sLOVEnka: Bilingual Baby

Watching Lily learn language as a bi-lingual baby has been absolutely fascinating. When she was born and I started thinking more concretely about what it would be like, I assumed she would learn English first and kind of fill in with Slovak later since I am with her 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Interestingly enough, her Slovak is by far stronger in her speech than English. As I think about it now, I think the only English words she even says are Da-da and baby. She also says Mama, but that's the same in Slovak. But I've come to find out that she understands an incredible lot in both languages. I started asking questions that required a response, and she knew an amazing amount. When I listen to her practice speaking, she does something very fascinating, which is play around with Slovak sounds on all kinds of different words. Slavic languages have a lot of words ending in -k, -ka, -ky or -ko and she'll make up all these words and then add on those endings. My favorite example of this was that very early on she started saying bee (actually beeeeeeeeeeee) to mean food. None of us can figure out where on earth she got it because there's nothing remotely close in English or Slovak, but I knew that when she said it, it meant ''I want a pretzel.'' : ) Then she took even that ''word'' and started saying beek. Adorable. She even does it with her English words (because of course she doesn't know to differentiate yet). She'll say babyk or Mamik or Dadka, which is just so cool for a lover of languages like myself. Her Babka, Tomáš' mom, watches her for a few hours a week while I teach English in our flat and she has taught her so much, and here's why; She talks constantly to her, that's one thing, but also she asks questions or gives commands that require a response. This sounds obvious, but I'm telling you I had to learn this. It's kind of not natural. I tried to talk to Lily a lot (which was also not very natural for me), but mostly I just told her what I was doing or what something was called etc. Then the kicker was when Babka told Lily to flutter her eyelashes at her (zažmurkaj) and she did it! I was flabbergasted. Ok, ok, some of you are seasoned parents who know all about these things, but it's not like children were completely foreign to me; I did a lot of babysitting in my day and my mom once had a daycare, but still. It is an art, and I'm thankful to Babka for (inadvertantly) teaching me how to be a better communicator with children. Now I can tell Bug to: go get a book, find her ball, flutter her eyelashes at me!, shut the door, put her food in her mouth, go into the bathroom, get her Legos, baby, Mrs.Giraffe, and on and on. It's so satisfying to understand and be understood. Both for her and for us. I'm super excited for her to start speaking more English words, but in the meantime I'm just enjoying the learning process.
Here's what's been happening in our neck of the woods: