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Language/Communication development is fascinating

26 May 2019 12:01

We have a child who is now reaching 2.5 years old, and watching the language develop is fascinating. No doubt every parent experiences a similar level of amazement, but it's still new to me.

Part of the fun of watching our child grow his communication skills is obviously his bilingual nature; his mother speaks Finnish to him, and I speak English. Of course the pair of us communicate in English almost exclusively, but by contrast basically every other conversation he hears will be in Finnish.

Today I was struck by a new milestone, as he said the word "dog" for the first time.

I continue to read books to him, and of course they're simple books with lots of pictures. For over a year now he's been able to follow simple instructions:

  • Can you point to the dog?
  • Can you point to the cat?

I remember being really impressed when he was coming up to two years old, and he was consistently able to play that game - despite the various dogs/cats being drawn in different styles, and from different perspectives. (Cartoon dogs vary a lot; but he always was able to recognize them. He's obviously internalized the nature of the dog...)

Anyway he speaks pretty well, getting into two-four word sentences now. His favourite words are predictably enough "Äiti" (mother) and "en" (no). But he's never said dog until today, instead he's said:

  • Woof-woof
    • Probably as a result of months of me saying "dogs go woof", "cats go miow", & etc.
  • Hauva
    • Finnish for "doggy".
  • Dana
    • We have a neighbour with a dog. This dog moved in with us for a few days, and he fell in love.
    • That dog is called Dana, so suddenly all dogs became Dana.

Anyway today we were walking to the park and he said "iso-dog", "iso" being Finnish for "big". Indeed there was a big dog in front of him.

Good dog. Good boy.

Some of our conversations are quite intricate, some of the instructions we give him he can clearly understand/follow along - in two languages - but when I hear him use a new word, especially an English word, I'm suddenly reminded how awesome everything is.

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Brexit has come

5 January 2021 13:00

Nothing too much has happened recently, largely as a result of the pandemic killing a lot of daily interests and habits.

However as a result of Brexit I'm having to do some paperwork, apparently I now need to register for permanent residency under the terms of the withdrawal agreement, and that will supersede the permanent residency I previously obtained.

Of course as a UK citizen I've now lost the previously-available freedom of movement. I can continue to reside here in Helsinki, Finland, indefinitely, but I cannot now move to any other random EU country.

It has crossed my mind, more than a few times, that I should attempt to achieve Finnish citizenship. As a legal resident of Finland the process is pretty simple, I just need two things:

  • Prove I've lived here for the requisite number of years.
  • Pass a language test.

Of course the latter requirement is hard, I can understand a lot of spoken and written Finnish, but writing myself, and speaking a lot is currently beyond me. I need to sit down and make the required effort to increase my fluency. There is the alternative option of learning Swedish, which is a hack a lot of immigrants use:

  • Learning Swedish is significantly easier for a native English-speaker.
  • But the downside is that it would be learning a language solely to "cheat" the test, it wouldn't actually be useful in my daily life.

Finland has two official languages, and so the banks, the medical world, the tax-office, etc, are obliged to provide service in both. However daily life, ordering food at restaurants, talking to parents in the local neighborhood? Finnish, or English are the only real options. So if I went this route I'd end up in a weird situation where I had to learn a language to pass a test, but then would continue to need to learn more Finnish to live my life. That seems crazy, unless I were desperate for a second citizenship which I don't think I am.

Learning Finnish has not yet been a priority, largely because I work in English in the IT-world, and of course when I first moved here I was working (remotely) for a UK company, and didn't have the time to attend lessons (because they were scheduled during daytime, on the basis that many immigrants are unemployed). Later we had a child, which meant that early-evening classes weren't a realistic option either.

(Of course I learned a lot of the obvious things immediately upon moving, things like numbers, names for food, days of the week were essential. Without those I couldn't have bought stuff in shops and would have starved!)

On the topic of languages a lot of people talk about how easy it is for children to pick up new languages, and while that is broadly true it is also worth remembering just how many years of correction and repetition they have to endure as part of the process.

For example we have a child, as noted already, he is spoken to by everybody in Finnish. I speak to him in English, and he hears his mother and myself speaking English. But basically he's 100% Finnish with the exception of:

  • Me, speaking English to him.
  • His mother and I speaking English in his hearing.
  • Watching Paw Patrol.

If he speaks Finnish to me I pretend to not understand him, even when I do, just for consistency. As a result of that I've heard him tell strangers "Daddy doesn't speak Finnish" (in Finnish) when we've been stopped and asked for directions. He also translates what some other children have said into English for my benefit which is adorable

Anyway he's four, and he's pretty amazing at speaking to everybody in the correct language - he's outgrown the phase where he'd mix different languages in the same sentence ("more leipä", "saisinko milk") - when I took him to the UK he surprised and impressed me by being able to understand a lot of the heavy/thick accents he'd never heard before. (I'll still need to train him on Rab C. Nesbitt when he's a wee bit older, but so far no worries.)

So children learn languages, easily and happily? Yes and no. I've spent nearly two years correcting his English and he still makes the same mistake with gender. It's not a big deal, at all, but it's a reminder that while children learn this stuff, they still don't do it as easily as people imagine. I'm trying to learn and if I'd been corrected for two years over the same basic point you'd rightly think I was "slow", but actually that's just how it works. Learning languages requires a hell of a lot of practice, a lot of effort, and a lot of feedback/corrections.

Specifically Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns, the same word is used for "he" and "she". This leads to a lot of Finnish people, adults and children, getting the pronouns wrong in English. In the case of our child he'll say "Mommy is sleeping, when he wake up?" In the case of adults I've heard people say "My girlfriend is a doctor, he works in a hospital", or "My dad is an accountant, she works for a big firm". As I say I've spent around two years making this correction to the child, and he's still nowhere near getting it right. Kinda adorable actually:

  • "Mommy is a woman we say "when she wakes up"..."
  • "Adriana is a girl we say "her bike".."

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