My son spent his first six years in San Francisco. Canadian dad, Japanese mom. He went to Japanese preschool and spent close to two years (kindergarten, most

My son spent his first six years in San Francisco. Canadian dad, Japanese mom. He went to Japanese preschool and spent close to two years (kindergarten, most of grade one) in a Mandarin immersion public school. We moved to Japan after that. His younger sister (three years his junior) began French immersion in Japan. Actually, a truly French school, started by French parents living in Japan. Since our son was working on three languages, and there were limited options for being immersed in Mandarin here, we decided on French for her. Fast-forward eight years, six of which were spent in Japan, and two in the UK and France. Our son is bilingual, but his English is short of native. Japanese took over as the dominant language for him. His Mandarin is as good as gone, in spite of three extended trips to China and the (intermittent) use of native Mandarin tutors while living in Japan. I gave up on Mandarin for him when I realized how much his English was deteriorating. Our daughter is native-level Japanese and English, and just short of native in French. She speaks without an accent but is short on a lot of vocabulary, for example. (Similar to my son and his English.) Looking back at the experience of raising these children with multiple languages, my main observation is that, although children are superior at learning languages compared to their adult selves, there are starkly different levels of language acquisition ability from child to child. My daughter is truly a language monster. She is shockingly impressive in all three of her languages, and is constantly trying out new words and getting them absolutely right (context, etc.). My son is, not surprisingly, much like his parents. Language is hard for us. He is stronger in other areas (music, visual art, writing ability), and we work hard to let him know that everyone has their strengths and weaknesses. He's jealous of his younger sister's French (and her English, too), but we tell him that we're jealous, too! My second observation is that raising children like this is a substantial amount of work. Last but not least, I have come to appreciate the joy and magic of being truly, madly, deeply native in a language. Having that final 1% of ability adds untold richness and closeness. There's nothing quite like it. Being truly bilingual is fantastic, but not the same as being dual-native, and it doesn't come close, in my opinion. And, as an afterthought, there are all the non-spoken aspects of another culture, such as behaviour, body language, and even the volume of your voice, that are, in my opinion, as important as language fluency in terms of feeling "close" within a society.