I am a college student. I came from Russia when I was 15 and since then I have been living in Israel for eight years. I know Russian, English, and Hebrew. It's a good feeling to be trilingual.

I'm not really different from other people who are not trilingual. I don’t believe that a person can know two languages at the same level as a person who speaks only one language and knows it really well. Bilinguals know their two languages better than I know my three languages. I feel it. I hear it, I see it, but I also had a feeling that I had some advantages. I can understand and read more books, and I have more options in life because I know three languages.

However, the bilinguals in my classes speak English much better than I do, and their compositions are on a higher level than mine.

I do take advantage of secret languages with my friends.

When I try to speak in one language, not using any other ones, especially when I go abroad and need to speak in English or Russian, I can’t really deal with it. However, I think this has made me a smarter person. It gives me more access to information in English, and it upgrades my IQ, when the more you know, the smarter you become.

My parents are both monolinguals. They speak only Russian, even though they live here in Israel.

I think I would like to raise my children as bilinguals, but I’m afraid to damage their lexicon and their verbal abilities. As another student said, you need to work hard to raise a child who speaks really good in three languages and not to mix it all together.

Another student: I have a niece who’s growing up with English, Hebrew, and French, and I don’t think she’s going to have any problem talking. She grew up with two languages and she has no problem with it, except for maybe finding the right word. Growing up with a few different languages in the beginning, maybe they’ll start talking a little later, they’ll confuse the languages, but very quickly know what language to talk to Abba, and what language to talk to Ima, and what language the kindergarten teacher talks.

Another student: When I was 5½ years old, I came to Israel and was exposed to Hebrew, and I only had problems with words from time to time, but I wasn’t confused. Maybe 5½ is too late to be confused.

Our interviewee: Some teachers may have had problems with me because I did not know a language well enough, but there were no major problems that I would remember. Sometimes I presented discipline problems in high school, because of the multiple languages.

I’m sending my son to English-speaking kindergarten next year. I would like to talk to this one in English the whole day and we’ll see how it works. I didn't try it yet.

I feel totally like a trilingual. Sometimes I make mistakes in English, only because I’m shy to speak, but when I go to the environment that speaks only English I feel free.