Some societies argue that learning a secondary language at an early stage of life is a crucial concept to bear in mind for our children. For the purpose of this essay, I will present the potential benefits and drawbacks of this situation. Additionally, I will represent my personal ideas and experiences regarding this decision we make for our child.
For exploring the positive sides of this conversation, we can provide examples of how children can learn faster and even more permanently than adults; they can learn several different words, sentences, and grammatical forms in a day and be able to successfully retain them in their mind. On the other hand, an adult person can face a hard time when learning new sentences or words when compared with kids because of the decreasing brain capabilities. Also, learning a second language can provide better reading opportunities, social groups, friends, etc., for our kids, which eventually affects their overall happiness and can help develop academic reading skills at early ages. Concrete language skills developed at an early age can affect the person in a positive way when they reach their college and adult life, such as learning another language they are interested in, job offers, or traveling to another country they are interested in. On the other side of the coin, learning another language in childhood can damage the children’s capabilities of understanding, reading, writing, and even speaking skills in their mother language. Even though starting to learn another foreign language can seem beneficial at first glance, it can actually lead to poor understanding without even grasping the fundamental concepts of that language, such as grammar and lexical features.
After an overall judgment of its probable outcomes, I strongly believe that acquiring language skills can be beneficial at the early stages in childhood because of the benefits it provides both at the micro and macro level. To bring some personal experiences to this discussion, when I started learning my secondary language in my elementary school years, I remember how it helped in learning and grasping my mother language’s reading and understanding skills. This benefit comes from understanding a language that you were not raised with, which forces you to understand and use the foundations of the language you are learning. Also, learning another language at an early age helped me to learn another foreign language in my high school years and travel abroad using the languages I learned.
In summary, learning another language in childhood can have great impacts on a person as they grow. However, it can also bring some downsides. Parents should be careful and supportive when they teach a second language to their children.