Category Archives: language

by | 25 November 2009 · 7:43 pm

One Child’s Language: at 40 months

Physical development: Rachel’s handwriting is much smoother now. She doesn’t have to have little dots to mark the angle-points in A, M, Y and other letters. She has even got S and C down pretty well. She can also write quite small and has done a few exercises at school writing numbers. She jumps well with two feet and can stand on one foot. She likes to show how fast she can run. She is quite active during exercise at her school. We enrolled her in a “movement” class at the YWCA on Saturday mornings, but so far the only thing she has participated in is a balance-beam exercise that she enjoyed at preschool. She doesn’t like receiving a lot of attention from strangers. We doubt she’ll go into show business.

Intellectual notes: She still loves to count and do very simple addition and subtraction. In fact, she has discovered the Associative Principle: “Look, 2 and 2 and 1 make 5; and 3 and 2 make 5, too!” She was counting with her fingers in the stroller one day and announced “2 and 2 and 2 and 2 and 2 make 10!” She knows that 100 is a lot, and can count that high if you prompt her for the even multiples of ten. She no longer misses fifteen now that she knows fif is a funny way to say five, but she usually skips sixteen for some reason.

She also loves guessing and telling. “You don’t know how old Panda is?” [Just say “No!”] “I’ll tell you. He’s two.” “Do you know what we can use? … Think! Think!” She likes to involve us in long imaginary games in which everyone’s role is subject to redefinition whenever the fancy strikes her. She also does a lot of reasoning. This is the bicentennial of Chinese emigration to Hawaii. When Rachel asked why so many Chinese came here, Mama told her that many Chinese wanted to leave China. She said, “Yeah, they wanted to find a cleaner place, and Honolulu was clean enough.”

Language notes: Rachel returned from her Christmas visit having finally switched from referring to herself as Rachel to using I, me, my appropriately. She has also switched to an overcorrected pronunciation of the so that it always rhymes with thee. One of her teachers must have stigmatized the local pronunciation, da. (She has acquired the local auwe in place of ouch.) Her pronunciation of consonant clusters (st, str, sp, spr, etc.) seems to have slipped a bit while she concentrates on new grammatical constructions, especially comparatives (good, gooder, goodest, bad, badder, baddest), even complicated syntax like: “When I’m 100 years old, I’ll be tall enough that my head will touch the ceiling.” “Look, I can push the stroller as straight as you can.” Around us, she is extremely verbal, providing a running commentary on her every action.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 24 November 2009 · 10:11 pm

One Child’s Language: at 39 months

Social notes: Ever since Rachel moved to the bigger kids’ room at school, she has assigned herself a new role in life. She always reminds us of what a big girl she is and almost never goes into the little baby routines she was so fond of before the move: “Look how fast Rachel can run.” “Look how high Rachel can jump now.” In fact, she has changed her role-play at home from Baby to Teacher. She spends a lot of time at home comforting her stuffed animals, showing them things, putting them down on mats for naptime, waking them up again, reading to them, feeding them. She gets the funniest little serious look on her face when she is comforting them for crying. She repeats instructions from school to them, playing the teacher role to the hilt, telling them “This is a table mat activity, not a floor mat activity.”

Another way she marks her change in status is by constantly inquiring how she did things or said things when she was a little baby. “How did Rachel swim when Rachel was a little baby?” “How did Rachel talk when Rachel was one year old?” “How did Rachel say blue when Rachel was in China?” Then she will laugh and imitate our imitations of how she used to say things.

Physical development: Rachel is fascinated by writing now, and likes to take a pen or crayon and write messages on paper. She controls her scribble pretty well, doing a good imitation of a doctor’s prescription scrawl.

Intellectual notes: The biggest concept Rachel has mastered with her new rite of passage is the progress of time. Yesterday now means the previous day, or at least the other day, not just any time in the past. Tomorrow is also more immediate than it used to be. She knows about relative age and birthdays, knows most of the days of the week and the last four months of the year. She contrasts her life as a baby and her life in China with her present life. In fact, she has a renewed interest in her China past now and asks a lot more questions about her pictures from Chinese preschool.

Her other major fascination right now is numbers and arithmetic. She counts everything and knows the concept of adding one number to another. She will hold up one, two, three, four, or five fingers on each hand and ask “How much is this?” She hasn’t memorized the answers yet, but she can figure it out by counting all her fingers. She can count to twenty, but she tends to miss fifteen and sometimes sixteen.

Language notes: Rachel constantly asks “What’s that spell?” She has memorized an ABC book from the library that goes “A is for angry anteater, B is for bashful bear, ….” Her favorite road sign is the yellow BUMP sign. In fact, on the buses she often reads the yellow sign on every window “C-A-U-T-I-O-N Bump!” She looks for Chevron, Shell, and Union 76 signs; spells out STOP, WALK, EXIT, and NO PARKING signs; recognizes Safeway, MacDonalds, and Burger King logos; asks about the cover, half-title, title, and contents pages in books. She likes to take a pen and write messages which she translates as “Please take a juice can to school tomorrow” or “Let’s meet for breakfast at eight.”

Although she still never uses I, me, my in real communication, she will use them perfectly well when she is play-acting with her stuffed animals. And she now asks “How do you do” such and such rather than “How does Rachel do” such and such. But in talking to us, she still has her own special pronouns Deo or Daytoe (for Rachel) and Deo’s (for Rachel’s).

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 23 November 2009 · 5:38 pm

One Child’s Language: at 36 months

Social notes: Rachel was very generous about taking toys to donate to her school before we left China. But she displayed almost no emotion on her last day of school, when her principal (and favorite auntie) was teary and her mama was too choked up to say anything. It was only after we got to Hong Kong and started talking about what her life in Honolulu would be like that Rachel protested, “But Rachel likes China.” She also liked travelling, because she had one or the other of us to herself all the time. Unlike us, she loves to spend time in waiting rooms and hotel lobbies.

Especially while travelling, we tend to praise her for being a “big girl.” But she is afraid to leave babyhood completely behind, so she often reminds us, “When Rachel sucks Rachel’s thumb Rachel is a little baby,” and then promptly demonstrates. She has also invented some baby talk expressions, like titidada. At other times, her conversational style is very adult, like when she says, “Mama, mama! Rachel has two questions. The first question is …. The second question is ….” She also likes to give long-winded explanations why she should or shouldn’t do something in a particular way, often word-for-word renditions of what one or the other of us has told her.

We had far better luck finding a preschool for Rachel in Honolulu than in China. Bamboo Shoots was one we just walked into one day. It was just about to convert to Montessori methods. We walked in during naptime, when the administrator was feeling relaxed and talkative, and had a good look around. We were later told that Rachel shows some of the same problems Chinese immigrant kids have when they enter American preschools: they require a lot of adult attention, and they have trouble going off and doing things on their own. She is adjusting well though. Having a year of Chinese school has helped. And she hasn’t had any trouble getting used to sandwiches for lunch, as some of the Asian immigrant kids have. Rachel seems to be only full haole (Caucasian) kid in the school (as in China).

Intellectual notes: Rachel is very, very fond of puzzles now. She is pretty quick to spot where each shape goes. After the first time or two, she has just about memorized how to put the simpler puzzles together. She is also a reading maniac. We usually make a trip to the State library’s children’s book section every week. She can spend hours listening to us read all the way through each week’s stack of books again and again. She is especially interested in transportation, which might have something to do with all the travelling we’ve done recently. She likes looking for contrasts between the “new kind of airplane” (jet) and the “old kind of airplane” (propeller craft), between city buses (with more than one door) and tour buses (with only one door), between fast ferry boats (hovercraft and hydrofoils) and slow ferry boats (like the Star Ferry in Hong Kong). In fact, she always tries to compare and contrast new things she learns about, to establish new categories or better define old ones. Her other most absorbing hobby right now is testing every water fountain she sees. She had an interest in water fountains before we went to China but had to do without them for a year. Her old fascination immediately revived as soon as we got into the Taipei airport.

Language notes: Her pronunciation keeps improving. Right now she’s working on getting her word-initial consonant clusters under control (/fr, sp, st, str, tr/ etc.) She hasn’t got /f/ separate from /s/ yet, so straight sounds like freight. She has just started to work on eliminating the /w/ she used to put on over and out, and the /n/ she used to put on the front of on and in. In other words, she has started to master the glottal stop (the abrupt onset before words starting with vowels in English; the sound in uh-uh ‘no’ that helps distinguish it from uh-huh ‘yes’). She also noticed a good while ago that Daddy pronounces why—her favorite word—with a /hw/ sound while Mama pronounces it with a plain /w/. She claims to use both pronunciations.

Rachel was just beginning to speak a good bit of Chinese by the time we left Zhongshan, but now she has just about quit speaking it. As soon as we hit Honolulu, she ceased hearing it around her so much and apparently decided there was no more use for it. In Hong Kong, we took her out to a nice playground near our hotel where she played with a couple of English-speaking kids her age. She wouldn’t say a word to them. Instead, she remarked to us, “They’re speaking English. Why?” At Bamboo Shoots, she has been slow to speak with the other kids, but it’s probably just her natural shyness. One of the teaching assistants there speaks Chinese but couldn’t extract Chinese responses from Rachel. When we would ask her if she spoke any Chinese at school, she would answer, “But it’s an English-speaking school!”

She hardly ever sings much at home now. She hasn’t learned the new school’s repertoire yet. But she is an avid and highly interactive story-telling audience. She nods as you go, asks for meanings of words she hasn’t learned yet, and asks so many questions sometimes that it’s hard to keep the story moving. She never drifts off during a story, but keeps asking for one more. She likes to participate by filling in salient words in the stories she has read many times. She also likes us to spell (“psell”) words, and always assigns us one to spell while brushing her teeth.

Her most remarkable achievement in our eyes is her discovery of what syllables are. On the way home from school one day in China, she asked why “e-le-phant” has three words but “bear” has only one. She was probably carrying over into English what her teachers had told her about Chinese characters, since each character is one syllable. We taught her the word syllable (which comes out Seminole when she says it) and now she can count off the syllables of any word you give her—fairly accurately too. Although she does tend to like to repeat the last syllable enough times to get through all the fingers on one hand.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 23 November 2009 · 5:31 pm

One Child’s Language: at 32 months (and abroad)

Social notes: Rachel is experimenting with social graces now. She plays with using please and thank you sometimes, and is working up to saying xiexie (‘thank you’) and zaijian (‘goodbye’) aloud in Chinese. Her strategy seems to be to listen and repeat to herself for a long time while she is mastering something new, then finally perform out loud.

She often gets very upset if we let a guest into the house without her help, or see someone off before she gets to wave goodbye. One day, Daddy came home from school in the afternoon, let himself in, and went in to find Rachel and Mama in the kitchen. Rachel immediately cried that she wanted to meet Daddy at the door. So Daddy went back outside in the stairwell, Rachel sent him down to the landing, then she walked down the steps to greet him on the landing with “Hello, how are you?” She nodded her head in response to “Fine, thank you. And you?” and then turned around and said “Well, let’s go up.” She repeated this ritual about ten times before our downstairs neighbors, Uncle Xu and Auntie Ni, came out to invite Rachel to play with them.

For quite a long time now, she has not gotten tearful when we drop her off at school, and she has a “best friend” there now. When she hears classmates’ names she can point them out, but she won’t say their names out loud to us.

Intellectual notes: In Freudian jargon, she still shows a lot of typically “anal retentive” behavior. She is compulsive about arranging and matching things. If you slip out of your shoes, she is liable to run off with them to arrange them carefully among other shoes. When she gets dressed, she is always concerned that everything should match. After eating, she will often get down and rearrange the magnetic letters and numbers on the refrigerator door. She is more concerned about matching shapes than about sequential order, so she groups 694, 25, 17, 38, VY, KX, MN, IL, CG, FR, BD, OU, and so forth.

Language notes: Rachel is speaking more and more Chinese. Her teachers say she is becoming more verbal at school. She must be saying a lot more Chinese to herself than to anyone else. She is quite aware of the tones in Chinese and experiments with them sometimes. Everyone at school tries to get her to say simple greetings to them, but they are content for now if she simply shows she heard and understood them.

Her pronunciation keeps improving. She has /s/ and /z/, /ch/ and /j/ pretty much under control. When she demonstrated that she could produce a clear /s/ one day on the way home from school, Daddy praised her and asked her when she would be able to say /k/ as well. She said “Soon.”

She still sings school songs at home and also sings a lot of English songs. She sings This Old Man up through number five or six. (On one of our excursions she got to see a beehive up close, so she no longer needs prompting for “hive”.) Her going-to-sleep ritual every night includes the same series of songs: Sleep Baby Sleep, Teddy Bear (“Dayto” Bear), Mockingbird (Hush Little Baby), and then Angels Watching Over Me (“That Guy Is Watching Over Me”). She sings along on all of them and recently recorded them on tape, singing by herself.

She knows the lowercase as well as uppercase printed letters now. (After trying to think of easy terms other than “big/little” to distinguish the two styles, we just settled on “uppercase/lowercase”—and so has Rachel.) She often utterly loses her chain of thought when her eye catches any letter or Chinese character she can read. She reads off numbers on license plates or hotel-room doors as she walks by. Sometimes she spells words from right to left.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 20 November 2009 · 7:37 am

One Child’s Language: at 30 months (and abroad)

Social notes: Rachel is a full member of the family now. She has her own independent moods, desires, habits, hobbies, and insights. Her many observations intrigue and delight us and her usually buoyant mood lifts us when we are feeling cold and discouraged. She is more and more articulate about the specialness of our family relationship. She likes to repeat “Mama, Daddy, Rachel” as she points to each of us, sometimes misnaming us for our collective amusement. She often calls Daddy “Mama” and vice versa. When she does, she just smiles and repeats her error to reaffirm it. She has also discovered our given names and sometimes uses them to amuse us. She likes to sit us all next to each other and often calls for three-person hugs. She gives nice strong hugs now. She likes to refer to us as “this baby’s Mama” and the like. When we were travelling, she once said, “If Rachel goes to Guangzhou by Rachel’s self, Rachel will cry.”

She continues to feel more comfortable with familiar people. She warms up to students and people we visit much quicker than she used to, and is willing to show off a bit for them when she’s in the mood. She readily waves goodbye to everyone and anyone—even the most obnoxious of the “hello, hello” types. She really likes her teachers at school and knows them all by name. They really like her too, and spend a lot of time teaching her Chinese and eliciting English words from her. Rachel recognizes her classmates when we run into them around town, and knows many of their names. She has also become much more attached to and affectionate toward her stuffed animals, and likes to arrange them around her when she’s sitting on her potty chair or lying down to sleep.

Intellectual notes: Rachel’s compulsion about arranging things has reached the stage where she will take every loose object in the house and make long lines across the floor. When she finishes a line she calls us to come look, and then spends some time sucking her thumb, rubbing her belly button, and surveying her work with an artist’s eye.

She also likes her routines to be just so. When Daddy doesn’t do exactly what Mama did the day before, she will object. One day, Daddy sang Old King Cole as he stirred Rachel’s milk into her oatmeal, inadvertently establishing a ritual. Only the living room will serve for the nighttime milk-drinking and teeth-brushing routine.

Right before we took our winter trip, Rachel started to ask WHY everything. “Oh, that boy has no shoes on! Why?” “Oh, that’s a steam locomotive! Why?” Now, about three weeks later, she is trying out “that’s why” constructions: “Rachel’s cold, that’s why Rachel has no pants on.” (She still gets it backwards sometimes.)

She has begun to exercise her imagination and sense of humor a lot. She will turn herself into a roaring lion, an old lady with a walking stick, a vendor and shopper at the market, or a train passenger with bags and ticket. One night, she said “Rachel is sleeping with Rachel’s eyes open because Rachel doesn’t have eyelids.” She laughs “Rachel made a moo-take!” when she slips up, and likes to deliberately set out to make us laugh with funny faces, words, or movements.

Language notes: Rachel makes a clear distinction between occasions to use Chinese and English. Sometimes when we use Chinese, she will protest, “But Daddy’s an English speaker!” She is still not very talkative at school, but gets chatty in English as soon as we show up. She frequently asks “How Rachel say X in Chinese?” Sometimes she gets confused: “How Rachel say China in English?” She has learned to read a few more characters: 中国 (Zhongguo, China), 美国 (Meiguo, the US), 中山大学 (Zhongshan Daxue, Zhongshan Univ.), and 园林管理处 (Yuanlin Guanlichu, Forest Park Management). [Well, the last only in the context of the sign in the photo that we passed on the way to her school and back everyday.] She sat up in bed one night and said “Apple is pingguo” and then lay back down to sleep.

Reading park rules, Shiqi, Zhongshan City, Guangdong, China

Her teachers were astounded to find that she knew all the letters of the English alphabet. (They seem rather easily astounded.) She knows how to spell her own name, and can say the 7 syllables of her full name pretty fluently. Her grammar is coming along nicely: “Rachel thought this walrus had a blue shirt on.” “If Rachel runs down this ramp slowly, Rachel won’t fall down.”

CHILD’S SCHOOL RECORD
OFFICIAL NO. 2 KINDERGARTEN – SMALL CLASS
NAME BO LIQIU, WEIGHT 29 lbs. HEIGHT 89 cm. (35 inches)
CHILD’S SCHOOL PERFORMANCE
Able to adapt very quickly to kindergarten life. Comes to school on time everyday. Asks for leave when needed. Able to play together with her little playmates. Likes to listen to stories. Can chant simple nursery songs. Can do morning exercise and play games. With teacher’s guidance, can do drawing exercises. Ability to get along independently has improved. Regularly washes her hands before eating and wipes her mouth afterwards. Can eat by herself. Noon nap normal. But usually drinks little water. Hope next semester to strive for even greater improvement.
TEACHER: ZHOU
HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD’S OPINION
SIGNATURE: BO DEXIAO

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 19 November 2009 · 6:45 am

One Child’s Language: at 27 months (and abroad)

Rachel’s command of Chinese is growing. She still doesn’t volunteer to speak any, but she understands simple Mandarin and Cantonese at school. Her teachers teach her Chinese and she teaches them English, correcting them if they make mistakes. In Chinese, she can count quickly to ten, and knows basic body parts, items of clothing, and animals. At home she rehearses songs from school. In fact, she is now able to carry a tune (as well as her parents at least) and is sensitive to rhythm and rhyme. She frequently wanders around singing songs and rhymes to herself.

She loves to recite the Mother Goose rhymes we read her. She knows Pease Porridge Hot and Eeny Meeny Miny Moe by heart, and objects if we don’t stop to let her fill in the rhyming words in many others that we read her. The Grand Old Duke of York is one of those she loves to help recite. One time her Daddy said “Eeny Meeny Miny Yes” and she responded by trying to make all the lines rhyme with yes. She goes crazy saying Goosey Goosey Gander. When Daddy recited a nursery rhyme destroying the rhyme and using Rachel’s worst pronunciation, she said, “No, that not right.” Then she recited the rhyme and declared, “That’s right.”

We have worried that her English pronunciation won’t improve quickly, since we are the only native speakers of English that she talks to, and we already understand her idiosyncracies. But lately she has begun to mind her /p/ and /b/ and /m/ sounds. One day she managed to put /b/ in bubble bath. Since then, she has been changing a few of her all-purpose /d/ and /t/ to /b/ and /p/ when they should be. The /g/ and /k/ sounds may not be far behind. Any sounds that Chinese and English share should get double reinforcement. But old pronunciation habits die hard. She still has to stop and think before saying her name with an initial /r/ rather than /d/.

She is still eager to read. She pretends to read things sometimes, moving her head as if she’s scanning the lines. She has also started to read Chinese, starting with the characters for Zhongshan City (中山市). She spots them on signs or city vehicles all over the place. We’re helping her with some basic ones like Fire (火), Woods (林), Person (人), Water (水), and the like. But right now she is more eager to sing and recite rhymes than to read letters. She recites rather than reads many of her favorite passages in books.

She knows clearly now that she is dealing with two separate languages, and she doesn’t object any more if we English speakers use Chinese with her. She elicits the names of the languages by counting in one language and then the other, asking “What Rachel saying?” after each series of numbers. She also knows how to ask “What that mean?” if she doesn’t know the English equivalent of a Chinese word. Her nose, which is often runny these days, she calls bizi as often as she calls it her nose.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 7 November 2009 · 8:19 pm

One Child’s Language: at 24 months (and abroad)

Rachel celebrated her birthday in China this year. We used the occasion to invite all of our sophomore class students over to our apartment for tea and snacks. Rachel was overwhelmed. But two people brought cakes (most of which we prevented ourselves and Rachel from eating) and she got to blow out two candles. Shortly after her birthday, she started going to the Number 2 Kindergarten in Shiqi town, Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. It is about a 10-minutes walk from home, but Rachel can stretch it into 30 or more minutes when she walks home. She examines puddles, ramps, steps, curbs, passing vehicles (especially walking tractors), the chickens in one front yard, and the regulars who wave at her or come out to touch her.

Culture shock: For a long time Rachel would just stick her thumb in her mouth and and ask us to pick her up when anyone else wanted to talk to her or pick her up. She has been subjected to a lot of physical and vocal attention here; we had expected as much. But she has gradually begun to deal with the attention a bit more confidently. After our students assault her, she will ask us “They just want to be Rachel’s friends?” She dodges or brushes aside most passing maulers now, and lets one or two of the more familiar people pick her up. But for the first two months or so, she was in deep culture shock and very fussy and clingy. She still won’t say “thank you” or “good-bye” to anyone in either Chinese or English.

It was as hard for us as it was for her the first day we dropped her off at kindergarten. It was really sink or swim. She had had some setbacks in her toilet-training because of all the travel and stress she went through just before her second birthday. The first week of kindergarten, she wet her pants at least once a day, she wasn’t napping the required three hours [!] each day, and she was clinging pretty close to the principal all day. But now, she talks happily about “Rachel’s new aunties” and “Rachel’s school” (it helps that Mama and Daddy also have a school), rarely comes home with wet clothes, and is almost always in a pleasant, curious, and talkative mood all the way home and into the evening. She enjoys us a lot more when she isn’t with us all day long. She’s had a rough time but she’s grown up a lot in the last two months. She won’t even suck her thumb (considered a vile habit in this dirty environment) while she’s at school anymore. It may get worse, but the terrible twos don’t seem so terrible now that she’s actually two.

Physical development: She is increasingly confident—even reckless—on her feet: running, climbing, jumping, sliding down long slides. She almost has a swagger when she walks by herself. She loves to swim. We’ve been several times to hotel pools and she’s enjoyed leaping or falling off the side into our arms. She has very good control in her hands now. She can put up one finger or two fingers easily, and just recently managed to put up three fingers (the last 3) on the first try. We were all quite proud.

Intellectual notes: She is delightfully curious about all the new things around us, and wants to “see” every noise she hears. She loves to stop and inspect the snails, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and butterflies we encounter in our walks. She has an amazing memory. She can remember exactly where she put something hours ago, can remember what she saw where on a previous walk, and can remember who gave her things. We’ll say “Do you want to walk on the sand?” And she’ll say “Rachel want to walk on sand with Rachel’s new pink shoes from Rachel’s Grandma Grandpa.” She often asks “What’s that from?”—even about the toothpaste.

One of her games is to tell you one thing (“That Winnie Pooh”), then tell you something contradictory (“That not Winnie Pooh”). If you react with appropriate surprise, she will exclaim delightedly, “Rachel tricking Mama!” She can keep it up until you have trouble feigning surprise. Daddy said to her one day, “Rachel’s a talking trickster and a walking tractor.” She adapted that to “Rachel trickster, Rachel tractor, Rachel walking tractor.”

Language notes: Over the past two months, Rachel has been filling in a lot of the unstressed words she hears between the major words: prepositions, pronouns, adverbs, and conjunctions. One week it would be from, the next week with, the next w’out. She hasn’t got the and a figured out, and still uses Rachel instead of I, me, my but her English is more and more grammatical. She has now got the /s/ sound under control, so she distinguishes Rachel and Rachel’s, but she still has trouble with /p, b/ and /k, g/. She also just recently managed to make her Dayto sound a little more like Rayto, but the old habit of saying Dayto will take a while to break. Recently she has been playing with doubling words: “This Rachel Rachel; that Daddy Daddy.” [In retrospect, I think this may have been prompted by Chinese usage in her kindergarten, where she was called Qiuqiu, from her Chinese name Liqiu ‘beautiful autumn’. She was greeted every day like a visiting celebrity, with shouts of Qiuqiu lai le ‘Qiuqiu has come!’—J.] Not much progress in Chinese yet, but she can count from 1 to 5 (sometimes 10) in Chinese, and can follow simple directions at school.

We are amazed by her eagerness to read. She knows all the letters of the alphabet by name. We bought her a little magnetic board with all 26 letters and she plays with it each time she sits on the potty. It makes for some long potty sessions. She’ll keep playing with the letters long after she has done her business. Her demand as soon as she sits down is, “Rachel want to play with these letters,” followed shortly now with “Spell something, spell something.”

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in Boston’s Chinatown.

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by | 7 November 2009 · 7:57 pm

One Child’s Language: at 22 months

For several weeks, durai (dry) was Rachel’s antonym for we’, diti, ‘ow (wet, dirty, ouch). She would talk about dirty and dry hands, or ouch (sore) and dry knees. Lately, she has started to use deen (clean) sometimes. Di and dido (big, little) sometimes occur instead of her old favorites wow, wee. She is beginning to use location words hia, dea, roro dea (here, there, over there), and when she bruises herself, she lets us know where to kiss by pointing and saying rai dea (right there), usually several times. Just today she started tagging otay?, dat rait? onto sentences to make them questions.

She does constant pattern drills, making the same sentence using Rachel one time, Mama the next, and Daddy the next—a standard substitution drill. She does endless repetition drills. We don’t drill her, she drills herself. She also does expansion drills: we say “Let’s brush our teeth” and she says Daydo dah Daydo dee’, Daddy dah Daddy dee’, Mama dah Mama dee’. If we tell her we’re going home, she’ll expand it to dodi Daydo ‘ous, Mama ‘ous, Daddy ‘ous (going to Rachel’s house, Mama’s house, Daddy’s house). And then, of course, she also does negation drills: we say “Not that!” and she says yes, dat; we say “Rachel drink water?” and she says Not Daydo dwin’ wawa; we say “Don’t throw your noodles” and she says yes, dwow noonoh. She never uses yes to answer simple questions, only to contradict a no. She’s definitely showing signs of nearing the Twos.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in the Boston Public Schools.

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by | 5 November 2009 · 4:38 pm

One Child’s Language: at 20 months

Reading is now the rage with Rachel. In one short week, she has nearly memorized Theodore LeSieg’s The Eye Book, one of the “Bright and Early Books for Beginning Beginners,” with a Cat-in-the-Hat trademark. Not that she can actually say all the words, but she knows what to expect from each page and can fill in at least the last word for every line. Of course, a person has to be familiar with her language and the situation in which she is using it to appreciate it because her articulation of consonants still has a long way to go. However, the vowels and the intonation are there. For example “airplanes in the sky” comes out as dayday die. Her other favorite books include Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, with its zillion little pictures to name, and Hand, Hand, Finger, Thumb, which features rhythmical text and monkeys drumming on drums. So she drums on an empty oatmeal box, not quite keeping beat with the text. She especially likes the line “Dum ditty, dum ditty, whack, whack, whack.”

She devised another game for herself involving books this week. From a big chair in our living room, she found out she could reach a stack of pocket books on a high shelf. Her routine is to pull one book off the stack, name the colors on its cover, open it up and “read” the numbers 1-5, lose it and put it down beside her, and then reach for the next one. Sometimes, she will try to put the books back on the shelf, too.

Her vocabulary and the speech sounds she uses change daily. We never know what words she considers manageable enough to try out. Once she tries something, she looks for ways to practice it over and over. She often talks quietly to herself saying things like: Daddy wey, Mama dey (Daddy’s away, Mama’s staying); Daydo ow, Daddy rey, Mama bdu (Rachel’s [toothbrush is] yellow, Daddy’s is red, Mama’s is blue). Her favorite topics of conversation are the color and size of objects and comments on who (mostly her) is doing what.

She loves to be asked silly questions like “Does Rachel have a tail?” and sometimes starts the silly game herself. For example, she will point to her rabbit’s tail asking us to name it, then point to herself and ask uh?, so we get the hint and ask the question. Language seems to be on her mind all the time; she even talks in her sleep. Her dad caught a glimpse of her attempt to communicate recently. As we left our apartment one evening, we met the family next door. They have a two-year old daughter. Rachel was standing face-to-face with the little girl and knew she was in a situation that called for some kind of linguistic interaction. She thought quickly, pointed to her shirt, and said bdu (blue)!

Of course, we are glad that books and language are important to Rachel now, but we are also glad to see her working on physical strength and dexterity. Her climbing has become more routine and confident. She will climb onto a box or chair and proclaim doe-day, which seems to mean something like “look at me.” She has been observing older children who can jump and hop for some time; now she is beginning to see what she must do to make a jump happen, though she can’t quite execute one yet. She likes to stretch and hang from the rings at the park.

We see signs of the stubbornness that accompanies the “twos.” Rachel uses no fairly frequently and often repeats Mama, no! Daddy, no! for no apparent reason. She repeats that latter often enough and reflexively enough that she sometimes gets tongue-tied. When she catches herself saying Mama no! to Daddy, she might try again with Dama no! or Madi mo! We think that we often find positive ways of encouraging her to do or not to do things, but of course, we don’t always succeed, and she gets input from other sources, too. She deliberately tests her limits: Yesterday, I let her throw paper wads and balls and clothes but drew the line at books. She tried it a couple of times but didn’t protest when I put the books out of reach. This morning she tried again, but when I put the books up again, she seemed to say, “Just checking.”

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in the Boston Public Schools.

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by | 5 November 2009 · 4:30 pm

One Child’s Language: at 19 months

Rachel has turned into a real neatnik these days. She not only informs us immediately when she has a “dudu” diaper, she also stops whatever else she is doing to close an open door, to push in a protruding drawer, to put down the toilet lid, or to clear the sidewalk of little twigs and gravel. She also shows a lot more initiative in trying to bring other aspects of her environment under control. She likes to choose one outfit over another when it’s time to dress. She starts fetching shoes and saying waw’ when she’s ready to go out. She heads for Uncle Barry’s car and says rye when she spots the car in our slot as she comes out the elevator. She’d rather push her stroller than ride in it when she’s feeling energetic.

One evening, she pushed the stroller almost all the way home (about 10 blocks) from the Italian ice cream shop we walked to. She tested every metal cover embedded in the sidewalk to see if it made any noise. If it didn’t, she would say no-o-o and move on. If it did, she would try stomping on it again several times. She also labelled every down-and-up driveway slope we passed over, with a down and an uh. (She also uses down and uh for upside down and rightside up, respectively.)

You may have guessed that language has begun to come thick and fast. We had thought that this might be the last complete listing of the words Rachel can produce, but she has already gotten ahead of us. She surprises us with at least one new word every day. She has even begun to talk in her sleep a bit. We’ll have to be content to list some of her favorites.

She can count to five, but tends to start with two unless you remind her. She likes the symmetry of tu, ti, tow, tai. She has the primary colors pretty well under control. Her favorite is doo (blue), followed by rey (red), oh (yellow), and dee (green). She has all of our names down pat: mama, dadi, and daydo. Her nasals, m and n, actually started when she named the nama (llama) that she petted at the zoo one day. Within a day or two, she started to rave about her mama, about checking the mayno (mail), about her nano (Anno’s Journey) book, and about things that aren’t true or don’t exist (no-o-o). So far, her use of no-o-o (it doesn’t exist) far outweighs her use of no-no-no (this is off-limits). That pleases us.

Some words are far enough beyond the frontiers of her pronunciation that she relies on sign language. Her word turn is signed by rotating her wrist and fingers. She uses that sign for revolve, twist, roll, turn over, turn around, turn a corner. When she’s feeling talkative, she signs turn and says wheel whenever any wheeled vehicle strikes her fancy. Open is signed with an open hand, close with a clenched fist. She will signal close before she closes doors, pushes in drawers, and restores seatbacks and tray tables to their upright position. She signs flash and squeak by repeatedly opening and closing her hand.

Rachel has also mastered several pairs of antonyms. One of her most charming pairs is wow (big) vs. wee (small). (Wee she picked up from her Three Bears book, wow probably from our comments about large spoonfuls on their way to her mouth.) She delights in comparing things wow and wee. Another pair, we’ and dwy, get pretty regular use at diaper-changing time. One pair consists of a spoken awake (wey’) and a signed asleep (the sh sign, but with forefinger across her forehead instead of her lips).

One time when she was playing in her crib, she composed a small compare-and-contrast sentence about two little stuffed gingerbread men. It is herewith quoted in full, with accompanying interpretation and commentary provided by a member of the rapt audience of one: rey wey’, oh sh [the last word was signed, not spoken]. The red gingerbread man was face up, the yellow one face down. (She puts her things to sleep by laying them face down.) Not quite “Give me liberty or give me death,” but a memorable utterance in its own time and place, nevertheless.

UPDATE: This child is now a 24-year-old teacher in the Boston Public Schools.

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