Introduction to this blog

Many years ago my wife and I had a problem with our oldest son. We love Asian food and eat out all the time. Whenever we went to an oriental restaurant, he would talk in a fake Chinese accent. I was mortified. Threats didn't work. Punishments didn't work. Finally I began refusing to go to any restaurant with him where we might have the problem. A friend presented a guaranteed solution: teach him a bit of a real foreign language and once he could say something to the waitress in her language the problem would go away. I was skeptical but incredibly desperate and so reluctantly decided to give it a try.

Thus began one of the great adventures of our lives as parents. We believed strongly that children are much more able to acquire language at an early age. Put any five year old in Hungary for a year and they'll be able to pass for a native speaker. My in-laws have been in America for over forty years now and nobody who speaks to them for more than a sentence would ever mistake them for native speakers. Besides, the research show incredible advantages in cognitive development in all sorts of areas, math, vocabulary, and even resistance to Alzheimer's from being educated bilingually. So, it wasn't actually that hard a sell.

I started looking for a way to get language lessons on Google and found that I could get one on one lessons in almost any language, via Skype. Some languages (those spoken in developing countries) were dirt cheap. I lobbied strongly for Hindi or Marathi. Andrea thought that since English was widely spoken in India that Mandarin would be more useful. We decided to let Joshua choose. He didn't hesitate. He loved Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and his favorite movie was Tonari no Totoro so he immediately chose Japanese.

We began, at the age of 7, with online private lessons from JOI and he learned a lot but was often distracted and so I had to sit nearby to redirect his attention.

The program was a huge success. Our original problem (speaking in a fake Chinese accent at restaurants disappeared almost immediately). In fact, for a while he was too shy to try speaking Japanese when we'd go get sushi. Joshua just finished his freshman year of high school and he's still learning Japanese. In fact, this year he completed Japanese 201 and 202 at a community college and this summer he'll go to a Japanese language immersion program for a month at Concordia Language Villages. He hopes to do a semester as an exchange student in Japan.

In 2009, we took Joshua and his middle brother Ari to Japan. Notwithstanding the fact that I consider myself reasonably well travelled it was the most interesting trip I've ever taken. I wrote a blog about it, originally as encouragement for Joshua to do the same and as a way to share the adventure with friends at home. Before we left, Zachary (who was four years old at the time) asked why we were taking Joshua to Japan. We explained it as a reward for years of diligent language study, which it was. HIs next question was "Will you take me to China?" because we had put him in an immersion Mandarin preschool.

"Sure," I replied, "if you are still studying Chinese we'll take you between fifth and sixth grade." At the time it didn't seem like much of a promise to make because I doubted he'd still be studying Chinese six years later. Two years after we returned from Japan, Ari (who had also been studying Japanese discovered Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books and became enthralled with the Greek gods and legends. "Dad, can I switch from Japanese to Greek?"

"Sure," I said, well aware that motivation was more than half of the battle when trying to get a child to do anything that required real effort.

"If I'm still studying Greek after fifth grade can we go to Greece?"

"Of course," I replied. So here I am four years after my trip to Japan, getting ready to spend a month in Greece with my son, seeing the sights, having adventures, and hopefully learning some Greek. I'll blog the adventure here.