[e63f67dd-065b]

It seems very cruel to the child to force bilingualism for the sake of being bilingual. I was raised speaking 5(!) languages, and over time that has attritioned into speaking only 3, but each language had its purpose: mainly in speaking to a different group of people in my home country, for official documents, or was the language on all the interesting TV shows.

The hard part about a new language, if you intuitively understand the grammar, is vocabulary. The author himself admits that his own vocabulary is not expansive enough, foisting than upon a child can't possibly help. The inability to have deep conversations is deeply harmful: there are many Chinese couples in my home country that raised their children only on English, much to the detriment of their Chinese/Hokkien/Cantonese, and the parent and child are now unable to hold deep conversations about important topics, which led to big disconnects in familial relationships.

I don't think that this will cause long-term harm, but I do think it's a massive waste of time.

There is this obsession with language learning that I've never quite understood in the US. The supposed cognitive benefits have, to the best of my knowledge, mostly failed to replicate, so it only lives on as a popular myth.

[zolbrek]

I agree, it seems artificial to me. My daughter is bilingual but that's because her mother is German and we live in Germany. When we're all together we speak English, when my daughter and I are alone we speak English, and when I'm not around they speak German. When we're around Germans we speak German. That's how things just naturally unfolded. If our daughter replies in German during an English conversation we don't force her to speak English.