Have you heard this joke?  What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?  Bilingual.  What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages?  Trilingual.  What do you call someone who speaks even more languages?  Multilingual.  And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?  American.

 

Yeah, unfortunately, that’s me.  Four generations removed from any immigrant relatives who came over speaking another language, whether Japanese, German, Yiddish or Hebrew.  My Japanese American grandmother, the daughter of immigrants to the young state of Arizona, learned English, Spanish and Japanese fluently out of necessity.  My mom learned only from youth language classes at the local JA Buddhist temple.  I, a native Angeleno, took five years of high school Spanish, which amount to exactly crap.  Oh well.

 

My wife can understand Tagalog better than she can speak it, though our recent trip to the Philippines brought it all back pretty impressively.  [Her mother’s native Visayan, however, remains a mystery.]  She ditched her high school French for college Spanish, and is now fluent, using Spanish every single day in her medical practice.  [However, the one time I asked her to help me talk to some parents about their children’s discipline problems in my classroom, she told me that she’d be happy to help if I wanted to know if they had any pain.  Heh.]

 

All of which is to say, we’d love The Pumpkin to be able to speak and understand more than one language, but I know I’m not gonna be the best resource in this department.  A scattering of Japanese and Tagalog words for things related to food and bodily functions aren’t gonna get her very far [though that is sort of emblematic of the multigenerational Asian American linguistic heritage, isn’t it?].  La dra. has been trying to teach her some rudimentary Spanish, like body parts, but it’s just vocabulary.  [“Sesame Street,” “Dora the Explorer,” and “Handy Manny” help in this regard too.  Heh.]

 

 

 

As with all educational materials, one of the challenges in fitting stuff in, and also doing so in a naturalistic way (so it’s not like, okay, it’s 5:30, time to learn for half-an-hour, and...go!).  Unfortunately, thus far, it’s been hard to work the Boca Beth materials in and keep her attention.  The coloring book, at this point, is just another fun coloring book and not a source of new vocabulary.  She enjoys playing with the puppet and maraca, which joined a growing collection of percussion instruments, and the CD is great exposure to another spoken, or rather sung, language, but hasn’t become a requested favorite yet.  The biggest challenge for my interactive toddlergirl has been the DVD.  She loves seeing the animals, likes dancing around to the music, but the pace can be pretty slow and it’s hard to keep her attention on it, let alone the spoken vocabulary words.