In our household, I am fluent in five languages and completely lost in one. The one that matters most right now is the one my three sons invented — or at least borrowed from the internet and made their own.
It starts innocuously enough. Danish, seventeen, walks past and says: "Baba, your outfit is fire, no cap." I thank him. I have learned to accept compliments in languages I do not fully understand. Harris, fifteen, calls across the room: "Let’s vibe check the room." Mustafa, thirteen — the youngest, and somehow the most fluent — just nods and says something hits different without specifying what it is or how it differs. I nod back. We have reached an understanding.
Sometimes, when they are in conversation with each other, I feel like a guest in my own living room. Their school, their digital spaces, their friendships have given them a language that runs faster than I can track. But when I ask them to translate, something shifts. They look at me with the patient, slightly theatrical generosity of people who have been waiting for this question their whole lives. And they explain.
That moment of explanation is one of my favourite things about being their father.
A Household of Six Languages
On any given evening, our home runs on something like this:
English is our household tongue — the one we defaulted to when we moved from Tokyo to Munich, the common ground between a father who grew up in Pakistan and sons who were partly shaped by Japan. German is for school, for the city, for the U-Bahn announcements we all pretend to follow. Urdu is for emotion: the language that comes out when something needs to be felt rather than simply said. Punjabi is mostly mine — a private nostalgia I carry around and occasionally inflict on the boys. And then there is some Japanese still, surfacing in odd moments, because Harris and Danish have not entirely forgotten the years when they navigated Tokyo’s school system as small children.
The sixth language is the one that surprises me most. Not because it is complex — though it is, in ways that resist a dictionary — but because it moves so fast. By the time I have decoded one phrase, the next generation of vocabulary has already arrived. This is the current syllabus:
I have learned to receive these translations with gravity. They deserve it. There is genuine precision in this language — it describes emotional states that standard vocabulary handles clumsily, if at all. Hits different is not just praise. It is a specific kind of resonance: something that bypasses your usual filters and lands somewhere unexpected. I know that feeling. I just had not had a word for it before my sons gave me one.
My German Has an English Accent
The role reversal goes further than Gen Z vocabulary. Learning German in Germany, as an adult who arrived already fluent in other languages, has been one of the most humbling experiences of my professional life. German grammar does not forgive improvisation. The verb appears at the end of the sentence, waiting for you, after you have already committed to a meaning you are no longer sure you intended.
My sons are my unofficial tutors. When I ask for help with a particularly German construction, the sequence is always the same. First: the laugh. Brief, affectionate, entirely at my expense — apparently, my German comes with a strong English accent that my ears do not hear but theirs do immediately. Then, with patience that I do not always deserve, they guide me through it. Danish straightens slightly. Harris demonstrates the pronunciation twice, slowly. Mustafa watches all of this with the quiet satisfaction of someone who passed this level years ago.
I pay the price of the laugh willingly. The lesson that follows is worth it.
Beyond grammar, they teach me things I could not have anticipated needing. German history as it is taught now, in 2026 classrooms, carries a depth and candour that the textbook versions of my own education rarely matched. Social codes I would otherwise spend years misreading. Which customs are regional, which are generational, which are simply Munich. I arrived in this country as a professional and have slowly, with my sons’ help, become something more like a resident.
They did not ask to become my teachers. They just were. That is what children do — they grow into the spaces you did not know you had left open.
What I Learn From Being the Student
I can discuss almost anything with these three boys. This still surprises me, though it should not. Danish has opinions about geopolitics that are more considered than most adults I work with. Harris has a spatial intelligence — in architecture, in maps, in understanding systems — that I recognise from my own younger years but cannot take credit for. Mustafa reads a room better than people twice his age and asks the kind of questions that make you stop and think before you answer.
They inspire me to keep growing. Not in the abstract, motivational-poster sense, but concretely: a 47-year-old software architect sitting at the kitchen table learning about the Weimar Republic from his teenager, genuinely engaged, is a man who has not stopped being curious. That quality — intellectual hunger, the refusal to treat what you already know as sufficient — is something I have tried to model for them since they were small. It turns out they were watching. And now they are reflecting it back.
The exchange is not symmetrical. I bring decades; they bring immediacy. I bring context; they bring the present tense. Both are necessary. Parenting, done right, is a collaboration. Not between equals — the responsibilities are not equal, the experience is not equal — but between people who are genuinely learning from each other, in both directions, all the time.
One of them once told me, with the casual authority of someone delivering obvious news: “Baba, you’re actually pretty good at being a dad.” I filed that under the highest professional achievements of my life. Somewhere above the architectural awards. Somewhere above the performance metrics. Right at the top.
That sentence hits different every single time.