Joke/a peek inside the Spanglish-speaking toddler's brain

________________________________
> From: Speedbump
> Subject: Joke/a peek inside the Spanglish-speaking toddler's brain
> Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2013 14:43:05 -0700
>
> Me: "One, two."
> Baby: "One, me!"
>

UGH

Yet another list for me, but for y’all, but for myself

• http://multitonguekids.blogspot.com/
• http://babybilingual.blogspot.com/
• http://wannajugarwithmigo.blogspot.com/

Also:

• Bringing Up Baby Bilingual by Jane Merrill, unfortunately out of print, 1984; too old for an ISBN; currently >$150 on Amazon.
• The Bilingual Family: A Handbook for Parents by Edith Harding and Philip Riley
  

LUCKY BONUS: Multilingual parenting FAQ

Bringing up a bilingual child is ordinary, not unusual. My own experience of child bilinguals has been mainly in Singapore and India. In these countries (and many others, especially in Asia and Africa) speaking more than one language is taken for granted. Most children grow up in families where two or more languages are spoken, in communities where they hear many languages every day.

In Singapore nearly all children come to nursery school at age 3 already able to speak 2 languages. Many can speak 3. A child growing up with only one language is quite rare.

If you live in a place where there is a clear dominant language in the society, which is the language of the children your child will be playing with, or which is the language of education, you can be sure your child will learn that language. YOU don't need to worry about it at all. If you speak a language that is not used much in the community you live in, and especially if you use the dominant community language with your partner, you are going to have to work hard to develop your child's skills in that language, especially if you and your partner speak in the community's dominant language.

Hyperpolyglots may begin with talent, but they aren't geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are drudgery to normal people.

I'm missing all this

________________________________
> From: Speedbump
> Subject: Sorry, I'm too impatient to find the right keys all the time
> on my mom-s computer
> Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 22:35:50 -0800
>
>
> > > Siempre ha dicho "casco" en español. Pero "kicking" en inglés.
> >
> > Studies have shown that bilingual children usually go for the easier
> word initially.
>
> Mostly that's been the case for The Baby - pan instead of bread, dog
> instead of perro - but there are a few things where he goes for one or
> the other because he likes the word more. I get the impression he finds
> it more fun to say, or funnier. Or sometimes because he hears it for
> the first time (or notices it more specifically) at a moment when he's
> having lots and lots of fun. So, like, he says "calcet'in" and
> "zapato", even though "sock" and "shoe" are much easier and he can
> actually say them, because he thinks, or thought, before he was saying
> them all the time, that they were funny. (And "calcet'in" is pretty
> funny to say!) And he now says "papilla", whereas before he never even
> tried saying cereal or mush or porridge at all, because the other 
> babies were visiting and he was all gleeful and bouncy and
> wanting to repeat everything everyone said no matter what. Sometimes he
> says both. Half the time,, instead of one or the other, he-ll say
> "come!Ven!Come! Ven!"
>
> He also switched from saying mam'a to saying mommy a month or two back,
> but that was very obviously because he suddenly heard everyone
> referring to me as mommy, whereas in Europe, nobody but me did.
>
> The overriding thing I've noticed with him so far is that if he can-t
> say a word all the way right, he'll take some consonant from the word
> that most grabs his attention, which is definitely not always the first
> letter of the word, and say all the vowels right, but put that one
> consonant in for every consonant sound. So Santa Claus is Kakakaus.
> And, actually, zapato is papapo and calcet'in tatet'in.
>
> Then he gets these really cute solutions sometimes for when he can-t
> say a word. Like he-s been able to say "big" for a long time, but can't
> say "small" or "little", so for when he doesn't want to use a sign,
> he's started saying "baby", for "little".
>
> Perhaps one of the funniest mispronunciation of his is that for
> whatever reason he can't say "white", he says "whitey", with a really
> strong T.
>
> And just yesterday he started being able to make the F sound a little.
> Before he just made a really exaggerated S!
>
> And he still gets really, really happy whenever he hears words he knows
> in songs. It-s like he-s surprised and happy to know that the man or
> woman singing knows that word, too. :)