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Monday, April 26, 2010

Let the river run!

True to the name of this blog, I shall dedicate my first update to what our girl has been getting up to, language-wise. Here are some photos of her taken on 10 April, sitting on another kid’s bike (rest of pix galore to follow after they get sorted out, I promise…).


She seems to spout more English words than Chinese, and I at times have to help translate for Nai nai, but hey, Nai nai teaches her Mandarin, so it’s a two-way learning as Rosabelle teaches Nai nai English words. In addition to the usual/past words she was already speaking, in random order, she has since learnt how to say/use the action of further words like:
  • Nodding her head when she says 要 (height/angle of the nod will commensurate with how much she wants the thing)
  • Objects like home/家 (when we are in the car on the way back) car, book, cup, bowl, bag, watch, juice, road (when she reaches the end of the pavement, she will tell me it’s the road and stop for me to carry her/hold her hand), door (she will indicate windows as doors still though…), and um – as in ‘umbrella’.
  • Colours like blue, red, green, and yellow (favourite is yellow – where every other colour asked of her is ‘yellow’… -_-)
  • Body parts like knee, toe, neck, chin, elbow, nose, mole, back (she loves books about opposites and very quickly picked up the ‘front vs back’ concept) 口(to ask her fake baby to drink water, mimicking us when we ask her to rinse her mouth with just 一口of water…)and armpit (complete with accurate pointing/indication)
  • Description with words like cut (mimicking my scissor-cutting action whenever I bring food to her), bit (when bargaining with me to take some of other kids’ biscuits before lunch), walk, wait, stop (with palms facing out), stand (like when she’s placing her water bottle on the dirty floor just to watch it stand – much to my chagrin), cheese (posing with fake cameras, at times facing the wrong way…), march (complete with hands behind her, as taught by my Dad, so much that she will go ‘Gong Gong’ every time we march), stuck (when she can’t move, or can’t get things out), knock, pain, dirty (like when she gets too near the dustbin or knowingly touches her dirty shoes or the floor), gentle (when we teach her not to be over-zealous in patting), wait (when she gets impatient with foods she wants to eat), come (when asking people to come, complete with waving of hand), turn (when she wants us to turn over and face her on the bed), big & small (even took out her two blue stacking cylinders to tell me she’s holding a big and a small cylinder), draw (when she wants her Crayola crayons and markers courtesy of Aunty Vanessa, where she like Wayne to draw cows for her), and good (though she does not know how to stick out her thumbs, but will use her index fingers instead, haha!), low (crouching down to demonstrate), dark (when we enter road tunnels), warm (in the past, she will describe things as hot even when they were mildly warm, so at least she has another in-between word besides cold and hot), 臭臭 (as she waves her hand around her nose, after she farts…), loud (purposely going LOUD when I tell her she has to be soft and whisper when people are sleeping), and with Nai nai around, speaking more Mandarin like点点, 饭, 慢 (Nai nai always tells her to run slower), 睡觉/觉觉, 绑 (as she happily cooperates when Wayne buckles her up in the high chair to stop her standing up), and 再见 (even said ‘Bye见’ once!). She can answer with words like 乖,听,带劲,好,美 when we ask her questions (e.g. ’Yue yue乖不乖?’). Nai nai even taught her to read玉米片 on the Kellogg’s corn flakes box, haha!
  • Animals like giraffe (she has a cute way of saying it – it’s quite a difficult word, if you ask me, so I think it’s quite amazing!), whale, 马 (was describing to me that Wayne took her on a carousel ride, and clueless me kept wondering what ‘ma’ she was talking about…) and 兔兔 (knowing that it’s slow like a ‘turtle’, and fast like a ‘兔兔’).
  • Counting one, two – her favourite number is officially now two (previously was eight), where she will want two of everything (or use two to refer to many…), or indicate two (with two index fingers placed together, since she can’t do a V sign with one hand now) – she can end the ‘One, two, buckle my shoe’ rhyme with an accurate ‘hen!’ too (and finish off the last words of ‘Twinkle twinkle’). She likes to go ‘Du du fei’ with her index fingers pointing together and coming apart – something the folks here teach their kids from young to practise their finger skills – though she says it more like ‘Du du wei!’
  • Foods like grape, 瓜, 'nana (banana), egg (says 蛋蛋 too), 肉, 豆豆 (her favourite as she screams for it at every meal, as she knows my tactic now of hiding her favourite foods like peas and corns away from her until she finishes the rest of the items) – she can say ‘milk’ very well now, but after Nai nai could not fathom what she wanted at the breakfast table, Rosabelle blurted out a ‘奶’ instead, as if knowing that with Nai nai, Mandarin works better!
  • Harder words like姥姥 (she says it with a roll of her tongue and it looks/sounds so cute – other older kids have a problem and pronounce ‘naonao’ instead…), and she can now say the names of her favourite friends like Qi qi, Jing jing, Wei wei, Wen wen, Dou dou, Jia jia, Guo guo, Bao bao, Fei fei, A-man, Hanzhu (mouth opens big at ‘A’ and ‘Han’) etc. Best of all, she can now say Yue yue, to refer to herself. She especially likes to refer to herself in the third person when requesting to do things on her own, like she will look at Nai nai and say ‘Yue Yue’ when she’s being fed, to get to hold her own spoon to feed herself.
  • Stringing words together like ‘wet wipe’ (taking wipes for me to clean her teeth every night, and remembering to push the opening back firmly after), ‘book stuck’ (when trying to take a magazine from the rack in a store), ‘no more’, and the ultimate ‘Mama抱抱down’ when she was in a hurry to get out of her high chair!
  • Also, she picked this up in Singapore when I shouted for Wayne to come into the room – she will go ‘Wayne!’ as well, and call out when we ask her what Daddy’s name is… not very polite, huh…
  • And of course, it’s never too early to start and now, she has learnt to say ‘please’ pretty well on her own accord, especially if she wants her favourite foods, heh!

1 comment:

Piggy Family said...

Wow! Clever Rosie can talk so much now, and her hair is so long. :)

Haha, RaeAnne's favourite colour is yellow too. Give her a bag of gummy bears and she'll keep saying yellow but I've left with the orange, red and green bears. -_-