Another NYTimes article on language learning

I usually get a lot of insights from NYTimes.com articles on language learning, and this one (called “The Beauty of Being Bilingual,”) on growing up bilingual in Florida was no exception. Anyone who has spoken a language other than English in public in the US can probably identify with at least some of the sentiment of this article.

I was a little taken aback that the parents of the author corrected their children’s grammar. I suspect that said parents did not do that to their babies or infants, but waited until their children’s pre-frontal cortexes began developing in earnest, because there is almost no research that I know of pointing to grammar correction within the first five-to-seven years of a child’s life.

I cannot wait until the Times publishes an opinion about the beauty of acquiring a new language as an adult in a way that honors the inner language learners that we harbor within us…