My daughter’s first language is Italian. You read that correctly. While that might not initially surprise you, let me explain why it should:
- I was born in New York (not Italy).
- My husband was born in New Jersey (also not Italy).
- Both of us exclusively spoke English for most of our lives.
So what exactly happened here, and what drugs were we on when we decided to teach B Italian?
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As is the case with most things, I blame my husband. When I was pregnant, he easily read quadruple the amount of articles as I did on all things relating to parenthood. Somehow, he fixated on the idea of teaching your child a second language, which is truly laughable because his ability to retain Spanish – which he apparently took for 6 years – starts and ends with pronouncing the word “hola” as “whole-ahh.”
While Spanish would definitely have been a lot more useful in the long run, my husband quickly deduced that my Spanish wasn’t all that much better than his, and instead moved on to the next most-logical option. I knew Italian thanks to a combination of taking it in school and learning from my mostly Italian-speaking grandmother (who lived with us for ten years), but I’d far from consider myself qualified to teach it to another person.
None of this seemed to worry him, and he set to downloading free apps like Duolingo and Memrise with a fervor that I wish he’d replicate when taking out the garbage. It became an obsession: he’d listen to podcasts in the car, watch foreign YouTube videos, and interrogate me and my mother almost constantly on the differences between words.
But – which I guess is one of the reasons I married him – my husband doesn’t quit when he sets his mind to something until he gets it right. And so, here we are, 3 years into our Italian journey, with a child who already has learned more of the language than either of us are able to teach her.
Most people tell us we made the right choice (and I KNOW my husband thinks we did), but to be honest, there are days when I’m really not sure – like when B has a hard time talking to other kids because she can’t find the right words, or now that she’s become super-attached to us, likely because she realizes we’re the only people who can help her translate what’s going on.
I guess as it is with most things, only time will tell.