Nice article in the Washington Post magazine profiles a young man named Daniel Chen, a second generation child of Chinese immigrants from Shanghai, and tells the story "about the isolating power of a lost mother tongue and an education spent retrieving it". Like many such stories, it is complex, involving movement, translation, frustration, and determination. The author details the phenomenon of first language attrition, which I have documented in my own research, spends some space on the critical period, and does an overall nice job of linking language development and loss within the larger contexts of immigration and family cohesion. Definitely worth a read.
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