@Tony My parents read out loud to me (in both Swedish and Finnish) even after I could read on my own. In Europe it’s not uncommon to speak ~two/three languages at an advanced level. I’ve been told by Anglos that Netherlands, Scandinavia and Finland resemble the Anglosphere the closest and this might have to do with the fact that these countries add subtitles to foreign movies, whereas Central European countries are far more protective of their own domestic languages, thus they instead resort to dubbing foreign movies.
@WelshNorman If a child has no incentive to use a language or lacks a strong connection to one he/she will feel discouraged to use it. One example I can think of is a bilingual family that moves abroad to live in a third country (Anglosphere) bringing along their young children with them. The mother and father each speak two unrelated languages (e.g. Portuguese and Czech) at home while English is the dominant language of the environment. So the kids will grow up feeling like ”they don’t belong anywhere”. In my opinion young children should grow up either in the country of their mother or father (quite literally motherland and fatherland). In terms of language-learning aptitude, the leap a child has to make from a conversational level to an academic level takes considerable effort.
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