dual language school

the other day, i was talking to another father who lives in our building. his wife is israeli, and he recognized that i was speaking hebrew with aviyah. i asked him if they or she were also trying to speak hebrew with their daughter. he said that they were not going to try to introduce hebrew until they knew that everything was okay with her first language, english.

that made sense. i'd also heard before that sometimes second language acquisition can move smoothly when learners have mastered their primary language. in some ways this makes sense, and i definitely feel that because i understand how english works, and i can understand the similarities and differences between the two languages.

at the same time, i can totally see that it just makes sense to teach a second language this early. the whole world is kind of a question, right? i mean, to young children, the whole day is exploring and testing and trying to figure out what things are, how they work, what might happen next. in some ways, language is a natural extension of that. we learn to infer and predict and analyze before we even have words, and we definitely try to express what we're thinking before we even have words. at root, our words are abstract translations of the things we actually think or feel, right? at root, our thoughts and feelings are just chemical reactions in our body?

sometimes, i get worried to see if aviyah is developing her english well. i want to teach her hebrew, but i always want to check in with samantha or the teachers at her school to make sure that they think her language is going okay and moving forward because i definitely don't want this to ever get in the way. i really do want to continue learning and speaking hebrew with aviyah for a bunch of reasons, but i definitely don't want it to slow her down from developing or anything.

when i was in israel, i definitely saw that the israeli children have so many more supports and their hebrew is so clearly better than my hebrew, too. i mean, it makes sense, right? in the same way that we are surrounded by english here, on television, in stores, in our building, on the street. and i definitely know that her hebrew is behind their hebrew. i mean, i was talking with some 5 year olds and i was kinda embarrassed because i couldn't follow all of them.

(at one point, i was like, "oh, i don't know, maybe ask your mommy." i don't know what the little boy was asking me, but i figured he'd either ask him mom and it would make sense, or he'd figure out ok, this dude can't hang.)

i also know that her hebrew is behind her english. she doesn't struggle nearly as much as she did before, and she's actually got a bunch of words that she uses. but she does forget some words she knows, and she doesn't flow anywhere near as much as she does in english. i'd say her hebrew is about at 70% of her english. that might be high, i don't know. i do know she speaks always in hebrew to me, nad sometimes she sputters or pauses but she clearly knows to speak to me in hebrew even if she is in the middle of a conversation with somebody else in english.

in an older video, she lapsed into some english when she just wanted to say something and didn't want to wait. she doesn't do that so much anymore. she's pretty much able to say what she wants to say, kind of like i was when i was further back, because the truth is you only need a certain amount of words to say most things. then, you get stuck on specific objects or specific actions and you an learn the word in context.