Speaking our language
May. 14th, 2013 12:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
olorielBy the way, if you're wondering about the strange gap between "Felix can now say [Word XYZ]" and between "Felix is producing whole sentences", that's because the shift from one-word utterances to two-word sentences happened so quickly that I didn't even find the time to record it. In Language Acquisition studies, I've heard this described as the (metaphorical) bursting of a (metaphorical) dam, and it really feels like that. About three weeks back, he began to reproduce pretty much every word he heard (if he found it interesting enough to do so), even long or difficult ones (with long breaks between syllables: Dand-kachta (Sandkasten, "sandbox"), Voh-hang (Vorhang, "curtain"); and then one week later, he started putting them all together. First there were phrases like "More milk" or "No hunger"; then came verb phrases such as "Come here/along" or "Open door". When I put sunscreen on his face, he would say "Sun shines" (more like "dun chines", actually, because [z] (in German, Sonne begins with a "soft S") and [ʃ] are still giving him a hard time). Then came the complex concepts: "Yesterday Sunday!" He tried combining opposites: "off! not on!" He no longer simply imitated animal noises, but learned the names to go with them, too (dog, cat, sheep, horse, peacock, birdy, i.e. the most common animals in the neighbourhood). He says "flower" (more like "fower") but has also learned some specific flower-names ("tahn" for Löwenzahn (dandelion) for example). He has a pretty good intuition for the "relevant" parts of an utterance - when we say something, he tends to choose content words for repetition, and among those, most often the verb, no matter where in the sentence it is hiding. When he doesn't know the name of something or just wants to hear it again, he goes Mama, da! Wort! ("Mommy, there! Word!")...
He remembers stuff he was told weeks ago, too, and suddenly reproduces them now to everybody's surprise.
His pronunciation, of course, is adorably childish; some sounds he can't produce at all, so he replaces them with others - [z] with [d] or [f], [s], [ʃ], [ks] with [ç] (he calls himself "Feych" XD) - or leaves them out entirely (as with [l] or [r] - he says "Ha-oh" for Hallo (hello) or "Na-oh" for 'náro, our cat). He randomly ends words in [a:], either replacing the word ending or appending [a:] to the word ending (the other cat, Mr. Darcy, is "Dahchah"; kämmen, "to comb", is "kemmnah"; Harke, "rake", is "Hahkah"). Or he mercilessly cuts syllables, like saying "dienung" ("trole") for Fernbedienung (remote control) or "fant" for Elefant.
But he is trying very hard - when he is displeased with the way a word came out, he'll repeat it until he feels he got it right (or as right as possible). He's also learning a lot of useless words (for instance, last Thursday he picked up "Ascension Day"; how often is he going to need THAT until, well, Ascension Day next year? Oh well, he's still got a lot of free storage space in his brain... and to be fair, the German word (Himmelfahrt) isn't quite as useless as the (Latinate) English, as Himmel just means "sky" or "heaven" and Fahrt just means "journey". So it's just the specific compound that's useless and he can recycle its parts anytime...).
Unfortunately, when he is tired or angry, he still resorts to screaming or wordless complaints, and depending on how frustrated he is, he refuses to articulate the problem - no matter how much we explain that it's much easier to help when he tells us what's wrong instead of keeping us guessing.
But still, how far he's come! The baby days really are over.
He remembers stuff he was told weeks ago, too, and suddenly reproduces them now to everybody's surprise.
His pronunciation, of course, is adorably childish; some sounds he can't produce at all, so he replaces them with others - [z] with [d] or [f], [s], [ʃ], [ks] with [ç] (he calls himself "Feych" XD) - or leaves them out entirely (as with [l] or [r] - he says "Ha-oh" for Hallo (hello) or "Na-oh" for 'náro, our cat). He randomly ends words in [a:], either replacing the word ending or appending [a:] to the word ending (the other cat, Mr. Darcy, is "Dahchah"; kämmen, "to comb", is "kemmnah"; Harke, "rake", is "Hahkah"). Or he mercilessly cuts syllables, like saying "dienung" ("trole") for Fernbedienung (remote control) or "fant" for Elefant.
But he is trying very hard - when he is displeased with the way a word came out, he'll repeat it until he feels he got it right (or as right as possible). He's also learning a lot of useless words (for instance, last Thursday he picked up "Ascension Day"; how often is he going to need THAT until, well, Ascension Day next year? Oh well, he's still got a lot of free storage space in his brain... and to be fair, the German word (Himmelfahrt) isn't quite as useless as the (Latinate) English, as Himmel just means "sky" or "heaven" and Fahrt just means "journey". So it's just the specific compound that's useless and he can recycle its parts anytime...).
Unfortunately, when he is tired or angry, he still resorts to screaming or wordless complaints, and depending on how frustrated he is, he refuses to articulate the problem - no matter how much we explain that it's much easier to help when he tells us what's wrong instead of keeping us guessing.
But still, how far he's come! The baby days really are over.
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Date: 2013-05-14 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2013-05-15 08:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-15 09:35 am (UTC)Ich ärger mich immer, wenn ich es nicht schaffe, eine Entwicklung aufzuschreiben. Denn später erinner ich mich da auch nicht mehr dran...
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Date: 2013-05-15 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-15 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-15 02:28 pm (UTC)