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immersed in it. Dual-track education for a couple years might benefit older children with
the transition to a new language, but it seems completely counter-productive for those in
the early grades.
Our kids soaked up the language like sponges along with all of the mind-boggling forms of
Italian verbs in different tenses and moods. “Maria was supposed to tell her that I couldn't
come. I would've called her if I had known that Maria hadn't told her.” As a grown-up,
when you try to say something like that in a foreign language, you start reaching slowly
and painfully for third person singular forms of the imperfect and subjunctive, and you still
probably botch it. Then you watch your kids rattle it off effortlessly without having any
idea of what a dazzling feat of grammatical showmanship they have just performed. And
they do it all with a flawless accent and with all of the intricate rhythms and cadences of
the local dialect. It's really unfair.
What caught us by surprise was the speed with which Italian became our children's dom-
inant language. After only a few months of attending public school in Italy, our younger
daughter, Emma, came home for lunch one day mildly agitated. She was eager to tell us
about something that happened at school, and she started telling us the story in Italian at
a breakneck pace. We asked her to slow down and tell us in English what had happened.
She looked at us with dismay and lamented: “But it didn't happen in English!” We laughed
about it, but we suddenly realized that her Italian would take care of itself. It was her com-
mand of English that would need to be nurtured and developed.
There seems to be a window that closes when children are about nine or ten years old; if
they absorb the language before then, they will speak flawlessly without an accent. After
that,rarely.AnarticleIrememberreadingaboutstudiesofbrainactivitynotedthatapartic-
ular sector of the brain was always used for storing the mother tongue, while other sectors
were used for languages acquired later in life. If two or three languages are learned in the
early years of life, they are all stored together in the “mother-tongue sector” while those
learned later on are always stored somewhere else in the outer reaches of the brain.
***
I grew up hearing various languages spoken all around me which, I suspect, really helped
me with later language acquisition. My wife, Pam, on the other hand, grew up in Oklahoma
where English was the only language anyone ever heard or spoke, and foreign language
study was optional in high school. Although she was a top student and graduated second in
her class, her semester of French didn't make much of a dent, and in learning Italian she
was starting from square one.
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