Hi there. I am writing this post from Bologna, Italy where we moved back from Japan in the mid-summer. It has been a great year for my son to get to know his Japanese grandparents, family, and friends he made there. He is shortly turning two years old, and is more attracted than ever to words. So we have much more fun reading books together.
Every page of the books is filled with images that make him a curious boy. He can't help pointing at them and saying "Oh? Ah?" as if to ask "What's this?" In the beginning, he was just doing this with illustrations, but now he also recognizes letters (both Japanese and English/Italian alphabets) and numbers, asking me how to pronounce them. And guess what, if I were perhaps half asleep and would answer him with the same words to different images, he would immediately raises his voice and says "Ah! Ah!" to warn me.
Do you remember this Miffy's picture book I previously talked about? He still loves it and we read it together every day and night, and now we can play this game; I teach him what each illustration stands for in Japanese. After learning all pictures on one page (usually 15 different words with illustrations), I ask him, for example, "Where is the carrot? Which one is the airplane? Can you find the hat?".... and he perfectly points at the correct illustration all the time! And what is impressive is that if my husband does the same in Italian, he also answers correctly!
Since he started to enjoy looking at letters and knowing how they sound, I thought it was never too early to open this book together. Do you know the Curious George series? We love it! This is the loveliest picture book for learning alphabets I have ever seen. George and his friend the Man with the Yellow Hat introduce you to the alphabets and discover how English words can be made with them.
We have this book in Japanese translation. I would have liked to get the original edition in English as it can be a bit clumsy to read aloud in Japanese how English words are composed with alphabets. As you can see here, each word is accompanied with parenthesis where you find the identical word in Japanese.
Unfortunately, the Japanese word for "ear" does not start with the letter "e" (neither Italian), although we can perfectly see the shape of "e" on the sides of our face! However, my son does not care much about it yet and gets excited to find his favourite character George across the book.
Actually, George also helps him learn the Japanese alphabets, hiragana, with this luncheon mat we bought in Japan. Sometimes he stops eating to ask me "Oh? Ah?," pointing at letters and illustrations printed on it.
So far, I have talked about how well his input activity is going to be a multilingual (hopefully) speaker. Now I want to write about his output performance which was not so advanced until a few months ago when he used to say a few simple words such as "Mamma, papà, wan-wan (means a dog in Japanese baby language)."
Then, one day not so long after we came back to Italy, he started to say "Ecco!" and "Atta!" (respectively means "here it is!" in Italian and Japanese) whenever he finds something he was looking for. It surprised us as we never taught him these words, but perhaps he had listened to us saying so and eventually learned it alone. Further, at the beginning of the fall he finally started to pronounce his name clearly!
Now that he also learned to repeat many things we say, his vocabulary is increasing a lot. He can say "ciao," "uva (grape in Italian)," and many other things that make sense. Anyway, he became a very chatty boy!
We are so proud of all the linguistic development he has shown so far. However, as it is often said that children of the bilingual or multilingual background may start to speak relatively later than the average cases, my son does not speak that much compared to the friends of his age. Some children already speak with two words at the age of one year and half. Some others are even more advanced. The other day we met a boy only a month older than my son already spoke in sentences. Che bravo!
I believe that the period before my son starts to speak (fluently) is a time to build his linguistic basis, so it can be specially important that we talk to him a lot, both in Italian and Japanese. I was convinced about it when I saw him started to understand everything he heard in Italian without much difficulties after our return here.
This was perhaps thanks to my husband who has always talked to him solely in Italian, including the past year we spent in Japan where everyone but my husband spoke Japanese. We were doing the so-called “one person, one language” method without intending to do so. It really worked out at least until we came back to Italy a few months ago. This naturally led to the fact that although my son first started to understand what adults say in Japanese, as he had much greater exposure to this language for one year after he had turned 8 months old, now his listening comprehension is totally equal in Japanese and Italian.
If you have not heard of this method, in short, it is a universally known bilingual education approach where one person (a parent) exclusively speaks only one of the two languages to the child. In our case, my Italian husband speaks solely in Italian to my son, while I do so in Japanese.
My husband, who did not speak Japanese at all and learned few Japanese expressions during his expat stay in Japan, did not have a slight hesitation to speak Italian to me and my son in the presence of the others who only understood Japanese.
However, now I became the one who speaks the minority language (Japanese) in Italy, I find it challenging to keep speaking Japanese to him all the time. There are at least two major factors to it. First, I know enough Italian and my brain naturally switches to Italian unless I were not alone with my son. Perhaps I do it out of the respect to other people who only speak Italian and also out of necessity.
Second, if I do it out of necessity it is because we basically moved back to Italy for good and I now have a great responsibility to take care of and educate my son as an Italian in the Italian community. Everyday there comes many situations where I feel I must speak Italian if there are Italian family members, friends, and strangers around despite how much I would like to speak Japanese only.
I have been in such a dilemma since the first day I came back to Italy. I will write more about it in my next post that should be out not too much later. See you next time!
About today's book
Curious George Learns the Alphabet (Japanese version)
Written and Illustrated by H. A. Rey and Margaret Rey
The original Englished title published in November June 1973 by HMH Books
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