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My name is Josh Rasheeds, I'm your host, and today we continue our How to Invest in Your Children When They're Young series. Not the catchiest of titles, but it is something that I believe very passionately is under-discussed and under-appreciated in the marketplace of ideas, which is why I'm taking a significant amount of time here in the podcast to go through it.

We began by talking about all of the basic things that make up your child's genetic material. Then we talked about investing into your child's body in various ways. And now we're talking about investing into your child's mind. We talked about word acquisition, literacy, and mathematics, and numeracy. And now I want to pivot to multilingualism, because I think multilingualism, meaning helping your child to acquire more than one native language, is a very clear example, not only of how you can make your children smarter, both in, I believe, the physical sense of actively stimulating the gray matter that's between their ears, but also kind of in the more commonplace sense, meaning you're smarter when you know more things, you're smarter when you have a greater appreciation of the world, and multilingualism accomplishes both of those senses.

Not only is this a good example of making your children smarter, but it's also a good example of the importance of beginning while young. So before I talk about the benefits of multilingualism, I want to take a few minutes and emphasize the importance of starting when you are young.

And I want to begin that with a story. I want to share with you the story of how I learned my first second language, which was Spanish. I grew up in South Florida. I was surrounded by Spanish-speaking people on occasion, but I had no consistent exposure to the language.

I remember at one time when I was very young, my family decided we were gonna learn some Spanish, and so we wrote some Spanish phrases on flashcards, and we tried to learn and memorize those phrases, and it didn't work. My parents didn't have the, whatever they were missing. My parents didn't follow through.

I didn't follow through. No one forced me to do it, so I was aware that Spanish was a thing, but I didn't have any exposure to Spanish. But I did have some elder siblings who had successfully learned Spanish, some to a very high level of fluency. And because of that, I understood that it was useful to speak Spanish.

So in high school, I took two years of high school Spanish, Spanish one and Spanish two. Don't remember exactly the grades. I'm gonna guess 10th and 11th grade. Could have been 9th and 10th. I don't remember exactly. And in those Spanish classes, I found that it wasn't particularly difficult to me.

I did my homework. But because I observed that Spanish was something that was useful, I did something that most of my peers did not. And that thing that I did was I tried to use the basic and broken Spanish that I had when I had opportunity. When I was in high school, I worked on a farm for several years.

I worked on lawn maintenance crews, and so I was around a primarily Spanish-speaking immigrant population. So there were lots of chances for me to try out my little Spanish with them. And of course, they were happy to talk with me, and that inspired me and motivated me to keep going.

I also, I didn't have a lot of instruction on how to improve my Spanish, especially as an autodidact. I had the instruction that I had in Spanish class, but no one taught me how to go on learning. In hindsight, I desperately wish that my teachers had given at least a class period or two to say, "Hey, if you're interested in learning more "than what I've been able to teach you in this class, "here are some of the things that you can do." It took me about 15 years until I finally started, actually more than that, until I finally had a plan to how to improve my own level of Spanish through self-study.

I thought I just needed to talk more in order to get better, which was a completely wrong-headed assumption that I had. But back to my Spanish, I also developed a simple technique that helped me to achieve a significant level of fluency, or I would rather say fluidity, because there's so much misunderstanding about the use of this term fluency in language learning, but it helped me to develop fluidity with my ability to express myself in Spanish, and that technique was I just simply practiced translating in my head when I was listening to people talk, listened to lots of classes, went to speeches, seminars, church meetings, et cetera, and when I would hear people speak to me, I would keep my mind busy by just figuring out how to do simultaneous translation.

And that skillset of constantly searching for ways to describe something when you're missing the vocabulary necessary helped me to achieve a much higher level of fluency, meaning the ability to express my thoughts in a fluent and flowing way, than many other people. It was only many years later when I look back on that experience, and I started to figure out why what I did worked and why what other people did not work.

And quite simply, it is a function of time, time spent with the language. The single most important metric to study when you are thinking about acquiring a foreign language is time with the language. Every language can be learned, even if you don't start when you're young, we'll cover some of those myths later in the episode, just a matter of taking and spending the time with the language.

If you spend a lot of time with the language, and you're going to acquire the language in the fullness of time. But if you only spend a little bit of time with the language, you're not gonna acquire the language. So I went back and I started doing some math.

And let me show you the math of what it takes to learn a language. First, let's begin with a baseline. In the United States, there is a governmental organization called the Foreign Service Institute. And the job of the Foreign Service Institute is to provide language training and culture training to US government employees who need to learn a language for various reasons, frequently diplomats, et cetera.

Foreign Service Institute has been doing this job for in excess of seven decades. And during that time, the teachers have acquired a great deal of expertise in what it takes to teach English speaking persons a foreign language. And what they have done is they have provided publicly available at state.gov, you can look it up yourself.

They have provided a chart or a set of rankings for how long it takes to learn a foreign language. They provide this chart in terms of a number of weeks of instruction and class hours. And they divide languages into categories one, two, three, four, and five. I'm not gonna go over all of these, but first let me define a few terms.

When the Foreign Service Institute indicates that someone is proficient, they use their own internal scoring. Here's what they say on their website. The following language learning timelines reflect 70 years of experience in teaching languages to US diplomats and illustrate the time usually required for a student to reach, quote, "professional working proficiency in the language," or a score of speaking three, reading three on the interagency language round table scale.

These timelines are based on what FSI has observed as the average length of time for a student to achieve proficiency. Though the actual time can vary based on a number of factors, including the language learner's natural ability, prior linguistic experience, and time spent in the classroom. So this definition of fluency, they call it professional working proficiency.

We might, I think of this as about a B2 or a C1 on the common European framework for languages that is most commonly used today to discuss linguistic ability, et cetera. And what they use is, let's go for example, category one languages, or languages that are very similar to English, or more similar to English.

And these languages take anywhere from 24 to 30 weeks for the student to learn. Now, when they say weeks, what they define that as is five days, excuse me, five hours of classroom instruction for a language learner, five days per week. So a total of 25 hours over the course of a week.

I don't think this is an all encompassing number. Their students are encouraged to go and spend more time and self-study outside of the classroom, but this is their baseline number, is five hours a day, five days a week. And they estimate the category one languages, such as Danish, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, these are all 24 week languages.

So if you multiply 24 times 25, you wind up with 600 hours. And so they estimate that Spanish is a 600 class hour language. Also included in this category would be a language like French, which they say is a 30 week language. So 750 class hours to acquire the French language.

And this gives us a good baseline. Now we go up, category two languages are a little bit less similar to English, but still fairly close. These are 36 week languages or 900 hours. This would include German, Malay, Swahili, Indonesian, Haitian, Creole, lots of category three languages, which require 44 weeks or 1100 class hours.

This would be Albanian, Burmese, Estonian, Georgian, Hindi, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Nepali, Serbo-Croatian, Thai, Turkmen, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Tagalog, Slovak, Russian, Latvian, Icelandic, Hebrew, Finnish, Bulgarian, et cetera. Greek, you know, Lao, Macedonian, Polish, et cetera. So these are 1100 hour languages. And then you go up to category four languages, which they classify as languages which are super hard languages.

Languages that are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers because of their dissimilarity from English. And category four languages require 88 weeks of classroom instruction or 2200 class hours. These languages would include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, et cetera. So this gives us a baseline. So now let's go back to my high school experience and let's think and talk about what actually happened.

Remember that in this high school, we were on what is a traditional schedule in the United States. In the United States, schools do 180 days of classroom instruction per year. That's fairly common on a global average within kind of the Western European nations, 180, 190 is the norm of numbers of days per year of classroom instruction.

I think Japan is, what is it, 220? I don't remember exactly. So there's some that are higher, but about is 180 hours, excuse me, 180 days in a year. When I was in school, our classes were 50 minutes in length and that was counted as an hour, but it was 50, five, zero minutes.

And of course, if we think about the amount of time that a classroom teacher has to teach in class, it's something less than the amount of time on the schedule. I'm gonna estimate that if you have 50 minutes in a classroom period, a superbly prepared teacher could perhaps deliver 30 to 35 minutes of actual instruction.

You have five minutes to welcome everybody, get everyone settled down, everyone in their seats, when the bell rings, et cetera, make announcements, et cetera, get the class started. You're gonna be interrupted at some point in the lesson for various five minutes here and there. And then you're gonna have five minutes at the end where you're basically winding down.

So a superbly prepared teacher who's very, very on top of his game could probably do 35 to maybe 40 minutes of instruction in a period. And then of course, in the course of an academic school year there are many days that are lost to various other activities. You might have homecoming week, you might have teacher absent days, you might have testing or some kind of school activities that are causing you to disrupt your normal schedule.

The first few days in from summer vacation are largely wasted and say the last week before summer vacation is largely wasted. So you're gonna get something less than 180 days. But let's assume for the sake of analysis that you could provide one hour of instruction in a 50 minute class, and you could do that for every single school day.

Well, you have 180 hours of instruction in a first year Spanish one class. Multiply that times two years and you have 360 hours. Of course, maybe there's some homework time, some things, other assignments that are assigned by the student, by the parent, excuse me, the teacher that allow the student to spend time studying, but still maximum I think is about 360 hours of instruction.

Do you see the problem? Is it any wonder that the vast majority of students who complete the required two years of foreign language instruction in high school do not come out of those two years with even a basic level of ability to communicate and enjoy a language? Even if that completely optimal scenario were somehow to be possible of 360 hours, we're still at about half of what the Foreign Service Institute needs to teach a highly motivated professional a foreign language like Spanish.

So what is the solution? Well, we could talk about pedagogy and helping the student to have more efficient ways. We could talk about ways to motivate the student, et cetera. But the simplest and most direct path to improving the outcome, if the desired outcome is to help a student to be fluent in a foreign language, the simplest and most direct path is to simply increase the amount of time spent in that study.

If we made Spanish one, two, three, and four the norm in our high schools, rather than Spanish one and two, I think most of our students would probably get close to fluency because their teachers are doing their best to use good methodology, good materials, et cetera. They just don't have enough time.

But if we know that we need 600 hours and we know that we are gonna get something less than 180 hours in a year, even at 150 hours, again, take it out over four years, we could teach a student a foreign language before that student graduates from high school.

And once you understand the math on it, it just becomes powerful when you recognize the result, the things that could happen. We'll talk in a moment about why they don't do that, but let's play with the math a little bit. What if you started a little bit earlier? What if, for example, instead of foreign language instruction being something that was relegated to the required two years in high school, what if it was something that was done all the time?

What if you had one hour every school day, so one hour, you had 180 hours per year over the course of a 12-year course of study of school? Well, that would give you 2,160 hours that is available for you if you did this for a one-hour period every school day for 12 years.

What could a language teacher do with 2,160 hours? I think pretty easily the student could learn something like Spanish, 600 hours. French, Foreign Service Institute would say 750 hours, but if the student already knew Spanish, I would say less than 600 hours based upon my experience. Let's just say 600 hours for French, and then German, 900 hours, and you still have a little time left over to spare.

So if we did one hour per school day for 183 days per year over 12 years of school, then a student could come out with three languages learned. Alternatively, we could take that time and we could invest it into some of those harder languages, those languages that are less similar to English, Arabic, or Chinese, 2,200 hours of instruction needed, and we could help a student achieve a very high level of fluency in these languages.

What if you were motivated and you expanded the amount of time beyond the school year? In most working adults, you don't spend 180 days per year working, you spend something like 250 days per year working, depending on the country. And so what if instead of doing this 180 days per year, we did 250 days per year, just one hour?

Well, one hour times 250 school days per year times 12 years of school is 3,000 hours. Once again, the student could learn pretty simply three, maybe four languages, maybe Portuguese, 600 hours, Dutch, 600 hours, Swahili, 900 hours, maybe Greek, 1,100 hours, with those 3,000 hours. What if you increased the amount of time still more?

What if you did two hours per day? I probably should have started the podcast with this, but in my family, we've gone in the last three years from being, last three and a half years, from being a monolingual family to now, at varying levels, depending on the student, achieving a pretty high level of fluency in four languages, and we're starting the study of our sixth and seventh languages.

And so what if you, but we do more than an hour a day. I break it up, but what if you did two hours per day? Two hours per day, and you did it, say, 300 days per year, because you used better techniques and methods that made it not onerous and burdensome, but rather joyful and enjoyable.

Well, two hours per day times 300 days per year over 12 years, that's 7,200 hours. So in that 7,200 hours, a student could very feasibly learn Italian, 600 hours, Greek, 1,100 hours, Hebrew, 1,100 hours, Korean, 2,200 hours, and Arabic, 2,200 hours. And then finally, let's play with the math still one more way.

What if instead of language acquisition being something that was constrained to schoolwork, it was something that was part of your family culture? What if you gave yourself a total of 16 years of time, starting at age two instead of at school age, and so you had 16 years from age two to age 18?

Well, two hours a day, 300 days per year, 16 years, that's 9,600 hours. So in theory, a student on that kind of schedule could learn Spanish, 600 hours, French, let's call it 600 hours, German, 900 hours, Greek, 1,100 hours, Hebrew, 1,100 hours, Russian, 1,100 hours, Arabic, 2,200 hours, and Mandarin Chinese, 2,200 hours.

So the point is that that's what's available if you have more time. Is it impossible to do that? No, it's not impossible to do that. It's just that most of us don't either have the interest or the system to do it. There's one guy, I should have looked up his name, forgive me, a Canadian guy on YouTube and has a little channel devoted to helping develop multilingual children.

And in his family, his children all speak natively, five languages. He, I believe, speaks Mandarin Chinese natively. He's of Chinese ethnic origin. So his children speak Chinese with their father. His wife is Japanese. They speak Japanese with their mother. They have a Spanish-speaking nanny who lives in the home and speaks Spanish with the children.

And they live in, I think, Quebec, Canada, where they speak French and English natively with their friends and in their academic studies. And so all of his children, basically from birth, are taught five languages. If his children desire to intensively study language, they would fairly easily pick up several more.

And because they have learned such diverse languages from birth, it cuts down the learning, the acquisition time necessary for virtually all of the world's languages to far less than somebody who only speaks English and is now going and studying Japanese. Because as you learn more languages, you have more connections, you have more cognates, it becomes faster and easier to learn languages.

So the key thing here is time. If you start early, you can achieve far bigger results than in the long run. So the question is, why don't we do this for our children? Why don't our schools require four years of language study instead of two years in order to graduate?

Well, let's assume the best. Let's not engage in conspiratorial thinking. Let's assume the best, that the school administrators and program designers are trying to do their very best to help a student be prepared. Why? If we know that a student needs a minimum of 600 hours of classroom instruction to achieve fluency in Spanish, why are we only devoting, say, 360 hours, or more realistically, far less, to that student's instruction?

The answer is the opportunity cost. If you are sitting down and designing any kind of academic curriculum, you have to choose what goes into it, and you have to choose what goes out. And this is one of the big reasons why we should start language acquisition at a young age, because the opportunity cost of studying languages at a young age is very, very low.

But as the student ages, the opportunity cost becomes more significant. Let's imagine your 16-year-old is coming to you, and your 16-year-old is saying, "You know what, I'm super interested in Japanese, but I also have just been offered this really great summer job, or this really great internship, working in the kind of business that I think would be cool to work in in the future." Your child has only so many hours available to him, so what advice are you gonna give him?

Should he spend his time studying Japanese, or should he spend his time going and doing the summer job, or the internship? Now, in fairness, he can probably do both, because even as a teenager, teens still have huge amounts of time available to them to accomplish anything they can dream of, or anything you can dream up for them.

But you see the point. That summer job is actually very important. When you look at the subjects that are necessary, I may cover a subject like learning to code. I don't think learning to code is important for a four-year-old, or a six-year-old, or an eight-year-old. I do think learning to code is important for a 14-year-old, or a 16-year-old, or an 18-year-old.

And so what's gonna be more valuable in life, learning Mandarin, or learning to code? Generally speaking, I would say probably learning to code, depending on the interests of the child. But what if you could do both? The way you can do both is by moving it younger. So when you look at the young ages of a child, and you think about what's necessary for that child, and what should a child be focused on during his younger years, language acquisition is a very natural fit for the development of the human brain.

Speaking of coding, I have looked for a very long time to try to find all of the best information I can about teaching a child to code. And while it's becoming more normal that coding is becoming part of the school curriculum from K through 12 in many cases, I have not yet found compelling evidence that a child really needs to be exposed to learning to code from kindergarten onward.

It seems to me that there's plenty of time in the middle school years and in the high school years to introduce the subject of coding when it seems a little bit more developmentally appropriate, at least to me. When you look at mathematics, I shared some of the arguments against intensive early study of mathematics.

What else? What about something like music? I think music is really valuable, but I also have spent quite a lot of time as a young child wrestling against my parents and against my music teachers 'cause I didn't wanna learn music. I spent some time wrestling with my own children, trying to get them to learn music.

And when you look at how slow the progress is for a very young child to learn music versus how quick the progress can be when the student is a little bit older, I'm not convinced that forcing music study on young children is productive for most people. If you have a prodigy, if it fits your culture, go for it.

I think it's awesome, but I'm not convinced it's necessary to force it. So what are you left with? Well, you're left with all the natural, normal things of childhood, character development, virtue development, et cetera, lots of time playing outside, playing with friends, free play, art, et cetera. But at its core, language acquisition is a core function.

And so in the same way that I spoke extensively about the value of studying your primary language at an early age and the number of words, the same thing applies to acquiring multiple other languages. These are golden years in which there are few competing choices for the time that are productive, and yet we can help a child be set up to be far ahead with later options if we help a child to be multilingual from birth.

So what I've just shared is clearly an extensive discussion, but when you understand the math, you can understand how powerful it is to invest into your child at a young age. Many, many college students all over the world go to school and spend a lot of money and a lot of time to take a degree in English, in Spanish literature, in Japanese language and culture, et cetera.

And I would say that if you had a coach and you had the right materials, you can pretty well set the foundation to where your child can acquire the equivalent knowledge fairly easily just in his spare time long before he ever graduates from high school. I've spent a good amount of time trying to find the best universities, going and finding all of their syllabus, their syllabi that they have for their students.

I go and try to find their reading lists for their Spanish literature major, their French literature major, et cetera. And then I go and try to look and make lists of the resources, right? I'm a homeschool dad, this is what I do, make reading lists. And while not all of it is appropriate to, certainly much of it is not appropriate to a young mind, I'm convinced that an average teenager who's been taught the language from an early age can just simply pretty easily absorb the reading list of one of these majors just for fun in his teenage years.

And while he's not gonna have the discussion and the argument and whatnot in a college classroom and probably not appreciate all of the piercing insights that you could have in analyzing literature at the collegiate level, you can get 80% of the way there to the value of a Japanese language and culture degree just simply through acquiring a language at a young age.

It's a powerful, powerful idea when you understand the math. - Now for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports. Get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3. Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner.

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Most people would agree, absolutely it is. If you're, depending on what language you're talking about, I would say that most people outside of the English world would say it's essential that your child be taught a second language. I don't think there is a wealthy, knowledgeable, educated set of parents out there who, if English is not the native language of their child, does not consider English language acquisition and instruction a high priority for their child's education.

There certainly are, in the English-speaking world, many parents who don't think it's a high priority for their child to learn a second language, but they do think it's a good idea. I wanna now talk about the concept of, is a child better at learning languages? There is, in bringing this subject up, an oft-repeated refrain which simply says, oh, children should learn a second language while they're young because they can just learn it better than when they're older.

I do not believe that myself that this is true, or at least if it is true, I can't find any good data or evidence to back it up. And when we think of the circumstantial evidence that all of us have of observing children acquire languages, I don't think that it bears out the idea that children are better at learning languages.

In fact, I think that adults or motivated young people who are not children are actually better at learning foreign languages because they have a whole set of tools that young children cannot apply. Adults can use tools like self-discipline, focused study, grammar instruction, et cetera, to help them to learn a foreign language much more effectively than children can.

Children basically are wandering around the world sort of kind of understanding at some point, and they don't generally have the motivation, the self-discipline, et cetera, to make fast progress. I think the reason people say that children are better at acquiring languages has more to do with the amount of time that children spend on language acquisition versus adults.

Remember that language acquisition is a function of time, and children have the great benefit that their parents take care of everything for them, and about their only job is to learn languages. I have a baby in the other room, and that baby is sitting either in his mother's arms or in a little carrier or a little seat or something, and all that baby has to do is look around the room and listen to the sounds that are around him and start to decipher them and figure them out.

And for the first couple years of his life, the only thing he will have to do for himself is just sit and listen. And after a couple years, he'll start making a little, you know, some noises and unintelligible, you know, single-word constructions here and there, and then after a few years, he'll start to spontaneously speak in the beginning with many, many mistakes, and in the fullness of time, when he reaches seven, eight, nine, somewhere in there, he'll speak with smooth, sophisticated grammar and start to develop a complex vocabulary.

Takes him many, many years to develop language ability, and that's all he has to do, spending eight, 12, 16 hours a day on this one task. As an adult, when you go to study language, you often have 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, because you've gotta feed and clothe and earn the money and everything that's necessary to support all of those other ones that are depending on you for their language acquisition.

So children spend far more time learning language than adults do, and that's one reason why they seem to be so good at it. The second reason that we consider children to be so good at language is the level of language output that we expect of them is fairly simple and unsophisticated.

As an adult, an educated adult, we consider, we think of language in a very complex ways. Our thoughts are very complex and sophisticated. And so when we wanna speak in a foreign language, we get frustrated if we can't express complex, sophisticated language. Whereas children, their language is generally simple, very repetitive, very action-oriented, et cetera.

It's the simplest form of language. The third thing that I think does come into play, when people talk about children learning languages better, after these factors, I think they're often impressed by the accent that children have. There does seem to be some evidence that children who do not use, who do not listen to certain sounds at a young age, lose the ability to easily hear those sounds if those sounds are not reflected in their mother tongue.

And so it may be the case that adults may not be able to easily hear certain sounds, but that can be trained and improved. But children often don't have a filter. And so when they hear somebody speak in a certain way, they unconsciously acquire that accent. And they sound very native because they don't have a filter.

Whereas adults, we are filled with experiences and prejudices and opinions and whatnot that cause us to be careful and reserved about the accent that we express. We do this in our native language. I would never speak like a New Yorker, right? I would never speak like a Southern redneck.

These accents are repulsive to me. I just don't like them. I don't wanna be associated with them. I don't wanna sound anything like them. And so if all of a sudden I move to the deep South and living out in Hicktown, or if I moved to the Bronx or Brooklyn, I would never sound, no matter how long I lived there, I would never sound fully native because of this prejudice that I have against New Yorkers or against Southern rednecks.

On the other hand, children don't generally have those prejudices. If I moved to the deep South or I moved to Brooklyn, my children would start to unconsciously acquire that local accent because they don't share my cultural prejudices. Well, now bring it over to a foreign language and the same thing happens.

As adults, we often, if we're learning a foreign language that we like, it may be easier to adopt the persona of that culture and really embrace it. But sometimes we're learning a foreign language that we wanna learn the language, but we don't love the culture. And we don't necessarily want to sound exactly like everyone else there sounds.

And so we often have those filters, but children don't have those filters. They just naturally and unconsciously absorb the sounds. And so they can often speak with a more native sounding accent because they fully embrace the culture that is surrounding them. So to conclude this section of when should you do it, when should you teach your children languages, you should teach your children languages earlier, not because it's easier to learn, but because you have the time to help your children launch as adults with a much higher level of fluency than you will have if you wait and wait and wait.

And also because this activity of language acquisition, this is how the child's brain is wired at that early age. It's the most natural thing to do, and that's the time in which it has the lowest opportunity costs. Let's pivot now to why should you learn a foreign language? Why should you teach your children foreign languages?

Because even if you didn't start early, I still think you should start for a number of reasons, not the least of which to grow your children's brains. Let me read you a short excerpt from an article at parents.com recently updated. The benefits of learning a second language as a child.

Raising kids to speak more than one language can offer emotional and academic benefits. Here's how to help your kids pick up another language. I'm going to skip the introductory paragraph and start with the benefits of being a multilingual child. In a study published in January, 2021, in the journal Scientific Reports of 127 adults, two cognitive benefits for early bilinguals, those who learned two languages as children, were identified.

The first was their ability to notice visual changes faster than those who picked up a second language later in life. The other revealed early bilinguals had more control over their ability to shift their attention from one image to another, which may stem from practicing shifting quickly between two languages.

While these are all wonderful perks, there are even more benefits to being bilingual and of course multilingual that experts are still learning about. Encourages empathy. Children who are raised with at least two languages have been found to have greater social understanding, says Oren Boxer, PhD, a neuropsychologist and advisor at BumoBrain, a platform supporting parents looking for options aside from traditional schools.

For example, a 2013 article in Learning Landscapes journal found bilingual kids tend to demonstrate empathy better than their monolingual peers. Specifically, bilingual children were advanced in understanding the following, other perspectives, other thoughts, other desires, other intentions, tone of voice. Part of this strength has to do with a more robust language system that can more readily detect certain features of communications, such as prosody, which is the rhythm of speech and tone of voice, says Dr.

Boxer. It is hypothesized that this developmental experience is different from monolingual children and it facilitates a more robust understanding of another perspective or theory of mind. However, encouraging empathy alone isn't enough to be seen as a benefit. Dr. Boxer says it's important to know how to cope with these empathic feelings and be able to distinguish one's own needs from the needs of others.

Boosts brain function. Being bilingual is good for a child's brain development. Quote, "They are better at planning, problem solving, "concentration, and multitasking," says Kristen Denzer, CEO and founder of Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion education program. Denzer, whose background is in psychology and educational policy, says these cognitive advantages can be seen quite early.

Quote, "Infants immersed in a dual-language environment "have demonstrated their advanced executive functioning "as young as seven months old "when compared to monolingual peers," she says, pointing to a study published in 2009 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. And she says, "These benefits may continue into older age "by preventing brain disorders "that commonly present themselves in the mid-60s." Quote, "Bilingual individuals are even able to ward off "the onset of dementia and Alzheimer's "an extra four years on average "compared with those that speak just one language," says Denzer.

That's based on 2017 research in Clinical Interventions in Aging that reviewed bilingualism as a strategy for delaying Alzheimer's disease. I'm gonna skip down, talks about how that's controversial and not unproven. Academic advantage. "Bilingual children may also have an advantage in school, "including with literacy." Quote, "Studies have shown "that when a child learns a second language," says Denzer, "they show accelerated progress when learning to read "compared with monolingual peers." Denzer refers to a 2000 paper on bilingualism and literacy presented at the Research Symposium on High Standards in Reading for students from diverse language groups in Washington, D.C., which explains that bilingualism provides children with heightened skills necessary for literacy.

According to 2021 research in Frontiers in Psychology, learning two languages at an early age may reduce proficiency in a dominant language. However, earlier studies also show literacy benefits, including bilingual children's better performance than monolingual children on metalinguistic awareness tests and acquisition of new words. Goes on, talks about other academic advantages.

The point is, when you learn two languages or more, there's good evidence that you become smarter. You become better at academics. Your cognitive functioning is enhanced, possibly even on a physical level, possibly even such that you can stave off Alzheimer's for an extended period of time. To cite that argument, I turn to chapter 18 of a book called "America's Bilingual Century, How Americans Are Giving the Gift of Bilingualism to Themselves, Their Loved Ones, and Their Country." Author is Steve Levine.

This book was published in the last year or so. "Giving the Gift to Our Loved Ones. For the first half of the 20th century in America, bilingualism was thought to be bad for children. In 1939, the same year the New York World's Fair debuted its City of Tomorrow and the first demonstration of television, an American psychologist named Medora Smith published a study of bilingual children in Hawaii.

She concluded that bilingualism caused a retardation of language development that could be counted in years compared with monolingual children. Her study presented lots of data. In fact, it was a quote, "monument to quantification," according to the linguist Kenji Hakuta. The take-home message was that bilingualism in American children, whether arising from native languages or immigrants' languages, was something like a medical ailment that needed to be cured by an inoculation of modern monolingual English language education.

Not until 1962 did two Canadian researchers, Elizabeth Peale and Wallace Lambert of McGill University, challenge this view. They studied 10-year-old children in Montreal and, unlike prior studies, carefully controlled the selection of samples. Their results turned a half-century of studies upside down. The bilingual children outperformed the monolingual kids in verbal and nonverbal intelligence tests.

It was a watershed moment. Lambert summed up the science that existed in the first half of the 20th century, quote, "Earlier studies over a 50-year period "had concluded strongly in favor of monolinguals "because, it turns out, they had not matched "bilingual and monolingual groups "on factors such as social class background, "nor had they measured the bilinguality "of those presumed to be bilingual." Bilingualism begets brainpower.

Social science, like all science, progresses in a fitful, uneven manner toward becoming less wrong about the world. After Peale and Lambert, scientists around the world began careful studies trying to parse out cognitive differences that might exist between bilingual and monolingual children. They have continued to find advantages for bilinguals having to do with their thinking, creative abilities, and empathy.

Also, scientists have found that being bilingual may help with the acquisition of additional languages. Any delay among bilingual children in learning one language over the other appears to be temporary, while their total vocabularies are greater than those of monolingual children. At the other end of the age continuum, another Canadian research psychologist, Ellen Bialystock, has found mental health advantages in bilingual older adults.

They appear to have an improved cognitive reserve, resulting in a later onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer's by approximately four years. Adding to these mental health benefits are economic reports that show measurable benefits to bilinguals in landing jobs, earning more money, and advancing in their careers. Other studies show that these individual successes stack up to societal economic advantages as well.

In the words of the polyglot author Gaston Doran, "The benefits of bilingualism have, in recent years, "been piling up like laundry." If you're interested in that book, it's called "America's Bilingual Century." It's an okay book. I won't say it's bad, it's okay. It just didn't floor me, but it's a good, useful discussion of the value and the benefits of bilingualism and multilingualism.

When you can speak multiple languages, you become smarter. You get more brain function, your brain fires more, more indifferently, you get more creativity in your thoughts, and you get better test results. To the extent that tests are effective at measuring intelligence, you get better test results. One set of data that is interesting on this topic to look at are SAT scores for students who study languages.

You can find these easily online if you just search SAT scores. Usually, you find this trumpeted by the proponents of teaching Latin, because in general, those who study Latin have the highest SAT scores. If you look at all the different languages, students of Latin have the highest SAT scores.

Now, I don't know if this study has been done by somebody who has compared the social class of those who study Latin and their SAT scores. I don't know if Latin is causal to their SAT score maximization, or if it's correlated to their, I have no idea. I assume it's both, it's probably both, that smart students study Latin, and students who study Latin become smart.

The trick is, I don't know where you get on that trick, get on that trend, other than just to start, and become smarter by studying Latin, and then study Latin because you're smarter. What's interesting is, while Latin is always the highest, Hebrew is often, students who study Hebrew is often the second highest, then French and German sometimes take the place for third, and then Spanish is always kind of the lowest of the class languages in terms of impact on SAT scores.

But what is interesting is that even Spanish, as the least effective of the languages to raise SAT scores, has a dramatic increase in SAT scores of those who study Spanish, as compared to students who don't study a foreign language. And so, studying foreign languages improves your test results, it genuinely does.

It allows you to look at the world more creatively. One thing you learn when studying foreign languages is how you can't express the same thought in all languages. And so you start to look at the world, and realize that your vision of the world, the way you look at the world, is constrained by the language that's in your head.

Your thoughts happen due to language. And if you don't possess, and you are imprisoned to the language that is in your head. And so, I won't belabor the point, but you look at the world more creatively, and in a different way when you speak multiple languages. I think a huge benefit also of teaching your children a second language, is what was alluded to in one of those articles, that once you learn your first second language, you then gain confidence in your ability to learn other languages.

And you become better at it. I am a better learner of languages now, having studied several, than I was when I was studying my first one of Spanish. I observe in my children, that my children are very good at learning languages, much better than I am, because they have now acquired several languages.

And they see things that I don't see. They understand etymology in a way that I don't, they're better at it than I am, because they've done more of it. And also importantly, it opens the world to you. If, especially as a native English speaker, if you're a native English speaker, there's only a small part of the world in which society is genuinely and truly English speaking.

You have basically the United States, Canada, with the exception of the French speaking areas, England, Ireland. And then from there, it's all variations. You can go to areas where there are lots of English spoken, Singapore, Malaysia, many parts of Europe. You can go to the cosmopolitan areas, et cetera.

But it's hard to find, and make sure I'm not missing anybody important, any fully English speaking countries. I'm sure I'm missing a couple, but it's hard to find where the entire society is in English. Rather, you find intense bilingualism of English in many places. But how it happens is, even if there is a high level of bilingualism, and you can get by just fine with English, the world is not nearly as friendly to you if you don't fully understand a local language and a local culture.

And so if you ever decide to move around the world, or you ever want your children to move around the world, just the knowledge and the confidence that comes from having learned another language, to know that, hey, give me a year, give me two years, maybe three, but I can master this language and be fully comfortable and competent in this language in one to three years, that opens up the world to you in a really neat way.

Also importantly, language learning is one of those things where learning just a little bit is still great. You're better off learning a thousand words in a foreign language than learning no words in a foreign language. You're not gonna be fluent or conversant with a thousand word vocabulary. But knowing those thousand words is much better than knowing zero words.

And language learning also is one of those things where it's very hard to get worse at it. It's not impossible. If we don't speak a language on an ongoing basis, our ability to speak and create that language extemporaneously quickly slides away. I think our brain kind of tucks it away and says, "Hey, this is not necessary right now." So you lose the ability just to speak off the cuff unless you're using it constantly.

But it's still not that far away. You can give yourself a couple of days in the country where you're speaking the language and your brain all of a sudden brings all that knowledge to the forefront. And so while it's not totally true, I'm pretty confident making statements like, "You don't get worse.

"You don't get worse. "You might get better very slowly, "but you don't really get worse in a foreign language." And so learning a little bit sets someone up to learn more later and makes it easier in the fullness of time to do it. Finally, why should you do it?

If you believe that there's no benefit to learning a foreign language, I would just submit to you that it's still a major factor at some of the most elite universities and schools that you can find. Recently, I was studying all the information I could find from Eton College in England.

Eton College is kind of the classic, one of the classic, I don't know if it's the most elite, but one of the classic elite private prep boarding schools for boys in England. I think it was started in the 1400s. This is incredible long history, all the sons of kings and princes and all the hoity-toity who go to Eton College.

So I was looking through their promotional materials and trying to understand what their biases and what their, not biases, just their framework, their concepts of education are. How do they do it at an elite college, boys college, high school, for high school students. And I was just interested to see that every student who goes to Eton College is required to study English, is also required to study Latin, is also required to study two different modern foreign languages, and then some additionally have the option if they want to study ancient Greek.

So at a minimum, every student who attends Eton College will have studied four distinct languages, English, Latin, and two other foreign languages. I doubt that their students achieve high levels of proficiency. I don't know. But they have the same problem with the amount of time available that we previously discussed.

But they still consider it to be important. And I think there are various reasons for it. (upbeat music) - California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaba Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas.

Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaba.com/palms to discover more. - Let's assume that you're persuaded at this point in time. Let's go on to what language should you teach and how do you do it? What are some techniques that can work for it? So let's start with what language should you teach?

Well, first, I think the obvious one is if English is not your native language, then you certainly should teach English. English is the dominant lingua franca of the world today. It is likely to be the dominant lingua franca of the world for a significant period of time. I don't currently see where the competitor to English as the world's lingua franca would come from.

That's not to say it still will be the case in 300 years, but at the moment, it's not evident to me where a competitor to English would come from. And I think that English, while it has its own set of difficulties that make it in some ways a difficult language, I think there is a whole opposite set of arguments as to how easy English is to learn and how flexible it is.

And so there are multiple reasons why English is becoming and is, sorry, is the world's lingua franca. And those are not all having to do with jobs, business, economics, the power of the United States as the world's lone superpower, being an English-speaking nation, et cetera. But there are other basic factors of the English language that make it very flexible and very useful.

English is the world's most spoken, most studied foreign language. And it is, well, not the world's most spoken language with number of native speakers. It is basically the world's most spoken language today. There's different ways you can slice those charts, but English is the language that, if it's not your native language, needs to be the first one.

Also, English is the world's language with the largest vocabulary at this point in time and the fastest growing vocabulary of any language in the world. And so studying English should be clearly the first priority. And helping your children to achieve a very, very high level of English should be your first priority.

That is the clear winner as to what language should you teach. What about more than that? Well, any other language that you wanna teach is perfectly good. So if you have a language that you're connected to for some reason, or that's important to you, then teach that language. I think you can look at this practically.

I think the most practical language to teach for me and for many of my US American listening audience is the language of Spanish. My arguments are a fewfold. Number one, for Americans, Spanish is the most dominant second language other than English at the moment. The United States, I haven't checked this data in a few years, could be out of date, but as of last time I checked, the United States was the fourth most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world.

And the United States is predicted to be the second most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world in the year 2050. The first, the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world today, as well as in 2050, is the immediate neighbor of the United States, which is Mexico. And if you look at most of the neighbors of the United States, Spanish is the dominant language.

It's the dominant language of the islands of the Caribbean. It's the dominant language of Central and South America, with the exception of the Portuguese in Brazil and the French-speaking communities in Quebec, Spanish is the most dominant language. When you look at the number of countries that you could travel to, work in, et cetera, that share one language, Spanish is, I think, the leading language in that regard as well, in terms of the official language of a larger number of countries.

And the population of many of those countries is very, very high. The population of Latin America, South America, et cetera, is very high. And because this is a continent that is united by a few basic languages, Spanish is just a wonderfully useful language. In addition, Spanish has the benefit of being exceedingly easy to learn.

Every language has its own quirks, but Spanish is easy to learn. The first thing that makes it easy to learn for English speakers is, excuse me, is its close connection to English that shares lots and lots of cognates. Cognates are words that are connected, or excuse me, that sound the same in both languages.

And Spanish and English have lots and lots of cognates. So you could have computer, right, or in Spanish, computadora. There are many, many versions of that that exist. This is because of the Latin origins of much of the English language as well as the Spanish language. And so Spanish also is easy to learn because there are lots of wonderful materials available for it.

A language that doesn't have a lot of great learner's materials is hard to learn, but a language that has lots of materials is easy to learn. And for an English speaker, the world of language learning materials in Spanish is just, it's top notch. And you have lots of people with whom you can speak it.

It can be difficult to learn a language when you don't have anyone to speak it with and practice it with and listen to it. But across the United States and in many parts of the world, of course today, anywhere in the world with internet radio, but across the United States, you can find a Spanish-speaking radio station on your local dial.

You can find lots of Spanish speakers with whom you can interact. It's just an easy language to learn. And it's fairly straightforward, great simple pronunciation system and very, very simple and straightforward language. So I think Spanish should be the, is the obvious first language to learn. From there, in terms of practicality, you can go to any language that would fit where you would desire to live or what you would want to do.

In a Western tradition from Western Europe, from the Western world, the European languages make a lot of sense. And so after Spanish, French is pretty easy. And so what I did was I taught Spanish and then French because French language structure is very analogous to and comparable with Spanish.

And yet the vocabulary of French is very highly known between English and Spanish. A huge portion of English vocabulary comes directly from the French language. And because much of that is descended from Latin, you have a close connection between the, you have just a massive leg up on ability to read the language, understand it, et cetera.

So after you learn Spanish, it's pretty easy to learn French. From there, you could continue with kind of the classic European trio of adding in German. I think German makes a lot of sense for English speakers because while it's not all that significant of a language in the world today, it was formerly a very important language in scholarship, et cetera, but Germany has faded in many ways from global significance.

But still English is a Germanic language with a Latin vocabulary. And so there's a close correlation between English and German, a lot of connections, and it can be a useful language. The language that I find most useful traveling around the world is often German because the Germans are committed travelers.

You meet lots of wonderful Aussies and Kiwis and Brits and whatnot, but you're very likely to meet Germans in many corners of the world. And so I enjoy that as a traveling language. So then if you want to go further as with English being your dominant, the final languages that you could discuss would be Latin and Greek, kind of the classic languages.

Why? Well, if you look at English vocabulary, 26% of English vocabulary comes from the Germanic head language, or let's just call it German. So 26% of English language is Saxon or German. 29% of the English vocabulary comes directly from French and 29% comes from Latin. So total of about 60% of English vocabulary is coming from the Romance languages, which is why there's so many connections between Spanish, French, English, Latin, et cetera.

Then you have 6% of the English vocabulary that comes from Greek. And so you could look at those classical languages. I think classical languages are really interesting and useful. We're in a classical language phase in our family now. So I introduced Latin a while back and then we've recently started on Ancient Greek.

And these languages are important to me, not necessarily because they're classical languages. Latin is not super important to me, but after you speak the other Romance languages, Latin is pretty simple and straightforward. So I figure, it's simple and easy, a few hundred hours, let's toss it in. But with regard to Greek, then we get to the heritage languages or religious languages that are important to me.

So of course, the Christian, the New Testament was written in Greek, in Koine Greek, and the Old Testament was written in Ancient Hebrew. And so I think religious languages are really useful and valuable. I think that if you're looking for, if you're from the Christian world, I think learning Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew should be at the top of your list in terms of languages to study.

This is one thing that I actually admire deeply about the Muslims. Muslims have a strong commitment to Arabic and many, many Muslims all around the world study Arabic because of it being the language in which the Quran was written and delivered. And I think that's a really healthy kind of religious trend.

And in many cases, Muslims put Christians to shame on that topic. And I think that you should consider if there's a religious language that's important to you, I think that has a huge level of value. Then also consider heritage languages, things that reflect your culture, cultural significance that you would like to keep alive.

And then you can argue about the classical language. I'm gonna save the classical languages for another time. The key thing is once you've learned a second language, then the whole process becomes a lot less daunting and your confidence grows. So in my story, if we went back four years, ago we were a monolingual family and I had zero confidence in my ability to teach or even to acquire for myself another foreign language.

Fast forward four years later, and again, I'm not being cagey with describing things. It's just that each child is different. I have five children. And so I'm trying to be accurate with my comments, but also realistic with the fact that all the children are at different levels. And my older children are far ahead of my younger children, et cetera.

But since then we have made tremendous strides. And at this point in time, I'm seeking to homeschool my children with fully integrated of four languages, English, Spanish, French, and German. And then we're doing quite a lot of Latin reading and we've just started ancient Greek. So possibly in a couple of years, then Greek and Latin will be a bigger component of our curriculum.

But we're doing homeschooling completely in those four languages. Every day, using all the languages and not just studying them as languages, but simply using them as a tool for acquiring knowledge, speaking them whenever possible, et cetera. And so that confidence has grown with each language. And today I have full confidence that not only can I myself learn, but I can teach any language to my children that were motivated to teach.

And so it becomes a matter of, are we willing to put in the time? Is there a reason for it? And is this the highest and best use of the time? Think back to what I said about a 16 year old. I don't think that acquiring languages is always the best thing for a 16 year old to do.

Maybe a healthy activity, but it's not the most important thing. But for young children, it is very healthy and there's not a high opportunity cost for it. And once you get past the first few hundred hours of language study, where you're studying the language as a language, and you just get into the point of using the language as a normal part of life, you get to the point where you can watch a movie and just enjoy the movie with subtitles on, read a book and just enjoy the book for its own sake.

That's the magic point, because then it just becomes part of the lifestyle that yes, I use this language, but I use it for enjoyment, for life. And the fact that I'm getting better at it is a useful add-on. We now turn to how to do it. How do you actually do it?

Well, there are many ways, and I'm not sure that one way is necessarily better than another. I'm a little jealous of that Canadian guy who speaks Mandarin and has a Japanese wife, and a little jealous of that. But I don't have any of those things. If you do have those things, meaning if you do have that linguistic background, the first thing is use what you have.

If you and your wife or your mother or someone speaks a heritage language, just use it. There are so many people who don't use their family languages. And in today's world, if we went back in the United States 100 years, there was a strong push to get everyone to be English-speaking.

And that was seen as kind of the part of the cultural fabric of the United States, and so when you moved to the United States, you stopped speaking Norwegian and you spoke English, and you didn't try to teach it to your children, et cetera. In today's world, I think people appreciate more of the benefits of multilingualism.

And I think that you certainly should teach your children the language of the country that you live in, so you gotta teach English. But maintaining that cultural language is such a benefit to your children. It opens up doors for them, and again, all the benefits we've already discussed. So just use it.

Use the heritage language that you have. Now, one reason many people don't do this is they often feel insecure. This was the case with me, with my own Spanish ability. When we had our first babies, my wife and I talked about, should we try to teach our children Spanish?

Should one of us just speak in Spanish to them all the time? And we decided that I couldn't do it. My Spanish wasn't good enough, and I was worried about teaching them poorly, et cetera, and it just wasn't working. I didn't think I could do it. Today, what I would say to myself, if I were coaching myself back then, would be, all right, Joshua, you may not be able to do it really well, but you don't have to do it really well.

All you have to do is get the basics done. And so if you speak a basic level of Spanish, or if you speak a basic level of Norwegian, because your grandmother taught it to you, just use some of it to help your child to get started and then supplement with all of the normal native language resources that are at your fingertips.

And if you can just give the basics, right, even a thousand words, and you get a thousand words to your child that you know, the basic thousand words, and then you fill the house with Norwegian picture books, and you watch Norwegian movies, and you go to Norway, et cetera, then your children can do the rest of the hard work themselves.

And so that's how I see it now, is that my job is basically to introduce the languages and introduce the materials, and then in the fullness of time, they'll just absorb the materials, and the materials is what teaches them the language. So when I teach my children languages that I don't speak well, I don't worry too much about the fact that I make tons of pronunciation mistakes and accent mistakes, et cetera, because I know that I'm not ultimately gonna teach them the language.

My job is just to get them started in it, and then they're gonna learn their accent from a professional audio book narrator. I just gotta buy the books and then make them listen to them. And they'll learn their accent from the professionals who have a great accent and who speak with proper grammar, and the professional writers, et cetera.

So my job is to get them started. So if you have a heritage language, use it and just start, and speak to your children in that. This of course leads us to, can you intentionally create a language environment around your children? And the answer is, many people can. All around the world, the elite of the world send their children to private schools, and a key selling point of those private schools, at the minimum, is going to be a bilingual education.

And so this is increasingly happening in English-speaking parts of the world as well. You can find bilingual schools, and so you might enroll your child into a true bilingual school, or trilingual, or more. Again, many schools advertise themselves, and from the very beginning, they work in multiple languages. You can also do this in a homeschool.

One of the things that I have sought to do is to create in our own homeschool some of the major benefits of a school like that. I can't do all of it, but I can do a lot of it. And so we can put books in multiple languages, we can use Khan Academy in multiple languages, we can do all kinds of stuff in multiple languages.

So you may not be able, you have to get your children over that initial hurdle, but then it's just a matter of bringing in the books and the resources and the materials. And if you can cultivate a love of learning in your children, they pretty much teach themselves your native language by reading to themselves.

And so get them started on a little bit of pronunciation, and they'll teach themselves the other languages by reading to themselves as well. If you need to, so if you can't use a school, you may consider doing something like using family help. You may hire a nanny, a maid, an au pair, someone who is gonna be around your house.

You might choose a piano teacher in a foreign language, somebody who's going to interact with your children in a foreign language. These are all good options, it's bringing in professionals that are gonna help you. You may choose to live in a community in which the foreign language is more broadly spoken.

Go to a church where that language is broadly spoken, et cetera, all depends on your level of comfort for it. Or you can just simply use tutors, classes, et cetera. The basic method that I use to teach my children languages is bilingual translation. I read to them in a foreign language and I translate into English.

I use translation tools, primarily my favorite language app, LingQ. I mentioned it a bazillion times, I ought to start getting an affiliate LingQ with them, L-A-N-G-Q, and I use that to read them children's books and whatnot, and I can use the built-in translation function which is basically accessing Google Translate to translate and help me to do it.

You can also use other courses. I prepare audio files for my children of books and stories. That allows me to use translation functions that I can find online and native speakers, and then I just replay those many times until they acquire and learn the knowledge. There's a whole movement of what's dubbed comprehensible input channels for many languages.

So you can go and you can find input and just have your children watch those language learning videos, et cetera. There are many kinds of language acquisition things that you can learn. Most of the adult-focused ones aren't effective with children. So if you get to a 10-year-old, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, you've got the world of Pimsleur and all the wonderful kind of adult language programs.

Those are great, but not for children. They're just too, children aren't that interested. But you can find them good input and they can be interested. And then you can use media. I'm convinced, I've heard enough stories. First of all, if you go around the world and you find somebody who is not a native English speaker, but who speaks English very well, with a very clear and understandable accent, with smooth, with excellent prosody, et cetera, and you ask them how they learned it, 80% of the time, they're gonna say something about, well, I watched a lot of American TV, right?

I watched "Friends" all the time. And all around the world, there are people who just speak perfect English, and they get that way through a lot of media exposure to the English language. The same exact thing works in reverse if you want it to. I've heard plenty of stories, people who, one story that Steven Krashen tells is how he worked with somebody who spoke perfect Mandarin.

And the way he learned Mandarin was they had, his family had a Mandarin-speaking housekeeper that would come to the house to clean the house, and she would put on cartoons in Mandarin for the boy, and the boy wanted to see what was in the cartoons, and eventually he learned Mandarin.

He didn't care about learning Mandarin. He never wanted to learn Mandarin. He never had lessons in Mandarin. He wanted to watch the cartoons, but this happened for years and years. And as an adult, he could go to China, he could speak Mandarin. He couldn't read or write, but he could speak Mandarin.

And then when he left China, he never even thought about Mandarin. It just was there for him because he watched cartoons. And so if you expose your children to enough media, they can learn the language. It'll just happen. It may not happen in the most efficient manner possible, but it will happen in the fullness of time.

And so think back now to some of my harsh and critical comments that I have made in previous episodes when I was talking about the value of literature and words, et cetera, and I was saying how if you want your children to be really good at English, you wanna read to them a lot, you want them to read a lot 'cause that's where they develop their vocabulary and their grammar, and I was saying how it's more efficient, et cetera.

All of the stuff that is a negative with regard to your native language of English now becomes a positive with studying a foreign language. So if you're going to have your children play with apps, if you're gonna stick an iPad in your three-year-old's hand, at least put the iPad in Indonesian.

Your child's gonna figure it out. There's those cool studies where they took, I can't remember who to cite on it, but there was a story where they took a computer and they stuck it in an African village where nobody spoke English and they didn't give any instructions. They just stuck it there and turned it on.

And they came back some months later and the children were learning English. They were accessing all the websites and everything, and they just figured it out. Children figure it out. So just, if you wanna have something fun, just go and take your child's iPad and stick it in Chinese and walk away and don't tell them how to change it back.

And in the fullness of time, they'll figure it out. So you can do this, right? There's an interesting Spanish YouTuber that I watch, and he himself is multilingual. I think he speaks six or seven languages. And he and his wife have this strategy with their daughter. And he speaks Swiss German with his daughter.

His wife speaks Spanish. They speak English with other friends. The cartoons are always in Italian, and the iPad is in Portuguese, something like that. So you can use this in that way. You can also use movies. This is something that I've tested out. For a long time, we did no movies.

And then I started showing my children movies for a variety of reasons. And then I said, instead of just showing the movies in English, why don't I just use this as a foreign language opportunity? And so in the beginning, I would show the movie in English, and then a couple weeks later, we'd repeat the movie, and I'd put it in a foreign language.

And I got a little bit of complaints for the first couple times, and then they just saw that if we're gonna watch a movie, this is the way it is. And so at this point in time, they don't complain about it anymore. If I say we're gonna watch a movie, then they say, oh, great.

And they ask what language it's gonna be in, and I tell them what language. Recently, I have stopped even bothering to show the movie in English the first time around. And I just show it now in foreign languages. And I'm not committed to that all the time, because I think movies are wonderful, right?

It's nice to have things that are in your native language, and really beautiful movies, great. But we often consume a lot of just fluff movies that aren't really great art pieces. They're just filling the time. Might as well put the time to good use. And so I've played around with doing foreign language dubbing and also foreign language subtitles.

I've pretty well settled on that the best solution is to just play it with a foreign language track and play it with English subtitles. There's data that's cited in Jim Trulisa's book called "The Read Aloud Handbook," where he identifies, I think there was research that was done in Finland, where they found that some of the Finnish schoolchildren were advanced readers.

And the reason they figured that was happening is that because the nation was so small and had so little native language content, most of the media that was coming in on the TV station would be in a foreign language, but it would all be subtitled in Finnish. And so the children had lots of chances to improve their reading speed and reading skill by reading subtitles constantly.

And so I think that this can be another tool in your toolbox. Put on the subtitles, and especially what's in a foreign language, the child wants to know what's going on. So the child will read the subtitles, that's improving reading ability, and also will over time be able to understand the foreign language more effectively.

And then even when we come to the topic of books, in my tradition where we talk about Charlotte Mason and living books and whatnot, we use this word twaddle to refer to books that perhaps aren't the highest expression of excellence in that category. They're kind of repetitive or they're kind of amateurish or childish or not super awesome.

But what's interesting is a lot of the twaddle that we would call in our foreign language, the reasons we call it twaddle, it actually becomes a benefit in a foreign language. I think I mixed up my words. The stuff that in our native language, we wouldn't want our children to read because it's just beneath them, in a foreign language now becomes really, really useful.

And so we can take something that is, for example, series books, and just put them in a foreign language. And all that stuff, the simplified vocabulary, the simplified plots, et cetera, that can be a negative to your child achieving a really high level of literacy in his native language, but it's now a positive in the foreign language.

That the repetition or the low level vocabulary is really useful because it makes it easier to learn that foreign language. At its key, you want to measure the number of hours of exposure that your child has. You want to expose your child to comprehensible input, something that they can understand, either through context, through translation, et cetera.

And you want to maximize the number of hours. The way I do it, I don't test my children on their languages. I don't force anything. All I do is try to create the best, compelling, comprehensible input I can have. And then I require them to be exposed to it in moderate amounts.

I don't want to be a hard taskmaster. I don't want to require hours and hours. I don't want to poison the well. And then associate that learning Chinese is something that stinks because it's just hours and hours all day. So I keep it in short little bite-sized segments, stick it in all over the place.

But the goal is just to accumulate those hours. Accumulate those 600 hours, those 1,000 hours, those 2,000 hours, et cetera. You want to just start the clock working towards those hours. And then watch to see kind of what's working, what's not. Find other resources, et cetera. And then when possible, supplement with some form of immersion opportunity.

At the moment, in my home for the last couple of weeks, and this week, I have a German tutor staying with us. My children have been being exposed to German, but they haven't had any chance to speak it. I can't speak it with them. I don't have a good opportunity.

And so I basically have an au pair who's in our home for a few weeks. And it gives an opportunity for German immersion in the home. So we're doing a German intensive. We watch a German movie every night, which helps a lot to have language exposure for my youngest ones who aren't super interested at all in the lessons.

The older ones are doing most of their reading in German, listening in German. And then we have the conversation opportunity. And I've just been amazed that, let me get my timing right, nine months ago, we had no German exposure. And today, my eldest can naturally and fluently converse in a normal way in the German language.

But it came after lots of exposure and then having an activation opportunity, an immersion activation opportunity. I have other podcasts in the backlog where I've talked about methods and in detail. So I'm intentionally avoiding an in-depth conversation here on the methods of language acquisition. I wanna tell you any method can work, just basically exposure.

And there's probably no bad method. It's just a matter of finding things that balance that metric between pleasure and kind of one of the child wanting to do it, not pushing too much, but making sure that there's an exposure and then consistency and diligence over time. If you can repeat the process multiple times, again, over enough days, enough weeks, enough years, you can make tremendous progress and it gets better and better.

Years ago, I remember listening to, who knows, may have been Zig Ziglar or Brian Tracy, some of my motivational speaker heroes. And one of them made a comment and said, how many languages can a child learn? And the answer was, well, as many as you could teach them. And I thought, yeah, that's cool, that's pretty cool.

We should teach our children more. Then I had children and I had no idea how to teach child language. And I just felt like, maybe that was nonsense. So today I have figured out and learned how to teach a child a language. And so what I say is that your child cannot learn as many as you can teach him.

Rather, he can learn as many as you can teach him and have the time to do it. So I think there is probably a pretty obvious cutoff with the number of languages that your child can master and can maintain over time. And I'm gonna guess that that number is somewhere between 10 and 20.

I think 12 is pretty doable. 15 starts to get questionable. Maybe it's as high as 20. But if you look at some of the very experienced, motivated polyglots that are out there, you recognize that it becomes challenging to maintain a huge number of languages to the level that you would like.

There are noted polyglots who have studied 50, 60, 70 languages, proven. Not the old ones where it was just fake, or we didn't have good records, but today, proven. And it's easier to be a polyglot today than it's ever been before because of the modern technologies where we can access these languages, we can access the materials, we can access all this great stuff.

So it's easier today to be a polyglot than it ever was before. But it's hard to keep them all current and to have enough time to invest into all of them. And languages need to be maintained in order to keep them ready and usable. And so I'm gonna guess that the number that you probably couldn't really go beyond it is probably in that range, again, 10 to 20.

And again, not that you can't go beyond it, I think you can, but in terms of a child who may not be motivated. Now, if you have a child who's motivated to be his own polyglot, yeah, you can go ahead and add another 10 on. And just like, think about that Canadian guy who his children from birth are speaking five languages.

If he also embraced other things and added in more languages, he could go a lot farther. But there is a limit. The cool thing is that most of us are nowhere near that limit. I'm not at the limit yet. I'm guessing we've started some of the harder ones. Yes, the classical languages, I started Chinese recently.

And so these are a big time commitment. It's 2200 hours is a lot more time than 600 hours. And so we'll see what happens in the fullness of time. We're not at that limit yet. And I'm guessing that most of us are not. So if you look at what is possible, and then you come back, I hope it can inspire you that it is much more feasible than you might have thought.

If I think back to how hard I thought it was to teach my children Spanish, today I don't think it's hard. And this is where I wanna actually end. One of the things that you need to control for yourself as a parent and also for your children is the beliefs that they have around studying languages.

First, you need to think about your own beliefs. Do you believe that learning a language is hard? I used to believe that. I no longer do. I don't think that learning a language is hard. It's not hard. Your brain is wired to learn language. It's just slower than you would like it to be.

And it's frustrating because you would like to be able to remember that new word you learned the first time you hear it. But realistically, you probably need to hear it 10, 15, 20 times in order to remember it. So if you accept the fact that you need to hear a word 10, 15, 20 times, read a word 10, 15, 20 times, maybe 30 times before you remember it, just recognize it's not hard.

It's just a matter of getting in the reps, getting your way there, working towards it. And so if you think it's hard, you can give that belief to your children. But if you can cut out that belief for yourself, language learning is not hard. You can cut it out for your children.

So I have successfully cut out the belief to my children language learning is hard. It's just something they do. What about language learning is not fun? Well, certainly we can all acknowledge that we all have different definitions of fun. And you may have yours and I may have mine, but I genuinely enjoy it.

I consider it an enjoyable thing to do that is fun in the way that a workout is fun. You go and you lift heavy weights, or you go on a long walk, or you go on a hike, and there's times in it when you're hurting, but you feel good when you're done.

And I think language learning is an appropriate form of mental exercise. If you remember what I said when I talked in the math episode, if we're designing a perfect life, quote unquote, for ourselves and for our children, I think there are some things that are gonna be a part of it.

There's a whole, a perfect day is gonna, a perfect day physically is gonna have high quality food, high quality extended rest. You know, no alarm clocks. You're gonna sleep until you're not tired, and you're gonna wake up, and you're gonna have good sleep. So lots of sleep, good sleep.

High quality food, high quality air, high quality water, clean water, lots of it. You're gonna get lots of sunshine. You're gonna get lots of action, activity, movement. You're gonna sweat. You're gonna work. You're gonna work your heart. You're gonna work your muscles. You might work your balance. You might stretch.

You might, those kinds of things. Or you can go down a list of all the physical things that lead into a perfect day. You can go down then the list of all of the mental things that lead to a perfect day. So you want your brain to work. So a good day is probably gonna include some math, make your brain really, really work, get a good math workout in, work on a hard problem that you don't know how to do.

That's really good. A good day is gonna involve some foreign language study, some vocabulary acquisition, kind of keep that flexibility and plasticity going in your brain. A good day is gonna involve dwelling on some high thoughts, something inspiring, something motivating, a great story, something that inspires you, something that touches your emotions.

A good day is gonna involve some instruction, feeding yourself with useful advice or instruction around some challenge that you're facing. A good day is going to involve a range of emotions, feeling love, feeling joy, feeling laughter, right? Laughing together with those that you love, having jokes, et cetera. These are all components of keeping your mind appropriate.

And then you can explore the spirit, right? The spiritual side of dwelling on something that is beautiful, looking at a beautiful tree, looking at a beautiful landscape, looking at a beautiful piece of art, dwelling on something that touches your soul like music, playing a beautiful song or singing something that is uplifting, dwelling on a beautiful thought, meditating on the person of God or the love of God or the goodness of your neighbor or whatever it is that uplifts you.

And so if you made a checklist of those 10, 15, 20 things and on any given day, you had five, 10, 15 of them done, you get together a long string of good days and you see improvements across all of those factors, physical, mental, spiritual improvements. I think that's the basic outline for children.

That's how their life should be. We have physical, mental and spiritual nourishment on a daily basis. And we build an environment in which their bodies are stretched and recovered, meaning they're nourished with rest and they're stretched with activity, where their brains are nourished with rest and they're stretched with activity and their spirits are nourished with rest and they're stretched with activity.

And that process is very, that's what it means to be human, that sense of growth. And so languages are a tool in the toolbox to stretch your brain, make you smarter, make your children smarter. They're not hard, no language is hard. It may be dissimilar, right? A language like Chinese is not hard, it's just dissimilar.

Every language has its complex things. Spanish is a crazy easy language to learn, but to learn it well, you have to learn these complex conjugations, which are often challenging for non-native Spanish speakers, but they're not hard. You get used to them over time and then they tend to flow fairly naturally, but they're just dissimilar.

Same thing with Chinese. Chinese has things that are dissimilar from English, the tonal system, the characters, but it doesn't have a whole bunch of those challenging features of Spanish. It doesn't have the complex conjugation charts, et cetera. Even if you get into the complex languages and the declension tables of Latin and Greek, et cetera, they're not hard, they're just dissimilar.

And it takes time. And if you can build pleasure into the routine, then it can be part of it. And then back to kind of what your children say or what your children think. One of the things that I try to do is I try to control the environment of my children and brainwash them for positive thinking.

So when I first set out on this three and a half years ago, I decided I was gonna do it. We started to teach Spanish. And then I thought, and as I researched and researched and researched, and I realized that my vision was so low, then I found examples of people who had succeeded at a very high level.

I found, I've forgotten her name, Bella, I think, the little Russian girl that, you know, there's this great clip of her speaking seven languages on national TV. I recounted the stories of various polyglots who speak 15, 20 languages. And so when you surround yourself with that, you recognize, wow, to learn two or three languages is not that difficult.

And then I try to cut out all the negative influence. I surround them with people who are multilingual. Just talk about multilingual. Look, this person over here speaks four languages. Very natural. And in fact, that was the other point I wanted to make is that on the whole, multilingualism is something that is very natural and normal for human beings.

All around the world, there are societies in which it's completely normal and expected that you speak three, four, five, or more languages. These are distinct languages. You can find this in various tribal regions that going back many, many thousands of years, this just intense multilingualism, and even today. So the concept of being monolingual is much more unusual as a modern aberration than the concept of being multilingual.

So just don't buy the lies. And even if you're not quite sure, it's very healthy for you to adopt a mindset where this isn't hard. This is totally doable. Learning a language is not hard. It's just dissimilar. It just takes time. I just need to get my thousand hours done.

And when I get my thousand hours done, we're good. And so what can I do in those thousand hours that I'm gonna really enjoy? What can I, how can I do this where I'm enjoying the act of doing it? This is on every level. People who work a lot, they find pleasure in their work.

People who work out a lot, they find pleasure in working out. And so we look to see how is this pleasurable and then that affects our results. And we should give that to our children. So in the same way I talked about exercise, that I don't want my children to ever think that exercise is a punishment, but rather the joy of exercise is the joy of exercise.

It feels good to take your shoes off and run across the yard in the sunshine. It feels good. Every child naturally does that. So I don't wanna turn that into something that is a work that has to be done and it's somehow a penalty. I want it to always feel good and I wanna nurture that.

It feels good to learn your first language. Babies love it and they just naturally learn it. And in the same way, it feels good to learn the second language and the third language, et cetera. And as you start to get that positive feedback of that, to be able to talk with more people, to be able to absorb more literature, you get the admiration of other people, it becomes a virtuous cycle that continues itself.

And so all of these things that we want our children to acquire, it feels good to do them. And I just think we should be careful about introducing negative emotional baggage when it's just not necessary. If you reinterpret sensations in a different way, it can help with a completely different mindset.

I wanna give one more example 'cause I think this is a powerful example. Recently on a Q&A show, someone was asking about pregnancy and I was describing the basic mechanics of childbirth. And my wife and I came up with a concept that we found really helpful, she found helpful, we found it, I think it's helpful, but I haven't ever given birth, of course.

But we came up with a concept that we found really helpful is that once we understood, with our first baby, once we understood the basic mechanics of childbirth, what is labor, what is a contraction, et cetera, we just talked about it in the context of reworking it in the context of a muscular experience.

We had been raised, like most people, our only experience of childbirth is watching some random TV program of a woman lying on her back screaming her head off. And this puts all these images in your mind. But what's interesting is people scream their heads off in all kinds of circumstances, but it's very different.

And so we came to talk about childbirth and contractions as kind of like a heavy workout. And you know when you go in the gym and you lift heavy weights, it hurts, right? Your muscles scream and it hurts. Or if you find some weightlifter, go find a video of Ronnie Coleman working out and it hurts and he's screaming, it hurts.

But because there's a context for the pain, you understand that this is a muscular pain that's gonna go away soon, your brain has a way to deal with it that's very healthy. And people that go to the gym all the time, they get addicted to the pain. They don't like the pain, they like the results.

And so when we kind of talked about the muscular experience of childbirth in that way, it doesn't diminish necessarily the pain, although there's things you can do to diminish the pain, but it reinterprets it. And so I try to talk with my children about this with regard to doing hard things, math, language study, writing, whatever the hard thing is, that we do these hard things because it helps us to get stronger.

And this is pleasurable because it's a growth opportunity to allows us to grow as humans. So language learning is not hard, you're wired for it. We do it naturally and easily, every baby around the world does it. It's just time consuming. And it's hard to sometimes to accumulate the materials that you're gonna connect with.

And sometimes it's boring. It's boring for a few hundred hours till you can get to your native level materials, but it's not hard. So if you're interested in teaching your children to be multilingual, just recognize you can do it. There's lots of ways to do it. The most important thing is not the method.

The most important thing is the desire and having the sufficient time. So start early and go from there. It's only hard the first time, it's only hard until you do it. Once you do it, you look back and you say, that was easy, but it's hard until you do it.

So press through and do it. Things you can spend money on here, obviously you can spend money on courses, you can spend money on materials, you can spend money on tutors, you can spend money on schools. All of those are good and useful things to spend money on. I productively spend, I would estimate, I had to go back and check my records, but probably a few hundred dollars a month, varying obviously depending on if I've got a tutor in the home or if I'm buying a bunch of books or if I have courses, I have some app subscriptions and courses, et cetera.

But it's definitely easy to spend a few hundred dollars a month very productively. But the key is not always the money, it is the time. So recognize that. Thanks for listening, I'll be back with you very soon. - It's the gentle warmth of the Northeast Florida sun and the whisper of an ocean breeze along 13 miles of quiet beaches.

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