Choosing a Foreign Language for High School

This series is the personal experience of the founder of TalkBox.Mom using the program with her teenager for high school.

As my teenager was walking out the door to the garage, he said in passing:

“It would be really fun to learn Russian.”

Then he shut the door, and I thought, “That was weird.”

Not because Russian is weird.

But because he’d never mentioned that before…

I didn’t really know where that interest was coming from…

And he didn’t mention it again for a couple more months.

He was showing me a scene from something about WWII…

And we understood the German without reading the subtitles…

But we were reading the subtitles to understand the Russian…

And he brought it up again as a little comment:

“It’d be cool to understand that.”

I brushed it off with, “Sure, that’d be cool.”

But it didn’t feel like something I wanted to invest my time in.

Not long after, I was hosting TalkBox.Mom Week…

And Hilary Alexander—who started using TalkBox.Mom years ago and is now using multiple languages in her home…

Shared that she was considering adding French because her daughter mentioned she wanted to do it.

But it felt too crazy because they had a full plate.

She said something we can all relate to:

“ Do I want to wait three years down the road and have my kid look at me and be like, I really wish we had learned French. And I’m like, we didn’t do it because I thought it was too much.”

That statement felt super reasonable to me. It was just too much at the time. I feel that. I get that.

And then she said something that I did not expect!

“ That’s crazy. Like, why would I wait three years to do the thing? Even if she decides in a year, she’s done with French, she’s got some. 

“She’ll have the beginnings, and she’ll be able to decide because she was in it, not because she missed it.”

I felt my whole body freeze. 

It wasn’t about not having enough time…

Or too much on my plate…

Or the interest fleeting, giving way to a vibe of “whatever, it was going to end anyway.”

It’s about investing in time with my child to connect…

And help him grow in an interest he has now…

To show I care and value what’s in his heart.

So even though it feels super PRACTICAL for him to credit Spanish and German for high school…

Because we are practicing those languages anyway…

I asked him what language he’d like to work on for his high school transcript…

And he, of course, said Russian.

So I said, “I’d love to spend time working on that with you!”

Thank you to Hilary for inspiring me to start Russian with TalkBox.Mom!

And shaking me out of making excuses…

So I could just have a great time with my teenager!

Interested in starting TalkBox.Mom with your high school student? Grab all the details here.