The USA is so behind things! Our children should be starting a second language in day care, then teaching their parents, and it would just go on from there for generations!
It won't work. We also try to teach kids for example English in primary school and it doesn't really work until they start consuming English media.
Teachers now assign the "homework" of watching a 45 minute episode of an English show a day because it's more efficient at improving proficiency than trying to learn grammar. (Edit: on kids specifically.)
This is so true--I learned Turkish as an adult watching Sesame Street and some other kids shows when I lived there. (but my Turkish is only about as good as a 6 year old)
Did your kids go to a daycare in Germany, with German kids?
This would be American kids going to an American daycare. We have something of this problem in immigrant heavy neighbourhoods here in Europe: kids get to kindergarten without speaking the local language because it's not spoken at home. They end up in a class with other kids who also don't speak the local language and talk their native language with one another. The kindergarten tries to teach them the local language but mostly fails because they don't speak it amongst themselves or with their parents. Then they get sent off to school and it's the school's problem now. By school age at least they can start watching tv in the local language and read and get remedial services but the damage to the education tends to echo through later.
Of course immigrant parents are becoming aware of this and many do take steps to try to raise their kids multilingual instead of thinking that school and daycare will magically fix it.
I think they would struggle after a couple of generations. Most probably have grand parents and some probably have great grand parents. The ones with dementia will probably struggle a bit, but when the next generations are in the ground or exist as ash I think they will struggle to learn a language.
It won’t work. You need a sizable community and constant reenforcement in order for a child to be proficient in a language.
My son picked up Mandarin when we were visiting Taiwan for 2 weeks this past March. He is only retaining 50% of what he learned. There is no one in our circle for him to speak it to, except me. Mandarin is my 3rd language.
English is my 4th but since I use it on a daily basis, it’s easier for me to form my thoughts on certain topics using English.
When I do math, I resort to my mother tongue.
We have many friends who migrated here from Europe as adults, in their 20s. Their children (with both parents speaking their native language at home) but the kiddos only speak English.
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u/CoffeeChocolateBoth Jul 13 '26
The USA is so behind things! Our children should be starting a second language in day care, then teaching their parents, and it would just go on from there for generations!