French Corner by Dr. Nancy Le Nezet - November 9th

Learning new languages can be very difficult and stressful for some adults, and they tend to become anxious when their own children become multilingual. For example, parents who come to visit our school are never sure how their children will cope with one or two new languages.

I myself was anxious when we moved to Doha, as my children had to start taking Arabic lessons. I knew that Arabic was a difficult language that was completely unknown to them. My daughter is an English speaker and and she understands some French. She used to speak Bengali with her nanny, and then she learnt a little bit of Thai in Bangkok before starting Spanish lessons. My son speaks less French than my daughter, but was very keen on learning Mandarin whilst we were in Thailand. When we arrived here, I really wanted my children to focus on French and I was concerned that they would be resistant to their Arabic lessons.

I now know that my concerns were unfounded: my children love their Arabic lessons, even though they recognize that it is a difficult language to learn, and they have made some great progress in French despite the addition of an extra language.

I have now realised that I had made the same mistake as a lot of parents: I hadn’t taken into account the great capacity of children to learn new languages. Our adult brain being much less flexible than children’s brain, it takes us more time and effort to learn a new language and we quickly lose confidence in ourselves. However, we should not lose confidence in our children, whose capabilities often exceed ours.