As Anasooya's vocabulary gets richer and richer she has now started moving towards achieving the next milestone - Speaking a complete sentence.
By the way, she doesn't use too many signs or gestures while talking, except for those naively babyish ones. Coming back to speaking meaningful sentences, here is the one that she says very often: "Meenu Tata Poyi". This means Meenu went out.
Meenu is her cousin. Well 'Tata' is the generic word that suggests a journey, going outside the house, or simply a walk around the park. This doesn't apply to only CI children, but for any kid of age 1 year or so, well at least in our place(Kerala) in India. Three cheers for Anasooya on her first three word sentence!
Now she knows how to make other variations to this like "Appooppa/Ammooma Tata Poyi". Well, Appooppa and Ammoomma mean Grandpa and Grandma in Malayalam, the language that we speak.
I am sure that when she reaches the age of going to kindergarten or primary school, I will be adding another post to this blog or start a discussion elsewhere on this issue of teaching CI kids multiple languages. Maybe it could be my next post. As an early preview I can only tell that this is an advantage and disadvantage of living in India. For example, I can read "and" write as many as 5 languages. English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil. English is the ubiquitous language, Hindi is spoken mostly in Northern states and every South Indian state has got 1 language of its own. This may be compared with Europe and some of these states are much bigger than many of the European countries.
Below is a recent picture of her with the same background of the wooden door as in the photo that you see in my first post that was taken a year ago... She's grown taller and a lot of events happened in between...(Shhhh!!! :-)) Hope she smiles always like this. I will keep posting a photo with this same background every year and it is going to be very interesting :-)
4 comments:
Delighted to read about her progress.
I feel learning mutliple (at least two) languages should not be a problem for her. She will be exposed to malayalam at home. From school, in due time, she will learn to speak and write in english.
Do you know if there are studies done to find if children, post-CI, find certain languages easier to master than others?
That is a very interesting qustion. But I haven't heard anything like any particular language being easier for children with CI to learn. May be we don't have any proper statistics on this yet. However, as you know, Malayalam is the toughest of Indian languages to pronounce. But that is only about pronunciation not about hearing. So I would assume that she has cracked the toughest nut when she says "zha" as in Mazha or puzha!
Pratheesh
She is so cute. And congratulations on her first sentence - very impressive. Please keep us osted on her progress.
Nicky xx - Tom's mum
Thanks Nicky!
The next time I will record Anasooya say this in her own words :-)
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