Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Vocabulary list

A friend of mine told me today that her son knows 75 words. I was sort of taken aback by this. She's counted? How do you count? Meaning, what do you count as a word they know? Do you count words that they'll repeat after you, or words that they clearly know and say when you've said them recently, or only words that they come up with spontaneously and appropriately?

Well, if we're saying only the last category, here goes, in no particular order. Barak can say:

Abba, Imma, Barak, Esther, Emese (the cat), Arnie (his buddy), Ada (his babysitter), yeah, no, please, thank you, cheese, milk, juice, toast, bagel, egg, water, box, cup, help, mine, cereal, banana, orange, red, bowl, fork, spoon, chair, high chair, cookie, kiddush, kugel, challah, boom, fall, baby, toy, truck, car, go, open it, book, Abba's book (meaning, any book he knows he's not allowed to touch), bed, blankie, pluggie (local dialect for pacifier), pickle, apple, walk, house, home, poop, hand, toes, head, mouth, eye, ear, nose, hair, hat, ball, bag, rice, yogurt, bear, cat, doggie, sheep, pig, moose, horse, crying, more, again, up, out, all done, stuck, cracker, Muppets, phone, sing, stairs, hot, cold, shoes, foot, bath, coat, kitchen, Elmo, wipes, hungry, breakfast, snack, night-night, light, on, off, grandma, and auntie.

I'm sure I'm missing a few, but I'm slowing down and I think that's probably most of them. Most of those words he says in English; a few he knows in both Hungarian and English and a few he only says in Hungarian.

Okay, fine, so, nobody is probably interested in this list but me. But hey, it's my blog, and he's my kid, and what to do with such a list but post it here?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool! And yeah, you count the ones that they know and use spontaneously, although if they aren't saying much of anything at 18 months, as long as Mommy can regularly decipher it, pronunciation doesn't count.

A friend and I played the "write all the words down and count" game when our sons were each just over a year & a half - it's fun, and amazing to see how much and how quickly they grow and learn.

Enjoy! Have you started "brainwashing" him yet? (translation - convincing him that being the "big kid" and Mommy's helper is a GOOD thing)

Anonymous said...

That's pretty impressive! Did you realize, before you tried to list them, just how many words he knows? And uses appropriately? It's amazing how their little sponge-brains absorb this stuff.

Also it's a good thing you're exposing him to another language. The people who say you shouldn't because the kid will just get confused and it will retard his language development are simply wrong, wrong, wrong. Take it from somebody who grew up in a multilingual household. And Robbie, now in 2nd grade (=3rd year) of a Spanish immersion school, is having no problems at all and is darn near as fluent as his hispanic buddies. How useful is that in LA?!

Also, the current theory on phonetics and language acquisition in children holds that kids are initially able to recognize, and make, every sound in every human language (yes, even the /ch/ and the African "clicks" that are transcribed k! and so forth). As they develop, their ability to recognize and recreate sounds becomes limited to those they are exposed to. So the sooner they hear more sounds, even if they don't end up using them for years, the easier time they will have of it when they decide to take, say, Mongolian in college.

Which I did, by the way -- for one quarter, b/c the teacher was retiring and so they let him teach it one last time without requiring a minimum number of students, as they usually do. Unfortunately I only remember how to say "how are you" and to pronounce "Ulaan Baator" properly, though the ability to read Cyrillic came in handy when I took Russian a few years later.

Not that I remember a whole lot of THAT, either, linguistic dilettante that I am...