My wife and I both speak Japanese fluently. She does because she grew up speaking it with her parents at home in the U.S., and spent summers with her relatives in Nagoya. I do because I lived in Japan through part of elementary school and junior high, and returned to Japan periodically over the years, while continuing my interest and study of the language in daily life.

I also speak Mandarin Chinese, and although my vocabulary is somewhat limited, I do have very good pronunciation and fluency. I began studying it in college, spent some time in China, and have continued trying to practice and study that language as well.

Since our son Oliver is now three months old, my wife and I have been thinking about how to teach him more than one language.

It's been assumed between us for a long time that we would at least try to teach him Japanese. It would seem a shame for him not to learn it as we both speak the language. But the situation in the world has convinced me that everyone in every country is going to need all the tools they can get to compete in the future. Resting on our laurels is not an option.

Thomas Friedman has come out with another book titled "The World is Flat" on the subject of globalization and global competition for knowledge work. I'm not sure when or whether I'll actually read it, as I follow these things regularly and probably am aware of most of what he's written in this book. But I do think he's right on the money in his views as to how much more difficult things are going to get as millions more people come onto the market for jobs that used to be geographically limited and therefore had a measure of natural protection.

So I'm thinking about trying to teach our son Chinese as well. Although there are various theories floating around about how best to achieve this, a practical approach seems to be simply for each parent to speak a different language. My wife would speak Japanese, and I would speak Chinese; he would pick up English in the beginning from the environment and his grandparents, then later from school and from us. Three languages may seem like a lot, but it's pretty clear that children have little difficulty adjusting to it, and it's clearly much easier than attempting to learn later in life.

Here in Northern Virginia we're also lucky to have a couple of schools nearby with bilingual Japanese-English education curricula through elementary and junior high school. If these schools seem up-to-par when the time comes, it might be a good option. There are also lots of DVDs and VCDs out there now for teaching language to babies and young kids. We will have to load up on these materials in order to create an environment in which he sees variegated use of these laguages on a daily basis...

We haven't made any final decisions about how to approach this, but it will be an amazing process... :)