My three-year-old on learning 3 languages at once

The Earful Tower: Paris

Oliver Gee

Arts, Paris, Society & Culture, Travel, Places & Travel, France

4.8 • 749 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on the podcast, I invite my three-year-old son Otis to talk about language. He has been doing a stellar job learning English, French, and Swedish at the same time, and I was curious to pick his brain about it.

You'll hear him tell me how I'm no good at rolling my Rs in French, why he speaks Swedish with his mother, and what he thought about Italy. Well... I mean... he's three years old, so he doesn't really get too deep into anything, but it's still a fascinating conversation for anyone interested in language, the human brain, and international life for families with young children.

This episode is a follow-up to an episode from over a year ago in Season 15, Episode 9 called "How we're raising a trilingual child in Paris". That was my wife Lina and I discussing the same topic. But now it was Otis's chance to take the mic for the first time.

Also mentioned in this episode:

The Earful Everywhere podcast (currently in Italy): https://theearfultower.substack.com/p/its-here-the-official-launch-of-the
Our walking tours of Paris: http://www.theearfultower.com/tours

Music by Pres Maxson, his take on Douce France.

***********

The Earful Tower exists thanks to support from its members. From $10 a month you can unlock almost endless extras including bonus podcast episodes, live video replays, special event invites, and our annually updated PDF guide to Paris.

Membership takes only a minute to set up on Patreon, or Substack. Thank you for keeping this channel independent.

For more from the Earful Tower, here are some handy links:

Website

Weekly newsletter

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everybody, Oliver G here from the Earful Tau podcast.
0:04.0	And if you're brand new around here, this is a weird episode to start.
0:07.0	If you've been around for a long time, I think you're going to love this.
0:10.0	Because about a year ago, we did an episode about how we're raising our son, Otis, in three languages, trilingual.
0:19.0	So I talked to him in English. My wife talks to him in Swedish,
0:23.3	because she's Swedish, and we live in Paris, in France. So everything else he gets is in French.
0:29.0	I think it's important to note that in France, you start school, I mean, I guess full-time school,
0:34.6	at the age of three. So he was like three years and four months when he started school. And so that means he's had almost a full school year of French. In this episode, I think something fun to keep an ear out for is we speak different languages with each other in this episode. And he pronounces his name the way people pronounce his name in that
0:56.6	language. I think that's kind of cool after I went back and listened to it. Also, you'll probably
1:00.5	note his hesitancy to speak other languages with me or to perform, which obviously I can appreciate
1:08.1	that. So you might hear at the end, I bribed him to sing. I'm not ashamed to have done it.
1:12.8	As we last time, I'm just going to stress this as purely a matter of circumstance.
1:18.0	We're not pushing languages on him.
1:19.7	We're speaking our native languages because we want him to learn them.
1:23.0	In this episode, I've invited Otis, who turns four in about a month.
1:27.3	So he's three years old,
1:28.5	to answer some questions that Lena and I answered on his behalf last time. Now he's old enough to talk.
1:34.2	I think who can answer them better than himself. And maybe in years to come, we can repeat this
1:40.8	every year to really hear from the mind of a youngster what it's like to speak all these languages.
1:47.2	Personally, I find it extremely fascinating.
1:50.1	So I hope you share some of that fascination with me on this subject.
1:54.6	About halfway through the episode, I mean, doing a podcast with a three-year-old is not the easiest thing in the world.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Oliver Gee, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Oliver Gee and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.