Mini Alex update.

[rivka]

Alex is doing so many new things every day! I want to note some of them down so I don't forget them.

New words: baby, clothes, outside, nose, eye, toes, knee (only applied when viewed through ripped jeans, for some reason), light, kids, read, rocket, Pa (replaces "Daddy" to refer to her Papa), stars, blocks, bread, cake (mostly applied to rice cakes, also appears when playing pat-a-cake), clues (refers to the TV show "Blue's Clues," which she now asks for by name. I am a bad mother.), hello, that, mail.

New book she asks for by name: Fox in Socks. ("Socks Socks!")

Four new tricks:
(1) Holding my cell phone up to her ear and saying "'Lo!"
(2) Holding a tissue or napkin up to her face and making a blowing noise, as if blowing her nose.
(3) Playing along with "Two Little Monkeys" by tapping her head and shaking a lecturing finger at more-or-less the appropriate moments.
(4) Waving and saying "Bye!" for endings: finishing books, walking away from a cage at the zoo, leaving her toothbrush behind in the bathroom, having her star light turned off at night.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Language acquisition is so cool.

It is! I love watching it unfold. It's so neat when she makes a conceptual leap - like going from using "ball" to refer to specific toys to realizing that she can apply it to anything round. I wonder when she will learn that a "knee" exists separately from a hole in my jeans.

I'm also getting to watch two kids who are being brought up to be bilingual. My German friend at story hour says that right now her son uses "whichever word is easier," the English or the German. She speaks both to him, and I think his father does too. The other child isn't really saying any words yet. Her parents both speak English to each other and Spanish to her.

I have always wondered, when struggling to learn the gender of nouns in a foreign language, how little kids learn to apply them correctly. But now I've noticed that Dagmar labels things for Kai using the definite article, where I would just use the noun itself. So instead of pointing and saying "Buch," she says, "das Buch." So he learns it as part of the name, not as something separate that gets applied to names.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. And yeah, little kids can soak up language like a sponge. My godmother's son and his wife live in Singapore, and have done so since their youngest was about Alex's age, and she's got tons of Mandarin words, and was in a Mandarin-speaking pre-school. Their older kids picked up some, but not nearly as fast. But they're still tons quicker at learning the language than their parents. I guess the older you get, the harder it is to learn a new language. I started French immersion in Grade 6, and my French is still pretty decent although I haven't used it in a long time (seems to get better after I have the need to use it triggered, of course), but I still *think* in English. Even when I was working in France and speaking French all the time, I wasn't really thinking in French.

Little kids who start French immersion in kindergarten seem to pick it up much faster, and will sometimes use the French word when they can't remember the English, even though they speak English at home. But a lot of the early immersion kids don't have a very good grasp on English grammar. They speak it just fine, but they never really got taught the structure in the way kids who are learning in their own language their first few years of school. When I hit high school the late immersion and early immersion kids took their classes together, and it was quite striking how many of them had trouble with fairly basic grammatical concepts. That may be the result of poor teaching, though, rather than an inherent weakness of getting an education in a foreign language.

My uncle who lives in a suburb of London has neighbours whose children grew up tri-lingual. The dad's Israeli and spoke to the kids in Hebrew, the mom's Palestinian and spoke to the kids in Arabic (which pretty much explains right there why they moved to England!), and they picked up English from TV and then having all their schooling in English. Apparently at home they just flip back and forth between the three languages pretty much seamlessly. And one of the kids is now an interpreter for the UN. I can't imagine thinking in three languages.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

That may be the result of poor teaching, though, rather than an inherent weakness of getting an education in a foreign language. I think it's poor teaching, actually. If you have a teacher who emphasises structure and teaches English like a "foreign language", you'd get completely different results.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Interesting that Dagmar uses the article when she's pointing something out. That'll only go so far, though, of course, since you have to learn how to modify the article depending on the case, so if you learn it as a chunked unit like that, you'll eventually start getting it wrong. :-)

What I've mostly noticed Grit and Frank doing is using words in a sentence. Like, instead of: "book, Laura, book," they'll say "see, Laura, that's a book." I don't know if that's just generally part of a "no baby talk" policy, though. I should ask them.

-J

[perceval.livejournal.com]

What I've mostly noticed Grit and Frank doing is using words in a sentence. Like, instead of: "book, Laura, book," they'll say "see, Laura, that's a book."

What is their intonation like when they say it? Mine is exaggerated, so I'm clearly using elements of motherese even though I'm using proper sentences ...

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm not sure. I'm pretty sure Frank doesn't have the motherese intonation, but Grit definitely does.

-J

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's funny. We're raising our daughter to be trilingual (German parents, English all around her, Scottish Gaelic playgroup, then nursery and school later on). When I name things for her, they're usually in German (I almost never use English with her, and if I do, it's out of courtesy to other English-speaking mums I'm with). When I name, I usually just say the word, maybe sometimes prefaced with "Mummy's X". After naming an item, I often make a sentence with it, sometimes as simple as "Das ist ein Buch", which means that she'll get gender and case.

One other thing I notice is that I make the lax vowels such as the /I/ in milk more tense when I'm enunciating words for her. It's automatic, as well. Very strange, this instinct. My DH on the other hand, speaks to her in this extremely soft soothing voice.