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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Most kids have the capacity to learn a language really easily, because humans are designed to learn to talk. They don't have the capacity to learn two. At best, the second language overwrites the first language and they forget their native tongue (as happens to very young immigrants) or they completely forget the second language once they are no longer required to study it (as happens to millions of American students who take French or Spanish in high school). At worst, they end up speaking a shitty creole of both languages (e.g. Spanglish).

I don’t think this is accurate. Most Swiss people use more than one language in daily life, something like 25% of India speaks 2+ languages, you have varying degrees of bilingualism for English and Tagalog in the Philippines, standard Thai and the various regional Thai languages (sometimes + a functional grasp on English), and so on. Even East Asian hubs like Tokyo and Seoul and Taipei will have a reasonable amount of people who are bilingual. And of course we have many examples of people here who are bilingual largely or at least in part due to education.

Surely the issue is that most American children don’t naturally find themselves in situations where they would need to speak a second language, and language perhaps rusts more quickly than other skills do.

(I am unsure about the value of formally educating children in a second language, but I want to nitpick a specific claim here.)

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