Vacaciones

Well, it's the holidays and that means that Laniña gets to see - and hear - a lot more of me. I´ve been off work for about two weeks now and have noticed two fascinating, yet probably quite obvious things:

First week off and I was away on my own, minus partner and sproglet. When I returned I noticed that Laniña´s ENGLISH had improved tremendously. Interesting. Her English is within normal parameters of development, yet my partner and I both feel that Laniña is slightly behind some of her contemporaries. This may or may not have been caused by my speaking Spanish to her, and now it seems that that is indeed the case, since without Spanish her English leaps ahead. This is perhaps kinda worrying, yet also reassuring since it also suggests that her English can catch up pretty easily should I ever decide to stop with the Spanish (and at this stage, I don´t think she´ll let me - nor do I feel inclined to!).

This week, however, I´ve been hanging out with Laniña loads. And guess what? That´s right! Her Spanish has improved tremendously! What a surprise. She has started replying to me in Spanish again, where she had started basically mostly talking to me in English, and has been attempting longer sentences. So, the stunning conclusion of all this is that the more input in a language my child gets, and the more opportunities to speak, the better she gets at it! Hardly a world-shaking revelation, I´m sure you´ll agree, but nevertheless I find it both reassuring and encouraging!

A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism

So, I sometimes get uncomfortable about the fact that we're really just making a lot of our bilingual-metholodogy (so to speak) up as we go along. There are several good sources of advice, including multilingual munchkins (which is a yahoo email newsgroup or something) and a couple of friends who are doing similar things. But at the same time, all kids are different, and all our situations are different, so it's difficult to make direct comparisons.

Therefore it's nice to find a book which pretty much answers, at length and with considerable academic clout, most of the questions which a person might have about issues surrounding bilingualism. I recommend it highly. Colin Baker himself is not only an academic studying issues around bilingualism, but has a bilingual family of his own in North Wales, so you can sense both points of view, academic and personal, throughout the book.

The only thing is that there isn't much about folks in my situation who are bringing up a child through a non-native second language, but nevertheless it was well worth the cover price!

uh oh...

Discussing what bowl to have breakfast in:

Laniña: Yeh, a verde bowl. An in Spanish is GREEN!!

ummm... nope, sorry - other way round! Shame, she seemed so pleased with herself...

Hide and Speak!

Hide and speak Spanish (humph, can't believe they've no picture!)

So, Laniña generally gets me to read something in Spanish these evenings as a bedtime story (that said, I did have to read Peppa Pig in English last night - she's only three; she's allowed to be fickle! And I'm not prepared to pretend that I can't speak English when I clearly can!)

But there's one book in particular that she often asks for, and she just calls it "Español" This book is Hide and Speak Spanish. It has a nice illustration and simple sentences on the left; on the right are boxes with specific pictures of individual items from the large picture, alongside other boxes with the names of those items. There are also two flaps so you can cover up either the words or the pics. We don´t do that, though.

I just read the sentences and point at the big picture. Then we go down the list of items on the left and I say the words. Laniña repeats what I say. She really seems to enjoy it. What is interesting is that when I say "El mar" she repeats "mar". If the word is "La calle", she repeats "calle". "La cama" becomes "cama". You get the idea. She leaves out the definite article, the the-word, if you know what I mean.

What is cool about this, is that it means she has sort of figured out that el and la are separate words, and can therefore be left off, sometimes. I mean, when I say "La cama" it actually sounds like one word - lacama. Therefore, she should repeat the whole sound - but she has somehow spotted the pattern of els and las and knows that there´s comething special about them.

Another interesting thing happened the other night, but I´m going to keep you in suspense for now...

Peterson and the missing blog post...

First, the missing blog post: during one of those periods when I haven't been posting very much, I experimented a bit with making this blog a podcast and recorded a couple of very interesting (if I do say so myself) pieces before running into a couple of difficulties. I've now sort of figured out how to resolve these, but only by moving the whole thing away from blogger or by paying for a service to host all the media files. Anyway, I haven't got round to either yet and instead had intended to simply type up what I had recorded.

Ho hum... still waiting...

Well, I'm gonna summarise one for you now. Hooray! Because it now has a new development. Great.

Basically, it was about how, just before Christmas, Laniña finally met a real Spanish-speaker. I mean she had met real Spaniards before, but hadn´t really been old enough to register it. So he naturally spoke to her in Spanish, having heard me talking in Spanish. Well, Laniña like TOTALLY freaked out. Somewhere between outrage and terror. I mean she has been exposed to plenty of Spanish on DVDs and the like, so one might have assumed she´d be pretty cool with the idea that other people apart from her and her dad speak Spanish, but no - the real thing was too much for her!

Didn´t really bode well for the future, eh? But we struggled on anyway.

And then Peterson came to visit yesterday. Peterson Toscano. You can google him, he´s lovely. The important thing about him from our point of view here, though, is that Peterson speaks very good Spanish. And Laniña hasn´t minded at all. In fact, she seems to have really rather enjoyed it. In fact she said, "I love Peterson!"

So, she now has come more to terms with the idea of Spanish being a real external language and is now happy with the idea that it´s something other people do too, not just something special between her and her dad.

Cool. It´s nice to feel we´re making progress!

Dartacan

OK, hands up if you remember Dogtanian?? If you've been paying close attention, you'll notice that my video bar (above) has changed recently, and now features highlights from that masterpiece of animation from my childhood! In Spanish!! Did you know that it was made in Spain? That's why the English lip-synching was so dodgy - the cartoons are really speaking Spanish!!

The original name of the show was Dartacan y los tres Mosqueperros. Dartacan is a word-play which works in much the same way as Dogtanian. So, I downloaded the whole series (in Spanish, of course), looking forward to re-living part of my childhood with my daughter... but she doesn't really care for it I'm afraid.

Ho hum, I guess they all have their own personalities after all. Or maybe she's just a bit young yet. Yes, I'll try again when she's older!

This is the link to the DVD, but as far as I can tell it's only in English, which is why I downloaded it (shhh... don't tell anyone!):

Pretty car!

No, she didn't say that Not really.

Laniña was in the supermarket car park with her mother a couple of days ago and they saw a car which was a truly horrific shade of orange.

"Look at that car!" said mother, "What colour is that?"
"s orange" said Laniña. Clever girl.
"And what colour is our car?"
"Silver. An in Spanish is plata"

Well, goodness me. It is, too! Clever girl, indeed! I did say she was becoming more aware of there being more than one language, didn't I?!

Totally cheered me up, it did.