It is said that schools should start teaching a foreign language when pupils start their freshman year, while I believe that it is the best practice if they start in secondary school.
On the one hand, a foreign language plays a crucial role in every children’s school life. Focus on a secondary language as soon as start their first year at school can give several advantages to children. Firstly, being bilingual at younger age serves as a sign of new opportunities on people’s life. Consequently, they can achieve their goals much faster than children who started learning a foreign language at secondary education. In Uzbekistan, for example, there are some schools that starts teaching English as secondary language from when children starts their educational life at school. The children proficient at English at their secondary school are now participating on international competitions and achieving several great trophies, while children started learning the foreign language on their higher age with other various subjects.
On the other hand, in my opinion, children should start studying a foreign language at their secondary education. Despite benefits ensuring early start of learning a secondary language, there is another side of coin. When children start a foreign language at the same time with their mother language, they can struggle with mixed language sentence structures, vocabulary and pronunciation. There are some characters different in other alphabets. “o'” in Uzbek language, for example, is not exist in other most of the languages. Furthermore, children just started learning a foreign language, tend to forget their mother language if they eagerly engage with the second one. It is fact that, Russian children who experienced the same phenomenon, with a high probability, are more likely to do not understand their friends fluently and cannot consume information in Russian language.
To sum up, while starting a new language as soon as children start school has its benefits, I believe that beginning language study in secondary school is more effective. This approach minimizes the risk of confusion between languages and allows for a deeper understanding of the new language.