First Words

     One of the things Filipino parents are really excited about is their baby's first words, or even any sound that comes from their baby's mouth.  Once our kid manages to stutter words, its already a heavenly feeling specially for young parents. Internet research suggests that a 2-year old kid can probably understand up to a thousand words but can manage to speak only with 150 to 200 words.
     However,  it seems that there are certain issues one might want to  tackle regarding how children acquire their language skills. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of  local studies dealing with this issue.  For example, Filipinos do tend to underestimate the ability of our children to learn and acquire language, that's why we prefer to communicate with them with baby talk. There is some truth that a baby can already comprehend many words even in their first year of life.
     Legitimate suggestions to stimulate language development on children includes talking and communicating with chilren as we would with adults, by making brief but complete sentences. We can expand our children's vocabulary by combining words; by attaching a verb to their noun or vice-versa, adjectives with nouns, prepositions with nouns, and even adverbs with verbs. Some kids pick words from different speakers resulting to multilingual situation.  From a Visayan housemaid, to an Ilocano grandfather, or even to a Chinese neighbor. The main challenge here is you have to decide on a primary language that you used to speak and which the child can then use to learn other languages.
     However, studies show that children's primary socialization in their schools later, do tend to correct and fill the gap of picking up the language,and that a child will learn to speak English and Filipino as his or her classmates do.
     We're fascinated when very young kids are able to say "thank you", "excuse me" or "please", not only because they show english expertise but because they show and understand certain values too.  It's better we stop counting the words they speak but listen hard to what the children are trying to tell us.


Photo Sources: http://www.tbclubbock.org