单选题   Para. 1 ①'You understand grandmother when she talks to you, don't you, darling?' ②The girl nods. ③Johnson, the reporter, met her—and her Danish mother and English father—at the airport, en route to Denmark. ④The parents were eager to discuss their experience of bringing up their daughter bilingually in London. ⑤It isn't easy: the husband does not speak Danish, so the child hears the language only from her mother, who has come to accept that she will reply in English.
    Para. 2 ①This can be painful. ②Not sharing your first language with loved ones is hard. ③Not passing it on to your own child can be especially tough. ④Many expat and immigrant parents feel a sense of failure; they wring their hands and share stories on parenting forums and social media, hoping to find the secret to nurturing bilingual children successfully.
    Para. 3 ①Children are linguistic sponges, but this doesn't mean that cursory exposure is enough. ②They must hear a language quite a bit to understand it—and use it often to be able to speak it comfortably. ③This is mental work, and a child who doesn't have a motive to speak a language—either a need or a strong desire—will often avoid it. ④Children's brains are already busy enough.
    Para. 4 ①So languages often wither and die when parents move abroad. ②In the past, governments discouraged immigrant families from keeping their languages. ③Teddy Roosevelt worried that America would become a 'polyglot boarding-house'. ④These days, officials tend to be less interventionist; some even see a valuable resource in immigrants' language abilities. ⑤Yet many factors conspire to ensure that children still lose their parents' languages, or never learn them.
    Para. 5 ①A big one is institutional pressure. ②A child's time spent with a second language is time not spent on their first. ③So teachers often discourage parents from speaking their languages to their children. ④(This is especially true if the second language lacks prestige.) ⑤Parents often reluctantly comply, worried about their offspring's education. ⑥This is a shame; children really can master two languages or even more. ⑦Research does indeed suggest their vocabulary in each language may be somewhat smaller for a while. ⑧But other studies hint at cognitive advantages among bilinguals. ⑨They may be more adept at complex tasks, better at maintaining attention, and (at the other end of life) suffer the onset of dementia later.
    Para. 6 ①Even without those side-effects, though, a bilingual child's connection to relatives and another culture is a good thing in itself. ②How to bring it about? ③Sabine Little, a German linguist at the University of Sheffield, recommends letting the child forge their own emotional connection to the language. ④Her son gave up on German for several years before returning to it. ⑤She let him determine when they would speak it together. ⑥They joke about his Anglo-German mash-ups and incorporate them into their lexicon. ⑦Like many youngsters, his time on the Internet is restricted—but he is allowed more if he uses it in German. ⑧Ms Little suggests learning through apps and entertainment made for native speakers.
    Para. 7 ①Languages are an intimate part of identity; it is wrenching to try and fail to pass them on to a child. ②Success may be a question of remembering that they are not just another thing to be drilled into a young mind, but a matter of the heart.