Ask Lemmy

Can the kid ride a bike yet? Kick a football? Swim?

I love reading now, but when I was 5 I only wanted to look at the pictures in books, not the words.

I was writing code in first grade, which I guess would be 6 or so. And I didn't have a home computer back then, had to do so on what time I could scrounge up in my limited windows of time of access to other people's computers or computers at institutions, which raised the bar. Today, computers are cheap and plentiful enough that it's pretty easy to get ahold of one.

I could definitely write software before I could ride a bicycle. I still don't know how to kick a football.

It's definitely doable.

I think that a lot of what we set our expectations around is around when schools choose to teach things. Like, I remember

as an American

being shocked when I discovered how young people in the UK and some other countries started being taught foreign language. In the US, our school system doesn't really do much by way of foreign language education until...I guess high school? 9th-12th grades, so maybe around 14-17 years old. But in the UK, you can (or used to, dunno if things have changed) take Latin in primary school.

kagis

Yeah, sounds like they made it mandatory recently:

https://www.oxfordowl.co.uk/for-home/school-year/subject-guides/languages-at-primary-school/

The 2014 Primary National Curriculum once again made learning a foreign language compulsory at Key Stage 2 (Years 3 to 6). Schools are free to choose whether to teach an ancient or a modern language; it is much more about language learning skills than the particular language on offer. Your child could therefore learn French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Arabic or even Latin — the choices are endless! However, once your child begins secondary school the teaching of a modern foreign language is compulsory.

I thought "that seems like an incredibly-advanced topic for a young age". But...really, that's just my expectations set by convention here in the US, not that there's an inability to learn language at a young age (and in fact, there are some strong arguments that learning language is easier the younger you do it).