Saturday 15 December 2007

Lingua-franca





Max is real smart.

I have come to figure out the way Max talks and have started my training for his speech. Not that there is anything wrong with his pronunciation, i.e. buck teeth or lisping. It's just that when he started making sense to us, he was happily communicating with single syllable words/sounds.

So, for example, he easily name animals:

fen = (ele)phant
raff = (gi) raffe
lern = lion
po = (hip)po
dawl = (croco)dile
ger = (ti)ger
ter = (hams)ter

Of late, I realised he can actually say words of two and three syllables. But for a lot of things, because we have been so used to how he speaks and know what he is referring to, he still happily uses his baby talk on us. Obviously it takes less work on the tongue. Hence, today, I made it a point to make him repeat and speak properly. So the list above was on the corrected speech list. Other words includes Micah, camel, gingerbread-man, noodle and fishball, and a few more I just don't remember right now.

So Mommy's work with Max now is to make sure he speaks well and not be smart and lazy and get away with just making sounds understood only by us. After all, we don't want to have to be his interpreter in days to come.


By the way, he always gets away with being naught from Grandpa because Grandpa thinks he is "still small", but Mommy, Daddy and Grandma know what are the tricks up his sleeves.

2 comments:

Ann said...

oossshhh....good that you noticed it. Sometimes we are so used to their lingo, we don't realise that it is "wrong". IN fact if we are not aware, we start talking in their lingo instead of correcting them!

My boy talks to me so much more when I talk in his lingo. Sigh...

Moomykin said...

ann,

Talking to babies: You can talk our lingo but use high pitch. It really strikes a chord in them. And from a friend who is a speech therapist, she says that really helps children talk faster.

With our boys, we don't always use the simplest words, but sometimes complex words, and that's how we fing Micah, especially, developing his vocabulary and maturity in understanding the world around him.

With Micah, it's actually quite scary. He repeats everything Mommy says, especially all the scoldings he gets, and repeats them to Max and even Mommy!!