I’m part of the problem here. My kids will never learn my first language. English has become the language of technology, and will probably become even more dominant as a result.
How old are your kids? The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time. The brain does the rest. You don't have to "teach" them anything.
It's not that simple. Kids learn language from their peers just as much as (maybe more than) from their parents.
I'm living in the US: I always speak Korean to my teen kids and they mostly answer in Korean, so they have no problem understanding phrases like "When is dinner today?" However, because they've never been to school in Korea, they basically have zero knowledge of Korean words for, say, "descendant", "ambassador", or "independence", while being totally familiar with their English counterparts.
OP is talking about how if kids learn to be bilingual+ at an early enough age then it makes learning languages that much more easier. This is compared to people who speak one language and try to acquire a second but start in, for example, middle school or later. People in the second boat are at a significant disadvantage. It's a well-studied area and one way of picking up second languages earlier is via peers at an early age as well.
It doesn't mean your points are invalid, but in general people like your kids are just going to be way better at learning language.
IMHO, it's almost cruel that many colleges expect all students to fulfill a 2 year foreign language requirement, even if they have no prior exposure or education. You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time, in addition to making their education more expensive.
> You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time
I agree it might often be a failure, in say, achieving fluency. But certainly no a waste. Exposure to foreign languages, and their cultural contexts, can be very enriching, especially the more distant they are from your own culture and language family. And the contrast with your own language and culture can teach you much about your own.
This is a common argument but it completely ignores any idea of efficiency in learning or learning outcomes that benefit the student.
Most people would get way more out of studying a culture and its context by directly studying that and in way less time. This time saved one could spend as 4 semesters of specialized cultural studies, one full cultural study abroad semester, or learning about other things (comparative linguistics?).
There's also the idea that you can only fully appreciate works of literature in their original language, but learning Russian to appreciate Dostoevsky is overkill and many people love his work who don't know the language. Learning about other cultures in translation is arguably going to be superior since any translation you can do is with skills way below fluency.
> The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time.
No need for them to be babies. That will work as long as they're younger than 12, and probably for a few years after. But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
> But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
The way to fix this is to find them things that only exist in that language and not in English. It could be other family members, friends, TV, music, time abroad, etc.
Kids, like adults, need motivation as the primary factor that determines success learning a language.
Why not speak to them in both? If they're near adulthood already it might be too late, but if they're young kids are basically sponges for languages. And growing up bilingual makes it much, much easier for them to learn a third language down the line if they ever want to.
Speaking to them in your native tongue isn't going to make them worse at English if they're growing up in an English-speaking environment.
My father's parents were immigrants and they spoke their native language to each other, but they didn't want their kids to learn it. I've tested my father and he has about a 5000 word vocabulary, pretty good for someone whose parents didn't want him to learn it!
Kids have an incredible ability to learn languages, given motivation, and they don't need to go to school to learn words like "accountant" reading books will do.
The reasons are non-linguistic - I emigrated partly to get away from the culture of my birth. I want to heavily curate my kids’ experience of that culture and teaching them the language isn’t going to help that.
To me, giving your children a second language is an incredible gift. Setting the pathways in the brain that separate concepts from the written and spoken representation, the abstractions of different grammars, etc, is very valuable. And something that I have really valued as I grew older.
But I (superficially, of course) understand perhaps why you'd like curate their experience of something you took fairly extreme steps to escape. That might well be the greater gift.
Appreciate your perspective -- thanks for sharing.
