Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: chris on 19/03/2010 21:55:49
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...and she's 3!
For some reason the other day I decided to see how many long words she can learn, how quickly, and how well they become integrated into her vocabularly; consequently every couple of days I give her another one; yesterday I had a go with "perspicacious"!
It's taking her a couple of days of repetition to get each of the new words off pat, but contrary to what I was expecting - that long words might pose a challenge to assimilate, she seems to be handling them no differently to short words.
I have to say if I could learn a foreign language the way toddlers learn a lingo I'd be one happy man...the young brain is a marvellous thing. Never have I felt so strongly that Oscar Wilde was right...
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You could be in for some problems as she starts to grow up and argue with you.
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I once read that children start to speak at x years of age. They leave school at y years. By that stage they have typically learned z words.
z/(y-x) runs to about (allowing for sleep) something shocking.
Children learn about one new word every 40 minutes. (averaged from about 3 to 16 years of age).
I gave up being shocked about how fast children could learn.
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They are absolutely amazing and teaching children to be bilingual and even trmulti lingual at these ages is actually pretty easy .. they seem to slow down in some ways but burst through with incredible comprehension and reading and writing skills in the long run. Their little brains are so amazing and so absorbant at ages birth through 5 its unreal! One of my favorite subjects by the way...
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Just wait till she goes to pre-school and tries out the "colourful" expressions she heard at home on the class [;D]
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I dare not tell ewe what words my dorty is saying now !
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When our oldest (Ruthy) was about four, we lived in a house that had a bathroom upstairs (bath etc.) and a toilet downstairs (WC and handbasin).
Mrs G was brushing Ruth's hair, and when she finished she asked Ruth to put the hairbrush back in the toilet. Ruth dutifully took the brush, but returned with it a short while later. "Mummy, where do you want me to put the brush?"
"In the toilet" replied Mrs G.
"OK" replied Ruth.
Some time later, Mrs G discovered the hairbrush in the downstairs WC.
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Children really are like sponges when it comes to information, they absorb so much, and considering how short their attention span can be it makes it all the more amazing. They learn so much quicker than adults as they are not encumbered with the adult way of thinking, things are far more literal with them. Hence Geezers perfect example!
I thoroughly enjoy fulling my son (4) up with information, and he loves it too! [:)] Whereas my teenagers are much more hard work to get them interested in anything!
The other day he noticed that on my pot of hand cream there is a picture of a flower, so he said " Mum, what's that cream for, is it daisy-picking cream?" [:D]
Now an adult would know automatically that the daisy is on there as part of the product design, that it does not symbolise the contents, and that there is no such thing as daisy-picking cream.We also know that there is no need to have a cream to pick daises with, and that picking daises is not a high priority to most adults.
But to a 4 yr old it is quite logical, hand cream - pick daises with hands- daisy on pot = daisy picking cream. Simple logic unaffected by reams of knowledge we have as adults.
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oh the joys, mines 2 and 3/4s. however bilingual babes, seem to get very confused between the 2 languages mixing both together ie going dodo (bed time) and dapa (dad or papa). so shes finding thing a bit difficult, at the same time im the only one that speaks english to her, so the amount of english she picks up is minamal
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Don't stop doing it GD.
What she learns now come natural, later it will become 'work'.
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a have to carry on going but its incredibly difficult, imagine your thinking listening and speaking in french then at a drop of a hat you go into english. its like trying to understand, the manual to your mobil phone, thats been translated from chinese to dutch by a russian peasant living in Brazil.
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But you speak it well GD, she will have so much easier to learn it as she grows up. I like your attitude man :) I wish I would have gotten that idea with my kids when they were small. Then again GD, buy her a computer and connect her to some English sites, ah, dressing dolls :) like this one f.ex Doll dressing (http://www.online-game.tv/play/dress-up-dolls) Then she will learn to recognize the words too. I have a memory of that small kids can learn whole words so to speak. I think it's a technique used also for those that are 'word blind' too, like my brother is (Dyslexia). You will be surprised :) But you better sit beside her though.