When You Don’t Learn Your Parent’s Language, What Is Lost?

What happens when you don’t learn your “heritage language” — the language your parents or grandparents speak? Like many of us who are multiracial, or children of immigrants, our intern Izzy Bloom gets asked all the time why she doesn’t speak her heritage language, Japanese. She usually says she's not as good as she'd like to be because her mother didn't teach her older brother, and because he wasn't taught Japanese, neither was she. It sounds simple enough, but the story is actually much more complicated. We hear about Izzy’s journey to get to the real answer, and find out what she discovers about her family along the way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices