Pronunciation

Laniña´s pronunciation has become pretty good. Clear and distinct, where a year ago she might have mumbled or otherwise failed to pronounce certain sounds or words correctly. This is in both English and Spanish, I mean.

But now she seems to have most sounds pretty well mastered in both languages - and she´ll not be 4 until December! Some more tricky words still cause difficulties, of course, but she´s doing OK.

One thing is still causing a noticeable difficulty, though: She still can´t to the "rr" tongue-trill which is so important and distinctive in Spanish. I´m not too bothered at the minute since I have read that this can cause even young native Spaniards trouble and some are 5 or 6 years old before they master it!

I have recently received one good piece of advice - thanks (you know who you are!). And it is to practice it my imitating the sound of a car: brrm brrm!!

I started this the other day and Laniña enjoyed it very much!!

(She still can´t do it though!!)

Pronunciation

Laniña's pronunciation has been getting clearer over the last weeks and months. Sometimes, though, that just makes her mistakes easier to spot. She quite frequently gets consonants or whole syllables mixed round - two examples came up yesterday:

in English, naming plastic fruit for her granny -
[apple] "apple"
[banana] "banana"
[pear] "a fruit" (!)
[lemon] "melon"

Granny thought that she thought the lemon really was a melon, but I think she just got the sounds mixed up.

Granny also gave her a new dressing gown, which I have been calling (hope it's right) in Spanish una bata. But Laniña says "tapa".

Also, she still leaves off the initial consonant to some words "wimming" for swimming, for example. Well, we´re not running for speech therapy yet, but just keep an eye on it maybe.