Sylvie speaks French, Italian, Vietnamese and English fluently, which isn't too shabby considering she was born and raised in Albania. Diona and Julia burst into Russian for conversations that they don't want anyone else to understand, and Diona also knows Arabic, having spent the second half of her childhood in Egypt. Depending on which side of the family he's talking to, Carlos's rapid-fire cell phone conversations alternate between Spanish and Portuguese. And I often have to forgive Ting's confusion with my American slang since she only learned English after moving from Japan five years ago.

In our program of 60 students (all of whom spend their days speaking French), we have native speakers of Polish and Romanian, Chinese and Japanese. Born into multi-lingual families, many of these kids have had the advantage of learning several different mother tongues. Since many of them also have parents in the Foreign Service, they've lived everywhere from Senegal to Peru to the Ivory Coast, and they've picked up more than a few words and phrases on the way.

Not only am I amazed at my classmates' ability to switch between languages mid-sentence, I'm also jealous. Learning a language as a child is so much easier than struggling with a dictionary and Berlitz tapes as an adult. Judging by how effortlessly my friends pick up new languages, it seems that once you can speak two or three fluently, the fourth, fifth and sixth slide right in without a second thought.

My amazement of these language gurus (and my envy of their global addresses) makes me hope that I'll be able to raise my children to speak another language besides English.

While wandering around a chateau on a field trip, my friend Nakima and I schemed up a game-plan to ensure having tri-lingual children all while living in a nice shack like the one we were touring: marry into the old French nobility and get a Spanish or German-speaking nanny. Granted, it may not happen – we have yet to stumble upon a count in our favorite cafés – but exposing children to many languages is still an advantage that many European parents consider a necessity.

A bulletin board in our school's lobby is plastered with ads for English-speaking baby-sitters. Many parents want to expose their children to English at an early age, to give them a boost in their studies once they reach school-age and they recognize that contact with native speakers is the best way to do it. Some take this notion to an extreme, though.

A friend of mine applied for one such job and found herself stuck in a bizarre language experiment. According to his parent's rules, the two year-old boy she watches must speak English with her, French with his father, German with his mother and Spanish with the cook. Clearly an extreme case, but the boy will probably grow up with a great knack for language, despite some strange views on familial communication.

All these thoughts of brilliant, multi-lingual children are at the front of my mind this week due to the arrival of my niece Aisling, sure to be much more "internationally chic" than her aunt since she can already boast being born in London and not Flint, Michigan. Even though she'll probably be back in the States before her vocabulary is peppered with words like "mum" and "loo," I've already bought her a French book in the hopes that she'll pick up another language while she's still young.

The studies on how easily children learn languages are amazing, and considering how fresh their developing minds are, it's no wonder those little synapses can pick up so much. The baby next to Aisling in the nursery has parents of French and German origin, and the room sometimes sounds like a United Nations conference hall when all the different families are cooing over their little ones.

I envy those babies in a way, because they will absorb so easily the languages that I'm struggling to learn every day. The way the world seems to work, Aisling could grow up to speak more languages than I could ever hope to know and her mind will be all the richer for it. Like Louis Armstrong croons, "I hear babies cry / I watch them grow / They'll learn much more than I'll ever know."

And if all else fails, she could always hunt for a French duke as a fallback.

The opinions expressing in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

Laura Kelly is a junior English and French major. She might not know Russian or Japanese, but after three years of high school Spanish, she can ask for "cervesas" and "el baño," which is all she really needs. She can be reached at lkelly@nd.edu. French Connection appears Mondays in Scene.

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