General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: If you could meet any DUer in person, who would it be? [View all]DFW
(54,348 posts)Since I don't know the German gestures for "I think you're beautiful, but I'm not going to be obnoxious about it," it was a good thing I had learned some German BEFORE we met!!
We always spoke to our two daughters in our own languages from the very beginning. Not only because we didn't want any one set of grandparents to be at a cruel disadvantage, but also because you're at your most natural in a cradle language, and because we wanted our daughters to be fully bi-lingual by the time they started looking for jobs, which turned out to put them on a fast track toward self-sufficiency some 25 years later.
Your son is his way to being a true world citizen. Tell him he is on the right track to world citizenship. I only speak a few words of languages like Kurdish, Turkish, Japanese, Hungarian, etc., but even that is enough to elicit a smile and a nod of appreciation from people to whom those are their native languages. And as for the ones I do speak, I was just down in Barcelona on Friday, and was reminded yet again, how VERY much people of a formerly oppressed ethnic group (in this case, the Catalans) appreciate it when an outsider learns their language purely because he wants to.