{"id":279016,"date":"2018-10-31T23:27:18","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T23:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/31\/ironwoman359-feathersescapism-abaddonsbabe\/"},"modified":"2018-10-31T23:27:18","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T23:27:18","slug":"ironwoman359-feathersescapism-abaddonsbabe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/31\/ironwoman359-feathersescapism-abaddonsbabe\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

ironwoman359<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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feathersescapism<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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abaddonsbabe<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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taliabobalia<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter later that day, she burst into tears with laughter because i was saying \u201cquiero abogado\u201d which means \u201ci want a lawyer.\u201d<\/p>\n

imagine a two year old repeatedly saying \u201ci want a lawyer!\u201d as an adult laughs at her.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"image\"<\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reminding me of also funny story: So my piano teacher of many years when I was a kid had a baby when I was in my teens. This little girl was super bright, and also bilingual in Mandarin and English from her first word.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I do not speak Mandarin. At all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One day as I\u2019m waiting for my mom to pick me up after the lesson, Baby Girl is playing in the kitchen and hears me sneeze! And she runs over and says,\u00a0\u201cYou need [incomprehensible]?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now here\u2019s the thing: I knew she was not speaking Mandarin. I don\u2019t speak it, but my aunt and uncle both do, and a close family friend\u2019s family growing up would code-switch quite comfortably around us. I was old enough and it was sufficiently different from English that because there was no formal teaching, I never derived anything from it? But I was very familiar with how it sounds to an uncomprehending ear.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What she said did not sound like Mandarin at all. It sounded like gibberish. Like English baby gibberish.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I clearly didn\u2019t understand, Baby Girl repeats,\u00a0\u201cYou need [gibberish]!\u201d and then, when I still don\u2019t understand, she stamps her foot and makes Angry Noise at me, which attracts her mother\u2019s attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bewildered, I relate what\u2019s going on. Her mother covers her face and says,\u00a0\u201cShe wants to know if you want a kleenex.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then my piano teacher explained that Baby Girl had figured out that some people didn\u2019t speak English and some people didn\u2019t speak Mandarin and she needed to confine herself to one language around them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But sometimes, as is very natural especially for quite young children, she\u2019d run up against realizing she didn\u2019t know the word for something – and sometimes she knew the word in one language, but not in the other!\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it seemed intuitive to her that the way to fix this was to say the word from the other language \u2026 with the right accent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what she\u2019d been doing was taking the word for\u00a0\u201ctissue\u201d or\u00a0\u201ckleenex\u201d in Mandarin and saying it like an Anglophone would: no tone-change and different vowel shapes and all. And it made Baby Girl VERY FRUSTRATED when this did not solve the problem, and at that point she seemed to believe that the adults around her were being stupid on purpose.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

children are amazing<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ironwoman359: feathersescapism: abaddonsbabe: taliabobalia: when i was really little, my babysitter only spoke spanish with me so i became bilingual but i never knew when i was speaking spanish or english. one time i told my mom i wanted an avocado & she understood but then when i said the same thing to my babysitter … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[2198,677,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279016\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}