¡Qué descarada!

So, I've been asking "¿Inglés o Español?" before each bedtime story recently, and tonight Laniña wasn´t paying attention because she wanted to play tent with the blanket and so I just went on ahead in Spanish. Suddenly she poked her head out and asked "¿Inglés o Español?", so I asked her that same question. She had a wee think, smiled, and then answered "¡Inglés!"

Cheeky thing!

That said, I´m on hols at the minute, and she´s had a couple days off nursery and it is immediately noticeable that she is just automatically speaking more Spanish. This has come so effortlessly that it really reassures me that she will just automatically adjust her balance of language to suit her environment - I wonder what will happen when we go to Spain for a week?

Where's me?

Well, sorry it's been a while - I've been busy.

Thanks to the folks at Multilingualmunchkins for the encouragement.

Anyway, I did do a couple more blog entries in January, but i thought I would be clever and record them as audio podcasts, but I've run into problems with getting somewhere to host the files - I think I've got it sorted now, so you can expect to see (hear!) them here soon.

Laniña´s speech and language is improving every day - mostly in English! She´s got to the point of making cute grammatical mistakes, and when she hides she now has in fact left "Where´s me?" behind and has started to ask "Where´s my me?" instead!!

Her Spanish mistakes aren´t as cute, I´m afraid: wrong verb endings and she does still insist on calling me yo instead of tú (because I call myself yo of course!)

She speaks much less Spanish, but still uses certain words like biblioteca especially if it´s something that she does principally with me. When she clearly knows a word in both languages there is a definite delay as she chooses which one to use, and seems to look for reassurance afterwards. She is much more confident in English. This is only to be expected.

Periodically, though, she asks to see Español , which is the DVD of the Usbourne first Spanish book. And in the last week, I myself found one of her counting books so boring that I asked if she wanted it in Spanish - she enthusiastically did indeed want to hear it in Spanish! Now I have been asking if she wants her bedtime story-books ¿en inglés o en español? and she has responded Español every single time. Very encouraging. I don´t really translate the story, though - we just chat about the pictures on the page.

Up until now, while I have obviously been reading her Spanish books in Spanish, I´ve been reading her English books in English - I mean sometimes she really wants Green Eggs And Ham (good luck with trying to translate that one!). My concern is that I feel she will start to pay attention to the words soon and I really don´t want to mess up her reading! I´ll let you know how it goes...

¡Preparados, listos, YA!

So, Laniña has really come on in her English over the last few weeks, which is great. She has, however, started speaking English to me, which she never used to do. I get up to 70% English perhaps, though she still hangs onto her favourite Spanish words like niños - I don´t think she ever calls them children!

But we did have a wee Spanish breakthrough today: we were playing running up and down, saying Preparados, listos, YA (ready, steady, GO) and she started bossing me, saying who´s turn it was to say the words. And for the first time she got the idea of me/you correct!! Hooray!

(She should, of course, say me toca a mí - it´s my turn; or te toca a tí - it´s your turn. Instead, though, she has had a tendency to use me toca papá, trying to say Daddy´s go. Of course this is because me toca is what I say when it is my go, so she copies that. Logical, really!)

He fixed the car!

So, sometimes Laniña just babbles still, though increasingly it´s becoming clearer that some of what I can´t yet understand her saying is nevertheless an attempt to say something.

A couple of days ago, in the car, she said "wa wa wa wo coche" with definite emphasis on coche, meaning car, since that´s a word she has known for ages and knows well. So this was definitely some sort of sentence; I wondered what it meant...

She repeated it a few times, getting increasingly sure of what she was saying, while I became increasingly baffled - suddenly, just as she seemed about to give up, the penny dropped:

"OH, ha arreglado el coche" (What on earth? That mean´s He´s fixed the car)(!)
"¡SÍ, ha arreglado el coche!" Ana was delighted about this, and said it again a couple of times more, to make sure I got the point.

But really, where did that come from; was that really what she was saying? And it dawned upon me that, when she had first said it (it had taken me quite a while to catch on), we had in fact been passing by the garage, where the man had, indeed, fixed the car.

I guess I must have mentioned it, and somehow it just came back to her as we were passing! I chat over all sorts of random stuff when I´m with here, repeating myself a lot I guess, since my vocabularly would be more limited than that of a native speaker of Spanish. So it looks like my random chat is good - some of it sticks!

Fury!

Wow, interesting experience this afternoon - I was alone with Laniña; she was looking out the window and I was dictating notes into my mp3 player about an idea I had for another blog entry. Suddenly she began to shout at me, with great anger, "NO, PAPÁ STOP IT! STOP IT!"

I couldn´t really figure out what the problem was, until I began dictating again, only this time in Spanish - she suddenly calmed down.

This seemed bizarre at first, since she hears me speaking English all the time with her mother; but of course that´s what the problem was - her mother wasn´t there, Laniña thought I was speaking to her in English and it really freaked her out!

That´s probably good, right?

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.

NO!

Ok, this has little to do with Spanish or bilingualism, but I guess that other parents of toddlers between 2-3 years old might find it interesting to note that my daughter's favourite phrase at the moment is to shout, preferably at the most inopportune moment, "NO! STOP IT! DON'T TOUCH IT!"

When she's being calmer and cuter she likes to introduce us as: "This is the Mummy one and this Daddy one."

Ho hum... the joys of parenthood.