[SOLAR_FIELDS]

I was having a related discussion with my wife about why our nephews weren’t taught Spanish as a first language (we live in Texas, their dad is bilingual). Frankly, having English as your first language gives you a much higher advantage in life in the current zeitgeist. There’s no incentive to learn RandomLanguage first, but there is every incentive to learn English first.

[denimnerd42]

I'm not really sure that's how it ends up working in reality though if you have exposure to English through school or childcare. We taught our kid Chinese first. He's now 2, almost 3, but he's equally good in both languages, maybe a little better in English at this point since he goes to school every day. So by 3 years old he's just as good or better than his peers in English but also is a native speaker in another language. I can see how a parent might think they are putting their kid at a disadvantage by not concentrating on English but language just comes so naturally to these young children.

[satvikpendem]

Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits. I speak both my native language and English at native levels, simply because I learned my language at home and English in school. Only teaching English is really a waste when you live in an English speaking country, as the child will automatically pick up English through school and friends.

[Dalewyn]

>Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.

More to the point: Speaking multiple languages expands your ability to express and describe everything, which leads to having more variety in your lines of thought. Different languages have different ways of thinking, thus speaking multiple languages nurtures an open mind.

Source: Me, native English and Japanese speaker.

[thequadehunter]

Same. I've immersed in Japanese for 10+ years and lived in the country. I grew up monolingual, and after that experience I felt like my brain "expanded". I think being able to understand concepts that didn't even exist to me before did that.

For example, I remember after finding out what "tsukkomi" and "boke" are in Manzai I started seeing it play itself out in English conversations with my friends. It's kind of weird seeing a concept play out that was there the whole time, but you re-shaped your thinking to observe and categorize it.

[dctoedt]

> Nope, learning multiple languages from the beginning has been shown to have many benefits.

Anecdata: I'm a native English speaker but as a little kid I was completely bilingual in French (dad was a USAF officer stationed at a NATO base in rural France; my sisters and I did our first few years of school in the local village schools). I've long had the impression that native fluency in both languages had benefits; it certainly gave me easy A+ grades in high-school and college French classes, but otherwise I couldn't begin to articulate what those benefits might be.

These days my French is pretty rudimentary, but my wife and I like to watch some English-subtitled French TV series on Netflix and Acorn, e.g., Call My Agent, Candice Renoir, and Munch; it's fun to recognize idioms and sometimes not even need the subtitles.

[thequadehunter]

I disagree. I learned Japanese to a fluent level as an adult and it gave me a whole new world of perspective. Knowing how many thousands of hours that took me, it would have been great to get that perk for free.

Besides, my mom speaks only English anyways. I don't know any bilingual kids I grew up with that ended up having a hard time with English.

[watwut]

You can have two first languages. A kid is able to grow up multilingual.