Speaking in tongues

Yesterday I read that by 30 months a typical child will have a vocabulary of 300 words and put sentences of 3-5 words together. At this point vocabulary then expands exponentially. The moral of the story I was reading was, watch what you say.

This reminds me of a funny moment in my childhood.

I was visiting my dad and we were driving in the car having a conversation. My then 3 year old half sister was sitting in the back seat. All of a sudden we heard “damn it” come from the back seat. Our eyes got big, we looked at each other, then back at my sister.

“damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it,” with a big smile on her face.

We look again at each other.

Me: “I didn’t say it, you did”

Dad: “No you did, I didn’t say it.”

Then we tried to figure out how to get her to stop saying this swear word before we got home and she said it in front of my step-mom. Of course everything we tried only made her say the word more often and LOUDER.

Eventually subjects changed, memory faded and luckily she didn’t say those words when we got home.

At this stage the mind is a sponge. It absorbs everything.

I’ve heard that before the age of 4 the child’s mind is completely open, without inhibition taking it all in. Therefore we really aren’t complicating matters by throwing in another language.

It’s true.

She gets it.

She understands everything I say.

And now the past few days she has started repeating words I say to her that are new.

She files them away, for use another day.

And the beauty is that she still doesn’t realize that she is learning two languages.

We’ve had plenty of arguments at the dinner table. She learned it’s a “Kastanie”, I say it’s a “Chestnut” oohh can she be stubbornly defiant as I tell her, “in daddy’s language it’s a chestnut” “KASTANIE”

(an odd side note to this story: Daddy is allowed to speak English & German however mommy is not. Stella does not like it when Mommy speaks English to Daddy. She can read or sing English but just not speak it. She always tells mommy to stop speaking.)

But sometimes the wires fire together and out of the blue she’ll answer me in English. Or she’ll throw an English word into a sentence. That word most of the time, one we didn’t know she knew.

She’s not afraid to talk (at least in front of us) and can string sentences upwards of 8 words together.

And this cognitive development develops at lighting speed.

In a new book there is an illustration of a bunch of animals carrying letters. She loves this picture and daddy or mommy singing the ABC song. In a matter of 4 days she’s learned the song.

First we sang the song to her.

All of a sudden she started singing “A-B-C-D” but was quiet the rest of the song.

The next day she would complete the next phrase such as:

Daddy: A-B-C-D

Stella: E-F-G

Daddy: H-I-J-K

Stella: L-M-N-O-P

And so forth.

When I came home tonight, she was singing the song by herself.

This simple example reminds me that we too can learn anything we want. We just have to open our minds, put any inhibitions away and have at it.

Because, you never stop learning.