Having bilingual kids

Miles declared recently, seemingly out of the blue, that when he is of the age to learn his 3rd language at school, he would learn French.  He said that if he could speak English, Chinese, and French (or Spanish) that he would be able to speak to most people in the world, and it sounded like that idea really appealed to him.

I asked Miles if speaking multiple languages felt like a superpower... and he said no.  He said it just felt normal.  We reminded him of how difficult he found it to engage with other kids when we first got here and he didn't speak Dutch - didn't he feel that that experience signified that it wasn't actually normal?  Maybe, he replied, but he mostly just pretended that we hadn't mentioned that aspect at all.

I certainly think being multilingual is a superpower, and I have always thought so, but I can also understand why Miles might disagree, even considering the difficulties he faced in his first few months here.  The culture around languages is vastly different here than in the US, and Dutch schools approach it particularly well.  Most kids start learning English when they enter the school system at age 4 or 5, but it's required to begin learning English by age 10-11.  Then a 3rd language is typically added, either French or German.  Depending on the secondary education track that the student chooses, kids here could have 5-7 languages before they graduate. 

Having been here only 1.5 years, are the kids really already fully bilingual?  If you ask Miles, he'd say not quite yet.  David likely wouldn't engage in the conversation at all.  But they are very nearly just as skilled in Dutch as their peers, just missing the cultural background and contexts that they would have had growing up with the language.  Miles, in fact, tested higher than his grade level in Dutch literacy and his teachers consider him fluent.  David, who is typically more reserved (to put it lightly), has the confidence to interact with adults in Dutch.  They only speak Dutch at school (though they are not the only native English speakers in their classes) and any other time they're engaging with kids, but they choose to continue speaking English together at home.  Miles has fully embraced his role as the best Dutch speaker in the house and enjoys acting as our translator when needed, or spending a far-too-large portion of our conversations correcting how we pronounce things.

From my perspective, they are growing into both languages in unique and adorable ways.  Miles speaks English a bit like a posh kid, even more so than he would naturally since we use a fairly extensive vocabulary at home but especially with Dutch as his second language.  There are many words in Dutch that are the same in English, but the culture around their use is different that make him sound a bit odd.  For example, "precies" means "exactly" in Dutch.  So, when we confirm a statement that someone made with "exactly!", Miles will instead say "precisely!".  Meanwhile, David has been using Dutch prepositions in English sentences.  I'm not sure if it would stand out to anyone else like it does to us, but it's absurdly cute. 

What really amazes me is that several native Dutch speaking adults have told me that the kids don't sound like they have any kind of accent when they speak in Dutch!  Granted, there are differing regional accents in the Low Countries themselves, but it is striking to me that after only 1.5 years the kids have learned to speak this new language with such fluency that they literally blend in with their Dutch-born peers.

Anyway, that's the magic of kids, y'all.