Mastering foreign languages at 4

Azure Warrenfeltz is fluent in Japanese and Spanish. She also can understand bits of French, German, Arabic and Italian, and she soon hopes to learn some Mandarin Chinese.

Azure is 4 years old.

“I’m smarter than my father. He can only speak one language. Muchas gracias!” she says playfully.

In today’s globalized world, Azure is one of many young American children whose parents insist her education include foreign languages.

“It’s such a global environment now, you never know what you might need,” says Azure’s mother, Julie Warrenfeltz, who started schooling her daughter in foreign languages when she was 6 weeks old. “I wanted to make sure she had every tool and every benefit at her disposal.

“She couldn’t hold a violin, she couldn’t stand upright, but I wanted her to do something,” says Warrenfeltz, owner of Petite Ambassadors Language School in Jacksonville, Fla.

Not only is learning a foreign language easier for children than it is for adults, but children who are exposed to other languages also do better in school, score higher on standardized tests, are better problem solvers and are more open to diversity, says Francois Thibaut, who runs The Language Workshop for Children, which has nine schools around the East Coast. Thibaut is a pioneer in foreign languages for babies and children and is the author of “Professor Toto,” an award-winning home-based foreign-language curriculum for parents and children.

“When I started 35 years ago, very few people believed in this idea. Teaching kids who are 6 months seemed crazy,” Thibaut says.

Today, Thibaut says, his schools can’t keep up with the demand for classes; about 1,000 students are enrolled and even more are on waiting lists. The schools even get requests from expectant parents wanting to reserve a space for when their child is born, he says.

The schools serve students 6 months to 9 years old and offer courses in Spanish, French, Italian and, new this year, Chinese, which Thibaut says is becoming the most requested class.

“More and more people are aware of the importance of teaching another language to their child because we are in a global world,” he says.

Language study for children is based on immersion, he says. Kids sing songs and play games to help develop language comprehension skills. “This is a natural way of learning language.”

When children start learning languages at birth, they have the capacity to learn many languages at once without getting confused – because, as the brain develops, so too does the ability to separate one language from another.

Warrenfeltz’s school takes students as young as 6 weeks in a course called Baby Boot Camp, which combines foreign language with strength training, balance and coordination exercises. She, too, has seen the demand for language classes grow in the past few years.

One of the reasons Anna Lynn and Stephan Oppenheimer of New York enrolled their daughter, Mireille, in Thibaut’s language classes when she was 6 months old was to help her understand diversity and learn how to see things from different perspectives.

“We both believe that could be a great gift to give our child,” Anna Lynn says. “As Americans, we don’t typically study other languages, and that can make us narrower in our perspective.”