I want to tell you guys about a funny little story from my childhood that will forever embarrass me. Now before you judge or laugh, let it be known that when this happened, I was around the age of eight, so my reasoning wasn't exactly practical during this time in my life. This story takes place in Gennadi Beach, Rhodes, Greece, my hometown village located on one of the main Greek islands. Every other year my family and I traveled there to visit my Yiayia (Greek for grandma) for around a month. Villages in Greece are similar to small towns; everyone knows everyone. However, the difference being everyone always walks everywhere (even to dinner or events), visits neighbors' homes on the regular, and hangs out with friends and family 24/7 around the village.

Next door to my Yiayia's house lived a cute little family that I was very fond of. It was a mom and her two kids, both around my age. Being the only young child in my family on our trips, I was constantly eager to hang out with people my own age. The kids next door were fluent in both English and Greek, which made communicating with them pretty easy. One day they invited me to play hide and seek with the other kids in the village. I gladly accepted, even though I was stressing on the inside about how I would communicate with them. They divided us into teams and I was put on the opposite one from my friends. For a while during the game, I tried my best to pretend like I could understand what the kids on my team were saying to me. However, it didn't take long for my teammates to start getting suspicious of my short responses, generic nods of agreeance, and awkward/misplaced laughter.

Realizing I was starting to look stupid, I thought up something quick that I thought was going to save my butt from this embarrassment. I remembered a phrase I had learned in Greek school, "I am going to use the restroom," and used this to remove myself from the conversation for a moment. So when the kids would talk to me, I would respond with the phrase, remember what they said in Greek, then run home to my Yiayia's, repeat to her what the kids just said to me and have her tell me how to respond. I would remember what she would say and then run back to the kids and say it. Because the time in between us hiding and seeking was so short and limited, I thought this would work.

Long story short, I got called out very quickly on what I was doing and found out so by my Yiayia's translation. When I came to her for another translation, she told me they asked, "Why do you keep asking us if you can go to the bathroom, is there something wrong with you?" Confused by this, my Yiayia asked what they meant and I explained what I had been doing and that I was clearly caught up in a small mess. She then explained to me that I wasn't really saying "I am going to use the restroom" but rather "may I please go to the bathroom if you let me?" which makes sense considering it was a phrase I learned to say to my teacher. Needless to say, I never ended up going back to finish the game of hide and seek with everyone.

With this being said, I want to emphasize the importance of bilingual parents teaching their children their second language before they become teens. For me, after that situation happened, I remember feeling angry with my parents for not teaching me Greek when I was a kid and blamed them for what happened. If I already knew most of the language at this time, I would have been able to communicate and form closer relationships with the kids in my village. Even though they put me in Greek School, the method and approach to learning felt forced and was difficult for me. Both my parents are fluent in both English and Greek and that was because in both cases, both languages were spoken in their households growing up.

Let me ask you guys, how many of you actually remember learning your first language? For those who don't remember, how many of you can remember trying to learn another language in middle or high school and it being too hard or frustrating to grasp and comprehend? For me, I don't remember learning English and do remember that any language I attempted to learn throughout middle and high school just never stuck after the class was over or the test had passed.

"Bilingual education, once widely hailed as a humane and a sound method of immigrant assimilation, has fallen into disfavor, disparaged as a bureaucratic boondoggle, even by many of the people it was primarily designed to serve: the nation's increasing Hispanic minority" (Bronner). Less and less people are choosing to speak and teach a second language in their households, resulting in a decline of bilingual children and a rise for the need as an adult to learn a second language. Without taking advantage of how quick it is to pick up a second language as a child, learning a language as an adult is a waste of time. I can say this because not taking advantage of the ease to teach a language to a developing mind at a young age should be a crime against your child. You are robbing them of the potential and capabilities they have when they are children.

John Archibald and a team of researchers at the University of Calgary conducted a study in 2007 that found the age at which a person begins to learn a language does matter. "Children who grow up learning more than one language at home essentially have two mother tongues" (Archibald et al., 2007 and Swain, 1972). Experts from kumon.org say that "children who learn a language before their teenage years are more likely than older learners to achieve native-like pronunciation. Furthermore, research has found that kids have an innate ability to acquire the rules of any language -an ability that disappears by adulthood."

You may think, what's the point? What does learning a second language give to a person anyways? I'll tell you, it can give a person a lot; if more people recognize the need to teach their kids a second language before their teen years it will prove to benefit in ways such as: opening up social and cultural opportunities for your child, creating more job opportunities, and helping improve a child's problem solving and decision making, while at the same time eliciting a rise in bilingual Americans.

I ask those of you who do happen to speak another language and plan on having kids, to teach them that language as well as English when they are children. Don't let them get caught up in an embarrassing situation like I was.