Mishmash

Here's another general update about V's languages.

First of all, she is pretty comfortable in all language settings, especially Finnish and English. I have noticed a couple of times that when we are around Swedish speaking kids that she doesn't know, she doesn't try to talk to them. It seems like she is trying to figure out, "Hmmm. I am not quite sure what to say to these people." And yet she watches them with distinct interest, and she clearly understands what they are saying. Sometimes I feel like her use of languages impedes her willingness to get in and mix with other kids, because she is standing back, trying to relate to what she hears going on around her. For example, the other day I took her to a gymnastics class for toddlers, and she spent most of the time going around listening to what the other kids were saying, rather than playing, jumping and shouting the way they all did. There were Finnish, English and Swedish speaking kids there, and it seemed to kind of throw her off. Of course, this could just be her personality: she has always been a "thinker" rather than being the first kid to jump in and start doing stuff.

I never really hear her speak Swedish outside the context of our home, however, which I find interesting. It's as if she hasn't quite figured out that this language transfers to other situations, as well--like English and Finnish do. This will surely change: we recently made the (very difficult) decision to send V to Swedish speaking nursery school here in Helsinki, followed by education in Swedish, so I fully suspect that Swedish will eventually be her dominant language.

The amount of vocabulary that comes out in all her languages is really something. She mentions words and names of people that she has encountered only once, and sometimes many weeks previously. Where do kids this age store all this information? It amazes me. This is kind of a weird example, but the other day I pulled something out of the fridge (can't remember what it was) and said, smelled it, and said, "Oh, this looks like it got old." V looked at it and said, "It's oldy." I didn't understand what she meant. "Do you mean it's old?" I asked. I could see the wheels turning in her head for a second, then she said, "It's moldy. Moldy." She had been searching for that word and couldn't find it, but then she accessed it and used it in exactly the right circumstances. A couple of points worth mentioning here: I don't know when I had ever used the word moldy around her, but clearly I had at some point, and second, I would like to defend my housekeeping skills and say that she was actually wrong--the food was not moldy!

The sounds are coming out quite on target in all her languages. I think the sound that gives her the hardest time is the Finnish/Swedish r, which is rolled like it would be in Spanish or Italian. Depending on the word, she says this sound either as an [l] or a [d]. In English, however, she says the r sound perfectly.

The other sound that seems to give her a hard time is s, if it comes at the beginning of a word before another consonant. She leaves the s sound out, so that, for example, "stinky" is tinky and "Steve" is teve. We've been practicing this lately, though, and she can produce the s sound if we really focus on it: "ssssssssssstinky."

I have noted previously that her grammar had lacked target-like negation and use of first and second person pronouns. This has changed. Only once in a while does she produce a non-target negative statement. The other day, for example, she came up with an interesting one. Our friend who helps us with the cleaning was here, and V likes to follow her around the house saying, "She's so busy. She's so busy." This particular day, she came to me and said many times, "Mamma not so busy." OK, this is quite an embarrassing observation for me, but what I want to point out is that it's still pretty close to the target: She is just missing the copula -s.

V can count to 8 in English, but not in other languages.

It's interesting that she knows her letters of the alphabet in Swedish, but not in English. She spends quite a bit of time with her dad looking at her alphabet magnets and also books in Swedish. This is one domain in which she transfers labels from one language to the other: she hasn't yet figured out, it seems, that the letters have different names in her languages. In Swedish, for example, the letter "i" is called ee, like the English letter "e." You can see where this would be potentially confusing, but I'm sure she'll work it out eventually.

One thing that amazed a visitor we had here recently was how V has different animal sounds for each language. I guess I had already gotten used to that fact, but it blew him away! Speaking of this friend, he happened to be travelling with a banjo (you have to love someone who comes from New York carrying a banjo!), and, naturally, V was blown away by that. She got her very first banjo lesson, and then, after a few minutes, she left the room, saying, "I have a banjo, too." Well, we were all very curious to see what she considered "her" banjo to be.

She soon came back into the room blowing into her little toy clarinet. It's easy to see the logic she was using: "A banjo is something that plays music, so this thing must be a banjo, too."

"Shhhhhh!"

V has a constant monologue going on, and I am not sure if it is because she is playing with language, or if she is actually trying to interact. Probably the former. It's nonstop babble, with everything coming out of her mouth that seems to enter into her head. One surprising aspect of her babble is the number of names that come out. She still repeats--actually, very often--the name of her little friend, our upstairs neighbor, who moved away now close to three months ago. That represents something like twenty percent of V's short life, so I would have thought that she would have moved on to new concepts, but apparently the name and idea are seared into her consciousness.

She also repeats the names of people she has only met once or twice, and, again, quite some time ago. For example, Tessa was the name of a little girl that V played with for one day only, and that was about two months ago. Today when V was falling asleep, she was saying, "Tessa, Tessa, Tessa." Does she just happen to fall upon the sound sequence and remember the name, or does something, in fact, prompt the memory of Tessa? I guess there is no way of knowing.

V seems to enjoy putting things into categories. I have noted previously in this blog, for example, that she likes to point out shapes. "Star. Ball. Heart. Moon." Lately, she also enjoys noticing body, face parts, and clothing on other people, toys, and from all sorts of pictures: "Fingers. Toes. Mouth. Eyes. Hat. Boots. Foot." Fingers are especially exciting. She often looks at her own, and then, as if ecstatic to discover that they are still there, she exclaims, "Fingers!"

Her predilection for categorizing things according to shape and appearance has led to conundrum when it comes to numbers. She has a book she really likes called, "Let's Count Baby." The premise of the book is probably easy enough to catch from the title. For the past couple of days, she has been interested in the actual numbers that are printed on the pages. She will point to the figure "8" and say "eight." Then she'll point to the figure "7" and say "eight." So then I correct her, saying, "No, that's a seven." So she'll say, "Seven," and then point back at the "8" and say "seven." And so on. I suppose this is the first time she has encountered a break from the usual pattern: even though these things (the numbers) all look more or less the same, they actually all have different names. And this seems to be confusing her! I am not sure how to deal with this, because I don't want her to think that a "7" is called "eight," and so on. But I guess I should just calm down. After all, she is only sixteen months old, and I am sure she has plenty of time to learn what the numbers are called.

In other news, she has a few new adjectives and adjective phrases: clean, nice, all gone. She also says "Nam!" if she really likes some food she is eating, so I guess that counts.

One of her favorite routines is to go through what all of the animals say. Quite typical, of course. What cracks me up about her, though, is when we start asking what certain people say. It doesn't matter who it is -- Mamma, Daddy, her sister, grandma, babysitter, even our dog, Cava -- the answer is always the same: "Shhhhh!" You would think we spend most of our time telling her to be quiet, which is most certainly not the case!

I am not sure what else to note about her languages other than English. Only to say that they are developing, but at a less noticeable pace than her English. Of course my reports are biased, as well, because she speaks English with me. However, I do hear her speaking enough Swedish to her dad and sister and enough Finnish when we are out in the city to know that these other languages do exist for her. Yesterday, for example, when we were in town, she was saying over and over to people in shops and so on, "Kiitos!" which means 'thank you.'