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Monday morning. Coffee machine. Small talk with one of my colleagues. The type of colleague you only meet now and then because you worked on a project together a couple of years ago. Multiculturalism is one of our favorite topic. He is Lebanese, settled in Australia for quite some time now. He is mentionning an interesting fact : his wife is Chinese.
Could it be his kids can speak English, Arabic and Chinese? Maybe even French since he is a fluent speaker just like 40% of his fellow countrymen, legacy of the mandate France had received over Lebanon after WWI?
Unfortunately his kids are speaking only English. A little bit of Chinese, but they started to forget it when they started primary school and spent less time at home with their Mum. I was sipping my coffee placidly but felt sad inside.
And then he declares : "you can't go against the flow. Speaking another language than English is too hard." This sentence really stayed with me : you can't go against the flow. Can you?
With so many resources available now, books, websites, apps, videos, of course you can. You just need to make the concious decision that having more than one language is right for your family. And as a famous sports brand said : "just do it". The fight for multilingualism is now on.
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