Thursday 9 April 2009

¡Ven!

So, I was out of the country for a week and usually when I'm out of the picture for a while Laniña uses markedly less Spanish. This time, however, things were markedly different:

Laniña and her mother were in the playpark and chanced to meet another young chap from Laniña's nursery class. They have had an ongoing competitive game going for a while of the "My x is better than yours" sort of thing. So they ran around a bit and then Laniña wanted her friend to come over, so of course she shouted, "Come over here!" and then, out of nowhere, she declared, "and I can speak Spanish: ¡Ven! ¡Ven!" Which is, of course, completely correct.

There was also the incident where she made her mother pretend to be me and mother had to say "Hola, ¿qué tal?"

Her pronunciation of Spanish is notably improving. While she still doesn't use or be exposed to at all as much Spanish as I would like, at four-and-a-half years old she at least does seem to be aware of herself as a bilingual person. And that's good.