The funny thing is - I think I was rather made to feel inferior. There was always that notion that I might fail because German is not my actual mother tongue. I was really good in school and got super bored in elementary. So my mom went to the principal to discuss whether I could at least for math join the higher grades or even skip a grade. This is when my school realized - based on my mother’s heavy accent - that I had a migrational background and put me into a special ed after school program. It was degrading.

Right now our child is being raised bi(and a half)lingual. And while it is superficially considered great that she is being raised bilingual, we are also practically facing a lot of cynical behavior.

We were asked to speak German to her when she started kindergarten/preschool at 3 years old (which is actually not recommended to preserve the home language) so that she would have a faster time adjusting. Simultaneously, we are being told to avoid German at all cost and push her Russian much more by other groups, with the suggestion to make her learn how to write and read Russian at least a year before she starts school and not read German at all. We can’t do it right no matter what.

She has a birth date that would qualify her to register for school a year earlier (she would regularly go a year earlier if we hadn’t moved to another federal state), and it is already pretty clear they won’t let her because they “want to make sure her German is good enough for school”. She excels in both languages btw and is well above average in terms of expression and vocabulary, as we were told by her kindergarten teachers, yet still - we get the default answer that she will likely not be able to start school early because of her knowing Russian along with German.

So, no, in everyday life, I feel disadvantaged. It also highly depends on what language combo you look at. German and English? German and Spanish? Nice, wow, how amazing! German and Russian? German and Arabic? Ooof you will probably have difficulties in school, poor you. I’m not even going to start with the casual racism here.

I grew up with Russian and German and I cannot put it into words, but as a kid I was 100% certain that this helped me with math. It is almost like - I subconsciously knew I could approach something (like something I wanted to express) from two very different ways (two different languages), this translated to the way I approached a math problem.