There is increasing support among educationalists for introducing foreign languages at primary rather than secondary school. Having weighed the competing considerations, I am firmly of the view that the advantages of an early start decisively outweigh its drawbacks.
The linguistic rationale is powerful. Young children possess a neurological plasticity that fades with age, enabling them to reproduce unfamiliar sounds with a precision that older learners rarely attain, and consequently to achieve a far more authentic accent. Because they acquire language intuitively rather than analytically, the experience resembles the effortless absorption of their mother tongue. An early beginning also extends the total span of exposure, so that years of accumulated practice allow pupils to reach genuine fluency by the end of their schooling, while incidental contact with another culture nurtures the tolerance and curiosity that a globalised world demands.
The objections, though not baseless, are comparatively minor. Some fear that a second language may momentarily unsettle children still mastering their first, and it is true that primary schools do not always employ specialist teachers or possess room in a crowded curriculum. Such concerns, however, describe problems of implementation rather than of principle.
Precisely because these obstacles are practical, they are also remediable, through investment in properly trained teachers and imaginative, play-based instruction that eases rather than burdens young learners. Set against the enduring benefits of near-native pronunciation, superior fluency and cultural openness, the transient difficulties appear slight. I therefore have little hesitation in concluding that the case for early language learning is compelling.