinese, for example, you'll have to use a different strategy. I can't tell you yet the strategy, although I've been working on it. I can't tell you the strategy that's appropriate for that.

But if you're looking for a language like Spanish or French or German, I think books are a primary benefit. So what did I do? In January 2021, I started by buying a bunch of graded readers. Graded reader is a tool that is developed for language acquisition. And what it has is a story.

It's a reader. It's a story. But it has a simplified vocabulary and a simplified grammatical construction contained within it. And so I bought lots and lots of graded readers for French. And these are very simple stories, but they use lots and lots of cognates from English to French. And they're written in a very simple way.

And I started reading them to the children. I would read and translate, read, translate, read, translate. And so I got lots and lots of these graded readers. And that was where we began. In addition to my reading them and translating them, I would strategically leave them around visibly for my reader to pick up.

And so I found that even from the beginning, my then 7-year-old would pick up the books and he would read them. And these are graded readers, so they're pretty easy, simple to read. I couldn't tell you what accent was in his head, what voice he was reading them in.

That's one of the challenges with French that Spanish doesn't have is that the pronunciation cues are different. And they're not as straightforward as Spanish. But I just saw that he was picking them up and reading them, so I made sure to leave them around. He would read them several times.

And so that was the starting point was graded readers. In addition to that, I bought a couple of vocabulary books. For example, I bought "First Thousand Words in French." And for part of his homeschool assignments, I assigned him to read and learn a page of vocabulary. And especially in the beginning, we used the website for that book, which had the pronunciations, so that he could hear a native speaker pronounce the words.

And the key with this is we focused not at all on the ability to produce the words, but simply on the ability to recognize the words. So quick vocabulary idea here. There are different forms of vocabulary. Usually, language students will call it passive vocabulary and active vocabulary. Passive vocabulary means the ability to recognize a word in a certain context.

So if I say to you a word like sausage, right? Then that particular word, if you recognize that it's sausage, then that word has a certain meaning in a certain context. And so if you can recognize that that word, would you like sausage or bacon with your eggs, and you understand what those things are, that's a passive vocabulary.

That's different than necessarily your ability to create something with your active and actively produce it. So active vocabulary means words that you can summon up and that you can use in context. So if I used words, let's say that I said, how do you want your eggs? I could tell you right now, and I could say, make a list for me of the different ways that you can order your eggs in a restaurant in English.

And if English is your native language, you could probably come up with three or four. If you pay attention to this kind of stuff, you could probably come up with six or seven. Or if you're a cook yourself and you've tried these different methods of making eggs, you could probably come up with six or seven.

But if English is not your first language, you can't really come up with any words. But if I start saying to you, well, there are different ways that you can make your eggs, so you might have your eggs scrambled. Well, now you understand what scrambled eggs are. You can recognize that.

You might have passive appreciation. If I say sunny side up or over easy or over medium or over hard or poached or fried, if I go through these different ways that we call eggs, hard boiled, soft boiled, medium boiled, if I go through them, you can recognize them. So those are your passive vocabulary, things that you can recognize when I go through the list.

And your passive vocabulary in language is your most important because it allows you to understand the language that's flowing by. This is why when people have a big passive vocabulary, they can enjoy literature because they can understand the language. We don't use a lot of the fancy words that we read in literature in daily life, but it's your passive vocabulary that is your most important thing.

And so I gave him a vocabulary book, First Thousand Words in French, and had him study a page a day just to be able to recognize the words. Then we hit a wall. And so this would have been about March of 2021, we hit a wall. I ran out of graded readers, which are expensive, and I had spent several hundred dollars buying graded readers.

I ran out of them, and then I didn't have the ability to replace them. We weren't in a French-speaking country, and so I couldn't find them. And I was searching Amazon, but I didn't know what to look for, and I couldn't find it. And so we basically quit. We quit everything for several months.

But then over the summer, we went to France. And while we were in France, I went to several bookstores. And when I was in the bookstores, I was able to browse through all the different things for children and start to see different things that I had wanted. And find some books that would be good resources.

Let me tell you what I have found to look for as far as language materials for children. Number one, stories. We as human beings are drawn to stories. And I think that story learning for adults is an extremely powerful way of studying a language. The problem is that most stories that are written for language learners are not that interesting to children.

But there are lots and lots and lots of stories that are interesting to children. So I look for stories. More importantly, I look for stories that are written in a series. Because what I observed by accident, and what I stumbled into with the Spanish project, was once I could get my child started on a series, then he would just get pulled automatically from one book into the next, into the next, into the next, into the next.

And we could put thousands and thousands of pages of reading behind him without him ever realizing what was happening. And if you read thousands and thousands of pages in your foreign language that you're working to acquire, it's just going to flow quickly. And so I look for series. Books that are written in series.

Number three, I look for books that are written as stories, not as kids books. I don't think that kids books are very good language material for language learners. Because kids books are written for native speakers. And they have all this weird vocabulary. They're often imaginative. They're not descriptive. They don't say, you know, "Tom and Sally walked through the woods and over the bridge." They just have a picture of a bridge, and they say, you know, the English equivalent would be, "Tom and Sally's beautiful stroll meandering through the woods was a time of great relief for them." Well, that's terrible from a language acquisition perspective.

And so I'm looking for stories that are written in prose and in a fairly simple and straightforward way. And I'm looking for series of those. So when I was in France, I was able to find a bunch of those. The first magic one was the Magic Treehouse series by, isn't it Mary Lee Osborne, I think?

Or Mary Pope Osborne? That story series, I am convinced, is probably the best language series ever made. Because the stories are written in a simple and repetitive way. They're very formulaic, but the prose is simple, and they have lots of pictures. Almost every page has a picture that shows you what's going on.

So it's easy for the children to follow, easy for the reader to follow. So I bought a bunch of La Cabane Magique there in France. Another series that I grabbed was the Enid Blyton series called Club de Cinq. And this is a classic series that is quite well loved in France for many years.

It was originally written in English, and Enid Blyton is well loved in English. More than any author for children, somehow Enid Blyton has the number on what children are into. Her books are quite formulaic for us as adults, of course. They always have a bunch of children coming together for adventures.

Of course, the parents are never to be seen, and they have various adventures that are far beyond their actual capacities. But somehow these books are just for children to get obsessed with them. And this was the series that broke open my son's Spanish language. It's available in Spanish, called Club de Cinq.

And so that broke open in Spanish. I knew he loved them in Spanish. And so I started getting them in French, and I put them there for him to read in French as well. I found several other series that I grabbed. There's one called Orsay Lapin, Bear and Rabbit.

Then I bought some books by Geronimo Stilton, and I bought a bunch of other books. And so the point was I got all these different books that I could find for him to read. And then I just left them there. And what's interesting is, as a reader, I found that my 8-year-old just couldn't stay away.

He just had to go and read them. First day we get back from the bookstore, he's just sitting there reading them. I'm watching from the other room, asking myself, "What on earth is he understanding?" I couldn't tell in any way what he was understanding. I just saw him reading the books.

And to this day, I don't know what he was understanding. I specifically avoid tests. I specifically avoid any kind of assessment, because I see that as a negative thing at this stage. But I just knew that he was reading and he was enjoying them. And so again, here the benefit is French is so closely related to English that after all the graded readers, I think he was able to see some of the parallels and just see the words and figure things out by context.

I've continued the reading and just keep buying more and more books. That's it. Let's put it as simple. But then I started to work on accent acquisition, because the problem with French is the pronunciation schemes are quite tricky. Kind of like English pronunciation is tricky. And so what I needed was to find books where I could get an audio book for him to read and also have the physical book match up, because I needed him to hear a narrator's voice in his ear and my French isn't good enough to have a great accent.

And I actually don't know all the pronunciation rules. I make it up as I go along. And so I needed him to hear. And with an eight-year-old, you're not going to sit down and teach the pronunciation rules like you would a college student. They're not into that. They don't enjoy it.

So I thought I've got to find something. So I spent hours searching through Amazon Audible, finding books that would be matched up, where there would be a suitable subject matter and a reader as well. I was able to find the best series there was a series of books by Roald Dahl.

My wife can't stand him. She refuses to buy any of his books because of the disrespectful attitude that he puts within his children protagonists towards parents and adults. But I was able to find enough that I thought were okay. So we got Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and the Glass Elevator, James and the Giant Peach, several of others.

And I was able to give him those with an audio book and the written book. I found some others as well. Let me look up the titles actually. I'm glad I looked them up because it was the other one was by author Marc Thiel. There's a modern French author and he's written a bunch of books.

They're relatively short but they're written for children. Some storybooks with similar attraction to Enid Blyton's. And I was able to find those written in Kindle and also many of them with the audio book as well. And so I bought all of those. Looks like that's about a dozen here that I have for him to read as well.

And by getting them, I also encouraged him to read on his Kindle. One of the great benefits of a Kindle, and at this point it seems to be fairly standard among other competing e-readers as well, but you have a dictionary function built in. And so by reading on his Kindle, I encouraged him to just simply have a pause button handy with the audio book.

And then if he didn't understand a word, stop and look it up with the French to English dictionary that's built into the Kindle. And that was a great benefit as well for him to be able to look up some words. That said, I observed that somehow with learning with reading, he's basically just learned the magic technique of ignoring the word and recognizing that if he doesn't understand it, no big deal, he just lets it go.

Which is I think something that children who are strong readers do learn. You just learn to skip the words that you don't understand and then what happens is after you stumble into them in various contexts, you wind up, "Oh, I magically understand them." And so I'm much more dependent on having to look up the words because I want to know.

He just lets the words flow by and doesn't worry about it. So after we wound up being, that was eight or so, eight or ten books for audio books, that I felt good enough that, "Okay, that's enough for him to have a good sense of proper accent, the way that things should be pronounced." And then I just continued buying books.

And so I continued working the series out. So now at this point in time, I have all 53 books of the La Cabane Magique series. I have all of the books of the Club de Cinq, entire series there. Which was interesting because there's actually about 10 to 15 bonus novels that were written in French, not by Enid Blyton, but follow along by another author.

So that's something like 50 books. Then I also try to buy encyclopedias. I find that children, or at least I know that when I was a child, I loved encyclopedias. And today there's so many wonderful encyclopedias that are written for children. The DK encyclopedias in English, and they also have them in Spanish, are awesome, just wonderful.

All these different subjects. And so I went on Amazon and I bought as many different high-quality encyclopedias that I could find. You know, the way things work, lots of pictures, planes, trains, and automobiles, lots of pictures, etc. And he enjoys reading those. And so of course that's also significant levels of vocabulary acquisition.

But it's very comprehensible because you're looking at a picture, there's a lot of cognates to words you already know, it's all in context, etc. And so I think those are wonderful for vocabulary acquisition as well. And that's what I've done. And so at this point in time, he enjoys reading in French.

It's just a matter of my being able to stay ahead and have enough books. And then he goes back and re-reads and re-reads and re-reads, which also is a very helpful strategy for language acquisition. But he's not re-reading for the language, he's reading for the story. And that's the key.

Is that children are into the stories. And if you can make it fun and just have good enough stories, then the stories will suck them in. And that's been my experience now with two languages. In the coming years, I will continue to enhance the opportunities. First, as my younger children come up and are able to read, then I'll repeat the process with them as readers.

And I'll report back. One of the biggest questions I have is do I have an 8-year-old of unusual capacity, or is it that these techniques are better? And I think it's mostly the techniques, there's no denying that he has capacity, but I think it's mostly the techniques and the fact that he's a reader.

Which, by the way, one thing I was going to say earlier is that we try to minimize the number of competitive options for reading. So we don't do a lot of screens, we don't do a lot of games, we don't do those things. We basically say you can read and here's a big stuff full of library, or you can play.

So I do want my children to grow physically, I want them to grow spiritually, and I want them to grow intellectually every day. And so we try to focus on those disciplines, something to nourish the body, something to nourish the soul, something to nourish the mind on a daily basis.

And so there's lots and lots of play outside time, etc. But we minimize some of the screens. I do think that there are good benefits for screens for language acquisition. We have just far chosen not to go there. But if you can find wonderful YouTube channels, etc., that are going to help your language learners, I think that's great.

We used, signed up for Little Pym at one point and we showed our children Little Pym. The problem is it's just so little language there that you're not really getting much. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not a lot of language. And so it's not enough to make a bit to move the needle in any meaningful way.

So after, I don't know, six months with that, we canceled that because it just wasn't making a big difference. And I think that this is the reason I, back to why I spend so much time on reading, if you look at the percentage of, the number of words that a child will be exposed to over the course of an hour by being exposed to cartoons in the target language versus by reading in the target language, then it's just night and day in terms of the number of words per hour that they can be exposed to.

And so we've chosen not to focus on those other methodologies. Where I think those would really help us is with my younger children. I think that my younger children would have had far more results this last year if we had chosen to go with cartoons. The reason I haven't focused on that is because I use that time with them still on Spanish.

And so they were behind in Spanish and so I just figure I want them to get better in Spanish. So we use Spanish audio books to make sure that they're having the exposure to Spanish. And so since I have no reason why the results have to come on any certain schedule, I just thought it was an interesting experiment and I slowed down with French along the way.

So where are we going from here? My plan is next to do German. And so I think that there's a good, for native English speakers, I think there is a good natural set between these four languages. And that they flow and feed off of one another. So again, Spanish is a useful language because of the massive numbers of Spanish speakers in the United States and because the United States is very close to the trading partners in Central America, South America, etc.

And so although Spanish is not a useful language for academics, it's not a useful language for anything other than just everyday conversation, it is something that is useful. And my entire life I have found it exceedingly useful in an American context because it has always allowed me to cross the cultural barriers with Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States.

And I enjoy that. I really love being able to find somebody who's a recent immigrant from Honduras or something like that and being able to talk to them in Spanish. I enjoy making people feel comfortable like that. That's nice. And Spanish is an easy language for English speakers to learn.

Again, the Foreign Service Institute estimates that 600 hours, which by the way, let me just, I'll emphasize that in a moment, so it's a 600-hour language, so it's a pretty useful one. Then I think French makes the most sense as the next one because if you speak Spanish, there's a lot of overlap between French and French now opens up another section of the world.

I enjoy being able to speak French because of the Haitian community. And so it makes Creole pretty accessible, pretty easy to go back and forth. I can speak French, they can speak Creole. And so that's also useful in South Florida where I'm from, where we have a lot of Haitians.

And then on a global basis, French is of course a very useful language. It's formerly a lingua franca, it's spoken all over the world, and it's a useful language for literature, and it's one of those languages that I think is very useful for helping children's test results and skills with verbal skills.

And so for the reasons I mentioned earlier. So what makes sense after that? Well, of course, I think the language that makes the most sense is any language that the child wants to learn or the person wants to learn. You learn a language because you want to learn it, not because you have to or it's strategic.

But I do think that German makes a good sense as far as the strategic next language. I think the benefit from German is, number one, English is a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary. So it's a pretty accessible language for English speakers. But I think also you start to get into some of the benefits, the academic benefits that people want from Latin.

So a language with declensions, for example. I think that there, why not learn a living language, my theory is, why not learn German instead of Latin? Because you got to get at least 80% of the benefits, but yet you get a lot more benefits of it actually being a useful spoken language.

And then economically, German is a powerhouse of a language economically. And so now we start to get into a good return on investment with the time spent. Then after that, I think it makes sense to go on to whatever you're interested in. I'm interested in Asian languages. I just have a harder time figuring out those first steps.

So I think the first steps that make sense, let's say you want your children to speak Chinese, unless you're enrolled in a local Chinese program where you've got a Chinese teacher, here's where I think it makes more sense rather than to focus on books, to focus on using an app.

And so there's so many great apps that you can use that can be accessible and help acquisition. I was going to use an app for French, signed up for an app, paid for a year fee and everything. I just don't love the apps, most of them. And we decided to slow down on the app and see if we can make it work with just literature.

And so we did. And so I will use apps at some point. I think apps are wonderful for getting that toehold that you need in a language. You need the toehold to be able to speak it and be able to read. And so an app is a really accessible way to do that.

I think we'll use apps in the future. We just haven't chosen thus far to do that. What I wanted to close with was there's no question that knowledge with the language is simply a function of time. I find it very useful to go back and look at the Foreign Service Institute charts as far as how long it's expected for an English speaker to learn a language based upon its connection to your native language.

And for example, the estimates by the Foreign Service Institute is that English and Spanish and French are both about 600-hour languages. French, German is about 800-something hours. And so if you take that and you look at that, that's your initial goal. And I think that if you recognize that, it makes a lot of sense.

If I look at what the difference has been between my children and their language ability, it's just a matter of the number of hours they've been able to be exposed to it. And my six-year-old, because she's not reading, I have to read to her. And so I do. Every morning at breakfast I read a little bit now.

We weren't for a long time, but I read a little bit in French. But that winds up being about 20 minutes. It's about 20 minutes a day. Well, if you've got 600 hours that you've got to get done and you're reading at 20 minutes a day, that's going to be a project of many years.

Many, many years. On the other hand, my reader, I was able to say, "Here, I want you to read for an hour in the language." And he would wind up reading for three because he's interested in the story. And so he's clearly easily gotten several hundred hours in over the last year, 300 to 500 hours of reading in the language because I don't have to do that for him.

And so I can just say, "Here, go and read." And then he can sit and read in the afternoon for three hours to himself, and the hours accumulate quickly. So when it comes to language learning, don't think that it's really anything except hours. It's just a matter of finding comprehensible input and then having enough exposure to it over time.

And so I love the translation method of read and translate, read and translate, read and translate. I think it works and it works pretty well because it allows you to have more interesting materials. But at the end of the day, it's just going to be a function of time and comprehensible input.

I think the only last thing I want to say is this. One of the things that has been interesting is we did go to France this summer, but we did not find that to be productive for any of us from a language perspective. There was no magic growth in our languages by physically being in France.

And I think this is one of the biggest overblown concepts that people think, "Well, in order for my children to speak a language, I have to go to that country." Clearly, going to the country can help significantly. I think the biggest help is that you run the possibility of being able to attract playmates who will speak the local language.

But we as English speakers really always have a hard time with this because around the world, English is widely spoken and it's the most widely taught second language. My children are not super--they don't just go and want to speak the language, they want to speak English. And of course, the other child's English is probably better than their Spanish or their French.

And so it's often not been as productive for us as we have wanted. What I have found is that being in the country, in the target country, is a very limited utility until you get to at least an upper intermediate level in the language. Then I think it is very useful to be in the country.

But if you're sitting in Canada and you want to teach your children Spanish, don't think that you have to go to Mexico. Going to Mexico can be wonderful, but going to Mexico may not actually help you to learn the language all that much. My French studies were easier for me not being in France.

When I'm in France, yes, it's fun and I enjoy being able to use it. But from the perspective of my actually making progress in the language, because I have to face so many logistical things of where do we stay, where do we eat, do we have the QR code and the passe sanitaire and everything, it's just much more complicated.

And so you can make progress in the target language for your children from home. And then depending on your level of investment, right? In the coming years, I intend to, I haven't been able to find one yet, but I will find a French conversation partner. Whether it's a French au pair, I might bring a French au pair in for a time to live with us for some months.

I might maybe be an exchange student, might be a babysitter. I haven't figured that out yet. Or I may just go to France. You do need to have the exposure to someone who speaks the language. But in that beginning and intermediate areas, I think that the literature is a better solution.

Feel free to substitute anything that you find to be useful. The core structure of what you need is you need compelling, comprehensible input. If you can have compelling, comprehensible input, then you can expose your children to that. They will learn the language, no question about it. So you have to figure out what's compelling for my children.

What is compelling for my children is books because we're readers. For your children, you might find a wonderful YouTube channel or wonderful cartoons or wonderful stories in some other way. If that can be compelling and if it's comprehensible, give them the input. They will learn, I promise. That's my story.

That's what we have learned. I would love to hear your results. I will continue to work on it over the coming years and I'll share with you. I just know that we've gotten unusual results and I thought you would be interested in trying some of these techniques. It is a lot of work.

I find every day. If you find it a lot of work, I find every day in the morning when I'm translating, it makes my brain hurt. For me to do translation for a couple of chapters of reading in the breakfast table, it makes my brain hurt. Which is good.

It's one of the reasons I do it. But it is tiring. I'm not going to be the super dad who just pushes through and does eight languages with them. I'd love to be, but I don't think I'll have the ability. We've gotten good results and it's been fun so far.

I hope that you will take those things and gain from them. Thank you for listening to today's show. Remember that I'm available to you for consultations at the moment. Consultations you can book at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/consult.