Children learn languages quickly. Very quickly. Time magazine senior editor and writer Jeffrey Kluger says a baby is born with zero idea of what language is, but by 18 months kids have a working vocabulary of 50 words. By 3 years old, kids can say about 1,000 words. By 6, the number of words is 6,000!
If you drop me in the middle of Moscow and leave me there for six years, I seriously doubt I will have 6,000 Russian words at my disposal when I leave. However, if the whole family moved right now to another country for six years, Amy and I could go to Reese as our personal interpreter!
Right now Reese can say a lot of words and even put a couple of words together in a rudimentary sentence (she has been saying "All done" to signify she's finished eating for some time now). But I wonder how much of her vocabulary is recognizable to other people and how much is a product of me being around her all the time and therefore understanding what her babble means?
Could you understand what "a-wha, a-wha" means? I'm still not 100 percent sure, but couple her words with her actions and it's a pretty good guess "a-wha, a-wha" means "I want." But I could be wrong.
There are two things I wish I knew. One is how to play a musical instrument. The other is to be bilingual.
One reason children learn languages so easily as opposed to adults is children's brain are different. The part of the brain that deals with learning language is huge as a child and stops growing somewhere around by the time most get to first or second grade. After more than two years of high school Spanish, I doubt I knew 1,000 words (but I don't how much you can blame my brain, my lack of effort or my truly idiotic Spanish teacher).
Right now, Reese is a verbal machine, babbling all day long with splattering of fairly distinct words and phrases. And then there are words she knows but can not say yet. For example, when we hear/see an airplane, I will say "airplane" and Reese will smile and point to the sky. If you say "airplane" and there is no airplane flying, Reese will still point to the sky and look around for an object up above. She knows the word "airplane" is associated with something in the sky. She may even babble some noises with the pointing of the sky, but I think it would be hard to distinguish "airplane" out of her verbiage.
Amy and I have often said Reese knows what she's saying, and once she realizes we don't know what she's saying, she will decide to speak English instead of speaking "Reese."
Maybe the only person who can decipher Reese's toddler babble would be c3p0.
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