February 28, 2004
Sponging it up
For the longest time I was worried about Alan's apparent speech delay. It took me a while to figure out that it was the move to Bucharest and the new baby which had rendered him speechless for a while. At the moment he's making up for those six months of stagnation with a vengeance.
Which got me thinking...
He and I both are learning Romanian. We both understand a lot more than we speak, but I speak more than he does (this is generally true).
The question is whether he understands more than I do. This is hard to quantify but every day experience shows that this might well be the case. It also seems that his active vocabulary includes many words that I have never heard - mostly play and kid words like shovel, sandbox, swing, etc.
This little guy is currently memorizing more vocabulary than I do. Granted, I don't actually sit down and study but neither does he. However, he is learning new words at an astonishing speed. In three languages.
(Mind, he does become monolingual sometimes. Usually when we're telling him something he doesn't want to hear. "Alan, don't touch that!" "Da?")
Meanwhile, our day-to-day language with him is becoming an odd mishmash of English, German, and Romanian -- a sort of creole. For "hand" he says māna, the Romanian word. For "please", he says the German bitte. So if he walks up to me with his jacket and says "Mun-ah yack-eh bid-deh", I immediately understand that he wants me to put his hand through the sleeve of his jacket.
But I doubt anyone else would.
Posted by claudia at February 28, 2004 10:06 AMHi,
Not really a comment, just a comparison:
My 4 year old spoke mostly Serbo-Croatian until roughly the age of 2 and a half (mind you, we were living in the Middle East then and his babysitters were speaking Tagalog and/or English to him and he seemed to have understood most of it!), after which he switched entirely to French, especially when he started daycare. I still speak only Serbo-Croatian at home, but the kids reply mostly in French now ... and that's alright, I guess. In a few months, when we move again, they'll be introduced to Spanish and I have no doubts that they will pick it up very quickly.
Speaking about sponging it up ...
Dragana