[caption id=“attachment_6459” align=“aligncenter” width=“527”] Scarlett and her cousin, Lan. Two different approaches to language.[/caption]

Nobody that I personally know was truly raised bilingual. My parents purposely taught me English first. Whatever Spanish I knew before learning it in third grade was picked up from visiting my grandparents. It was mostly limited to asking for food items and very generalized expressions of my state of being. Danielle was taught Vietnamese and learned English in preschool. Pretty much all of our cousins were raised with one language or the other as the primary language spoken at home. My house was pretty much only English unless my parents were trying to talk about something we kids weren’t supposed to understand. Danielle’s parents came to the US at a much older age than my parents (nearly twice as old) so English is laborious to them - they can understand it well enough to only be tripped up by the most esoteric of expressions (eg “like water off a duck’s back”), but can’t express complex ideas eloquently in English. Or, to put it another way, my father-in-law loves to tell jokes - he almost never tells any in English.