The big joke around our house several months ago was that Hiro-hanani was bi-lingual! Yes, he can say two words! Not mama or dada, but his first two words were
hot!!!! and
hai (yes in Japanese), so indeed he could not only say two words, but they just happened to be in two different languages.
He's been communicating for a while verbally, but only in terms of animal noises...As in:What does a sheep say? BAAA, so this didn't really count.
My mother spends 4 days a week with him and she only speaks to him in Japanese, and we only will let her read Japanese books, so it's natural that he is beginning to say things in two languages. My best friend
Rob, gave us a lot of Dutch books that we used to read to Hiro. Chaim apparently sounded Swedish when he read them, and I sounded German, in either case, we were reading it all wrong. We decided to give up on Dutch, and wait for Rob to come babysit.
Hiro-hanani has a favorite sitting-on-the-toilet book- a lovely graphically illustrated nature book by
Charley Harper. When ever he wants to go sit on the toilet, he calls for "Hapa! Hapa!" But he would sometimes say "Happa,Happa" when looking at his nature catalogue of leaves and rocks and Chaim was a bit confused. "Wow, Hiro is making a connection between Charlie Harper and all of nature! what an advanced thinker our son is!", he told me one day. Then I realized as I listened closely and watched Hiro point out leaves in the nature catalogue, that Happa is Japanese for leaf. And so, Chaim is learning Japanese through Hiro. I can speak pretty much up to a 6 year old level, so we are set for a while. But we have to really listen closely and play- "mama, dada, what language am I speaking now?"
For instance nan-na means banana and nen-ne means to sleep in Japanese. Not to be confused with nin-nin (ninjin- carrot in Japanese)
There is a lot of frustration and parental shrugging and pointing to things and each other in our house. Hiro gets exasperated when we don't understand what he is trying to tell us, and will run up to an inanimate object such as a chair or pillow and bite it when he can't contain his irritation with us. I can almost understand the frustration recalling when I was trying to buy fruit in a Paris supermarket. I got 3 or 4 plums and put it in a bag and walked to the line to pay for them. Everyone on the way to the line and in line pointed at the plums and was trying to tell me something...were they good? were they not good? don't buy them? too expensive?? I kept trying to ask them what? in my very limited French. Finally I got up to the cashier frustrated and she spoke calmly pointed to something across the store. I wanted to cry from dismay and embarrassment. Still not understanding what she wanted me to do, I just left the store without purchasing them. Later I was told that I was supposed to weigh them myself.
It's fascinating to witness someone learning language; not leaning a foreign language but just learning how to communicate. It's fun to watch the concentration wrinkles appear on the forehead as his brain works to make connections between things, objects and labels. A tur-tle is a turtle, but any shell can called a tur-tle as well. One of the earlier
favorite books shows a gorilla kicking, so when we see a gorilla in a zoo, on t.v. anywhere, we all say KICK! and kick the air.
We slow down and understand our own speech impediments and afflictions with pronunciations. Hiro-hanani will often pick up the strongest syllable the first few tries, and will sometimes repeat that syllable to create a new word. Thus orange (the fruit) is O or mimi (mikan in Japanese) and a door is dodo. A melon is mei and so is eye glasses (megane- in Japanese). So just as in adult speech it all has to do with context.
But often when he says something, Chaim and I will have him repeat it several times, then look at each other and ask "what language do you think that was?" and secretly we hope he doesn't end up with a Queens accent.
