The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker

I've mentioned this book to many parents. No joke, it is worth reading.

All kids are capable of understanding and creating language. Read what he says. Now that I am 9 years into my own experiment of raising a trilingual child, I can attest to the insights as being valid and true.

The thing about language acquisition is that I think "the studies" are still in their infancy around the world. Sure, there is a lot that is true, a lot that has been figured out. But it is very difficult for any adult to track progress in a language that they do not know. So when you read something like "Studies show..." or "Researchers have found...," it is hard to know what they knew beforehand and what they really were able to discern throughout the process.

I had to do my own experiment, so I tried to learn as much as I could. Several of the themes Pinker discusses became phenomena we witnessed in our own child's development. Pretty exciting.

And how would it pan out for her overall intellectual development? Well, so far, so good. I've met a few other bilingual and trilingual households out there who have also taken similar approaches as we have.

So if you are a bilingual or trilingual household about to become new parnets, I highly recommend reading Pinker and then doing the early immersion work at home. Don't worry about the "mixing up" in the early years. It will figure itself out. And by all means, keep working, keep moving forward. Someday, we'll have more multilingual grownups out there who just might change the world for the better with their ability to literally understand more people. Then we will all be able to say that it really, really, really was worth it!