What do you pass on to your children when the language you give them isn't even your first?

Sonya Rumpf grew up in Massachusetts with a German mother and an American father of Jewish origin. She spent her summers in Germany, absorbed the language through play and family, and went back for a full year in high school. Then a Rotary scholarship took her to Medellín, where she completed a master's degree — writing two hundred pages of academic Spanish, defending her thesis, becoming fluent through full immersion. There she met Juan David, her future husband. They married in California and settled back in Massachusetts, where they are now raising three children.

At home, there are four languages. Sonya speaks to her children in German. Juan David speaks to them in Spanish. Their oldest daughter attends a Mandarin immersion school. English is the air they breathe.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to build a marriage across two languages — and how English gradually became the foundation while Spanish never fully left. We talk about the social architecture Sonya and Juan David have designed almost without realizing it: Spanish at the table, English when the kids leave the room. We talk about the German she stepped away from for nearly ten years and the German she is now relearning alongside her own children — her seven-year-old already reading ahead of her.

We also talk about what it means to choose, as a second-language speaker, to raise children in that language. The doubt. The consistency required. The fear that something won't be understood. And the moment Sonya realized none of it was actually getting in the way.

The conversation moves through Spanish, German, and English — sometimes within a single exchange — which is, in itself, the whole point.