Early bilingual educational programmes have been a feature of European and Hungarian education for the past two decades. Throughout this period these programmes have had to face a great deal of criticism from numerous practitioners of education. Negative assumptions and reservations were mostly due to the fact that until the 1990s there had been little research in the field of second language learning and the young child. The prevalent view held that language learning was a highly demanding academic subject, and being so, completely unsuitable for children under the age of ten. Practice, however, has proven that early instruction in foreign languages can lead to an early competence in languages as well as in other fields of education. What we already know is that young children do neither better nor worse in languages than other learners, they just do it differently. It is this ’difference’ that makes early language learning a special subject in its own right under the umbrella term of