My little boy Scott develops quickly. After I came back from a short trip to The Netherlands on Monday I realized that once again. Before I left he could scream loudly but he was not really able to say any real words, except for “huh?” if he did not understand something or if he lost one of his toys. But that suddenly changed last week, and now he is able to say mama, baba and something that is probably zhua (Chinese for ‘catch’, our nanny uses that often when she is playing with him, pretending that she is trying to catch him. He loves the game). Last night he kept on saying baba baba while he had to go to sleep, so I came up to his room and he was very happy.
Scott is still a bit confused about language as he is raised tri-lingual (Chinese, English and Dutch – in that order). Because he hears Chinese virtually the whole day, that will be the language he will likely start talking in first. Only when I come home he hears English (my wife and I normally speak English together) or Dutch (if I talk with Scott). I want to make sure I understand everything he will say in Chinese, so I picked up my Chinese study again a few weeks ago, mainly reviewing the 2000 most important characters and listening to Chinesepod podcasts.
But not only did he start to talk. He is also getting a lot better at walking. He literally runs around the house now without falling. He can walk backwards, jump up and down, and he can turn around 360 degrees in one movement. He even manages that twice, but then he is so disoriented that he normally always falls down. If he falls he looks very surprised but normally he does not cry (he is a big boy!). And the few times that he really hurts himself it normally suffices to pick him up and hold him for a few seconds.
He also started to dance over the past couple of days. A lot of his toys have music functions built in and some of them he likes so much that he now dances with the music, moving his body to the rhythm – or at least trying to do that. He also swings his arms around and he has a huge smile on his face while doing this. It’s so nice to see these steps in his development, I am a very happy father!
That’s nice to hear 🙂
If you are reviewing/learning chinese charaters I strongly suggest you to give a try to Skritter.com.
I know you will be upset by the “Free during the beta” but I believe is one of the most effecient tool I’ve ever try.
I tried out Skritter a couple of weeks ago (After a tweet by you about it? Not sure), but it is not my ideal tool. I am using a trackball instead of a mouse, making the input of characters more difficult.
Furthermore, I did not figure out how to tell Skritter which characters out of a set to start with. To me it seemed it was taking random characters out of the available sets. After about 1 hour of trying I gave up and went back to my traditional way of index cards. I might give Skritter a second try when it’s a bit more mature and has more character sets available.
I’m also using a trackball without that much problem, of course I would prefer use a Wacomm…will buy one when I’ll can.
Skritter has been a lot improved with the new version, much faster and with more chars set available.
Good luck !
Will give it another try. Are you involved with Skritter, by the way? Or just a happy user?
I’m not involved in Skritter (just report bugs), just a very happy user.