I’m a rootless cosmopolitan, so we’re moving the family to Spain for a year. The kids are up for it. Growing up with anglophone parents in Paris, they speak French and English, and once you know one Romance language, learning another is a cinch. “Lexical similarity” is the measure of overlap between word sets of different languages; the lexical similarity between French and Spanish is about 0.75 (where 1 means identical).
I want the children to have such good Spanish that they can say everything, understand everything, have deep friendships and be fully themselves in the language for life. That’s what matters, not perfect grammar.
But for all my emotional commitment to multilingualism, I know its usefulness has diminished. How should we think about learning languages in this era of global English and machine translation?