I have always wanted a pet octopus to sit on the tip of my finger. No, it's true, ask H. Ever since he's known me that's been a true desire, once I heard there were octopi that small. Cyuuute!
H immigrated at age four, and was functually bilingual within weeks--he translated for his parents. He had a "yankee" accent (grew up in Philadelphia) when I met him, but decades in the south softened it. He's still bilingual, speaks Ukrainian when with his mom and brother, or they switch back and forth.
Friends when we were in Germany had a four-year-old who played with kids on the street, and by three weeks he was speaking colloquial German, indetectable that it wasn't his first language. He also slid fluidly from one to the other and had no detectable "other" accent in either one.
So I vote age four.
(I realize that was not the point of the story.)
I have always wanted a pet octopus to sit on the tip of my finger. No, it's true, ask H. Ever since he's known me that's been a true desire, once I heard there were octopi that small. Cyuuute!
Now I'm imagining you with the tiny octopus of your dreams playing teeny-tiny handclapping games and doing high fives with Emmett and the finger monkey of his dreams, and I'm dying of the imaginary cute.
I went to college with a guy who was trilingual, and apparently had a shitty accent in all three. At least, that was the word on the streets. I couldn't judge his accent in Spanish or Hebrew.
From the death report of a 13-year-old boy who died in 1854:
Killed by being swung around by the heels by a circus clown
I think it's weird that Eugene Mirman has a slight accent despite immigrating at four.
I don't even want to look at that as clown's are terrifying!
Oh, JZ, now I'm imagning that, too. Tiny heaven!
One of my former supervisors once met a guy at Harvard who had grown up in NYC's Chinatown, the only child of an immigrant family who was determined that he would Make Good if it killed them all; even though literally no adults in his neighborhood spoke English and he was the only English speaker in his family, his parents forbade him to learn Chinese because he had to be an American or else, even though it meant none of them could really understand each other.
He grew up speaking fluent English with a strong Chinese accent that he could not train himself out of no matter how he tried. Apparently at not quite twenty he was already deeply tired of having to explain that no, he couldn't translate for you and yes, he knew he had the accent but no, he really couldn't speak Chinese.
Oh, that's just tragic. O'Henry sort of tragic.
