Bilingual Kid Envy
My kids have a lot of compelling features—plenty of bells and whistles—but, sadly, bilingualism is not one of them.
Neither of their parents, unfortunately, hail from lands more exotic than Minneapolis suburbs, so all they could get from us was Fargo-esque pronunciation issues (with my Minnesota roots coming out when I say ‘toast’ or ‘boat’—each plagued with deep, nasal, too-long ‘ohhhh’ sound—tooooohhhhst and boooohhhht).
Nor did their parents enroll them in an immersion school, believing that the appeal of going to their neighborhood school outweighed the benefits and inconvenience of immersion. (Given my mixed feelings about their elementary educations, I would likely change course, if I could do it over.)
I know a lot of kids who are products of the immersion approach, including nieces and nephews on both side of our family, and it does seem appealing—tap into that period when the brain most easily learns language to give your kids not only the benefit of fluency in a second language, but also to benefit from the way bilingualism seems to enhance other mental abilities.
Yes, I am not too ashamed to admit it: I have parental bilingual kid envy. Mixed with some related parental self-loathing for letting down my kids’ mental development.
As luck would have it, those of us parents who do secretly seethe a bit over the fact that we have so grossly handicapped our children by failing to make them bilingual, we live in a golden era of technology-enhanced language learning that is a pleasure to tap into and may in the end level the playing field a bit for our deprived tykes.
There are many apps and tools for learning languages, but our family’s language learning experiment centers on Duolingo, which I was drawn to after listening to Luis von Ahn, the founder, talk about the company’s origins on the great podcast series, How I Built This (a link to the Duolingo episode is provided at the end of the post).
The impetus to actually make the effort to learn a second language on our own came about after a recent trip to Mexico, which was a big adventure that suddenly presented itself as COVID was momentarily easing up.
While on the trip, I was reminded of a realization I had during a backpacking trip in Spain that I took in my twenties. It was only on that trip when I finally had a chance to use the language that I realized that, while learning language wasn’t something I enjoyed, I loved the actual communication with locals, no matter how rocky my Spanish.
Down in Mexico, I noticed that our 11-year-old daughter, who is the family extrovert but has never taken Spanish, was getting a similar kick out of interacting with locals, whether she was saying ‘hola’ to someone in the street or going up to an ice cream seller’s stall and saying, ‘uno, por favor.’
So, once we returned, I decided that the time had come. The kids and I were all going to commit to learning Spanish as a second language.
After making that commitment, nothing happened. Months passed. What is it about trying to learn a second language on your own? Easy to say we want to do it, but so seemingly difficult to make happen.
Next to finally learning to play an instrument, possibly picking piano back up, learning a foreign language has to be one of the top adult elusive aspirations, the perennial New Year’s resolution that never is.
We did at least get the Duolingo apps downloaded to our phones and tested them out. And it was comically easy to start using Duolingo—to the point that you can’t help wondering if you are learning.
The core of what you are doing on Duolingo amounts to answering questions, as if you are taking short quizzes. Duolingo refers to these quizzes as lessons, in part because you can click on most words in the quiz to see the definition. Each lesson also includes a couple relevant tips that are important to the lesson.
What started as very intermittent usage, quickly grew to daily Spanish learning.
Our efforts were definitely nudged along by Duolingo’s gamification—the gems you are earning and treasure chests you open—along with the emails and notifications being sent either to encourage you or cajole you, depending on what their AI sees that you respond to.
We have been adding our own behavior change tricks to help ensure the progress.
This has included the fact that I am taking Duolingo with the kids. We share good news about streaks we manage to attain and badger each other for too many days missed.
Next up, I am adding a bounty for a thirty day streak; any kid who reaches thirty days will received a ‘get out of jail free’ card that will entitle the bearer to essentially override a parental direction one time, whether to get out of a chore, or participation in family event, or having to eat some detested dinner item..
Duolingo is an impressive app, and I am glad we are on board. In the short time we have been using it, they have already introduced several great additions to the app, including interactive stories that you participate with, which my daughter has actually taken to doing on her own for fun. The app also includes podcasts that are great learning tools.
Like Khan, which has a similar commitment to providing improving the lives of millions through free educational technology, it is exciting to imagine all of the future functionality Duolingo will add, given how advanced the system already is.
At a minimum, an app like Duolingo is a great tool to supplement learning when you have a child taking a language class. Presumably, their language teacher is already making it part of their pedagogy (for those teachers who don’t, I would ask: why not?). It is a fun, efficient way to, if not get in 10,000 hours of practice, then maybe 10,000 minutes.
Now that we have this momentum, I have visions that we are going to build on our Duolingo foundation with things like family time watching Telenovelas, or at least the occasional Marvel movie with the Spanish turned on in place of English.
But at my advanced parenting age, I know that I need to put the brakes on the grandiosity. Instead, just keep putting together the Duolingo streaks and building this new habit. Because this blog post comes with an I-see-dead-people twist at the end.
And the twist is this. I had always thought my efforts to develop the ability to speak Spanish as a kid had been disastrous. But as I started using Duolingo myself, and the system assessed my ability, the shock that I had a far better foundation than I realized.
Back in school, I failed to appreciate the progress I had made. I have been carrying a half-built second language around in my mind all of these years without realizing it. I wish I had known that; maybe I wouldn’t have neglected the language for three decades.
If I had even made the most modest effort to advance my Spanish during the last 30 years, where would it be? Of course, there weren’t apps like Duolingo. Or even apps. Or smartphones.
Things are different for my kids and yours. I strongly urge you and your family, if you haven’t yet, to get on the Duolingo bandwagon and leverage the world’s most downloaded educational app. Ideally, your kids won’t just make tools like Duolingo as a tool for language learning in school, but for a lifetime.
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