One of the great things about having kids is, you get to watch them at various stages as they grow up, and I’ve enjoyed seeing my son and daughter (currently 15 and 14) moving through each phase of their lives as they grow and change. Unlike most children, my kids have had to deal with learning two languages, English and Japanese, and when kids are small it’s a challenge for them to tell the two languages apart. I’ll never forget the image of my daughter in a toy store in the U.S., trying to talk to another child in Japanese and wondering why they didn’t understand her, or when my son commented that the cold-water bath at the hot springs we had just visited was “cold-katta,” mixing the English word “cold” with the past tense ending for adjectives in Japanese. Of course once kids reach a certain age, learning languages becomes child’s play (‘scuze the pun), and it wasn’t long before my wife and I found ourselves being surpassed linguistically by our offspring. Now my son won’t let his mother help him with his English homework, since some of the answers she gave him before turned out to be wrong.
Raising kids is especially interesting when they’re bilingual.
