Learn me - Becoming a foreign exchange student

In reply to mechanicalmeanderings :

Thanks!

Stampie said:

And then reasonable expectations hits the first time he has a blow out sitting in your lap.

Ugh.  Don't remind me.  I am very much looking forward to teaching my son about all of the wonderful things this world has to offer.  I am very much NOT looking forward to all the various fluids that will be leaking out of him.  That one's going to be hard for me to get used to.

I have a number of friends who learned Mandarin, but the path for that is definitely tutor while young and then go to college in China (which is extremely easy to get into compared to most european countries, because China is much more open to undergrad applicants and from my understanding, western european countries focus much more on post-grad work).  I even briefly considered going to China to finish my undergrad, despite not knowing one iota of the language, because the english language schools over there will train you as an educator, although you need to know which ones are legit.

Mandarin is also probably going to open up a fair number of opportunities for the foreseeable because chinese expats who want their kids to get into college in the US/UK/Canada really want to hire native english speakers so once you're moderately fluent, remote tutoring has been gaining popularity in the last few years and isn't going to go anywhere after the pandemic too. 

Spanish is going to be more useful day-to-day if you're in the US, and seems reasonable if the goal is Canada since French is a romance language as well.

In reply to jb229 :

Sticking with romance languages definitely seems like the most practical path - If he knows French then learning some Spanish, Italian, or any others would be extra easy.

I like how this has gone from my desire to possibly make my kid a foreign exchange student, to just going back to my old dream of moving to Montreal.  Hey, we'd all be foreign exchange students there!  Right?  Right?