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| Toy monkey. Image source. |
My second kid is 2 years old now, and she is learning language so fast! She mostly speaks Chinese, but I've been really surprised at how much English she uses- this is so different from her older brother when he was that age.
We live in China, and little Wavelength (this is what I'm gonna call her on the blog) is with her Chinese nanny or Chinese grandma while I'm at work all day. So it makes sense that she's mostly speaking Chinese. I'm really amazed at how fast she has been picking up Chinese. She can say whole sentences. Like the other day, at breakfast, her brother accidentally spit food on me while he was talking, and I didn't even realize that little Wavelength saw that, and then a few minutes later, she said "哥哥吐妈妈衣服" which means "brother spit mom's clothes" which is an accurate account of what happened.
Another time, she picked up a little dinosaur toy and said "恐龙尾巴掏牙" which means "dinosaur tail pick teeth" because she had been walking around with that dinosaur and using its tail to pick her teeth, and all of us told her to stop that. But now she's totally sure that's what the dinosaur toy is for, so that's what she said about it.
In English she can also say some sentences, which is great. Not as many as in Chinese though. She says "mama read brown bear" or "mama read monkey" to ask me to read her a book. She says "mama play legos." "Mama sing ABC." Etc.
She knows lots of animal names in English too! Cat, monkey, horse, dolphin, sheep, elephant (but she pronounces it "ofan"), giraffe (but she pronounces it "jwaff"), doggo (I guess I call dogs "doggo" and she has picked up on that), penguin, and probably more that I'm forgetting. She also knows all these, and even more, in Chinese.
And she can say "eat" in English. The funniest time was when she was trying to shove things into a toy T-rex's mouth, saying "Eat! Eat!" Also she knows "sit" - one time I saw her trying to sit on this stuffed parasaurolophus we have- she said her name and then "sit dinfour." ("Dinfour" is her attempt to say "dinosaur.")
The thing that really impresses me is that she doesn't just understand English, she also speaks it. Her brother (whom we call Square Root her on the blog) wasn't like that. He could understand English, but he always talked in Chinese.
Why is that? Why is the little one speaking English so much more than her brother did at that age?
I thought the reason Square Root didn't speak in English at that age was that I was the only one in his life who talked to him in English. Kids in this kind of environment think to themselves "I have 1 oddball parent who speaks a completely different language that no one else speaks" and don't see any reason to bother speaking it themselves. (Maybe this is not totally true of our situation- because me and my husband talk to each other in English.)
Also, that was during the pandemic, when we got stuck in China for 3 years, lolsob. (Or, rather, it was possible to leave China, but almost impossible to get back in, so I didn't try to leave.) So during the time he was a toddler and was learning language, we didn't have a chance to visit any English-speaking relatives.
But then during the Shanghai lockdown, I was with him all day every day for 2 and a half months, lolsob, and he started speaking English. And now he doesn't have any problem speaking English or Chinese- though his Chinese is better than his English, and sometimes with my relatives he speaks Chinese and they have no idea what he's saying, and he claims he doesn't know how to say it in English, but upon further probing it turns out he can describe what he wants to say in English, even though maybe he didn't have an exact translation for how he would have said it in Chinese.
But his little sister is different! She says lots of things in English, without hesitation. She'll point at a horse and say "马" and then "horse." She taught her Chinese grandma the word "monkey." Why is she saying all these English words, unlike her brother?
(And here's another interesting question: Does she say English words to *me* at a higher frequency than she says them to the people in her life who don't understand English? Does she have an awareness of what language is for what person? I don't know.)
Is it because we have been able to travel outside of China, and visit relatives who speak English? Well, we only do that once or twice a year, and last time we did, she hadn't learned that many words yet, so I don't know if that made a difference.
Is it because the existence of the bilingual older sibling has changed the language environment?
Is it because she learns languages faster than he did- and we see that in both Chinese and English?
Is it because the two of them are just different people and have different preferences about how much they want to speak English?
Probably it's all of these reasons. And I'm finding it fascinating how her language learning is so different from her brother's.
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