Concept Checking

Gravity is a concept, right?

Last week I posted about how Thomas had learnt the concept of himself as an independent person. He did this by proudly pointing to himself when I asked him who had scribbled all over the window in blue crayon.

When I was doing my MA in Linguistics, one of the lecturers claimed that the first conept we learn as babies is that of in and out.  He said we learn that by putting things into our mouths and then taking them out again.  It certainly seems a plausible hypothesis.  Thomas has learnt and relearnt that concept a million times as one of his favourite pastimes is to put stuff in a box and then take it out and put it in again and take it out again, ad infinitum.  It can be strangely relaxing to watch him do this.

Under the sofa

One of the first things I was aware of Thomas learning was the concept of ‘under’.  When he had just started to crawl he liked to roll a small little yellow ball under the sofa.  I would be waiting behind the sofa to get the ball and roll it back to him.  One of the sights that I will never forget is him positioning himslef so that he could see with one eye under the sofa to see where the ball was and actually realising that he had seen me.

I spy a ball… and a baby

Up, up and away

I remember being in the UK last November and his nana was at the upstairs window calling down to me and Thomas.  I tried to get him to look up at the window to see her, but he just was having any of it.  He looked all around him and below him, but couldn’t or wouldn’t look up.  If I threw a ball at him he would track the movement, but if I threw it up in the air above him he would just look dumbfuonded when it disappeared and then utterly surprised when it fell in front of him.

A few months ago he noticed trees and lamp posts and started to look up.  He still gets moments when he looks at trees and the wires that run acorss the streets here in Curitiba nd he just stops as if he is gobsmacked by how something could be up there.

Size matters

It seems that Thomas is currently getting his head around the idea of something being too big or too small.  He has a toy petrol station that has a road going into it an around it.  One part of the toy is a a car wash with two sponges on either side and a sign across the top.  Cars over a certain size won’t fit through this gap which caused a lot of problems in the early days as he tried to force big cars through it.  Nowadays he will pick up a big car, look at it and then at the petrol station and then sadly shake hs head and say ‘no’.

Is the truck too big for the car wash, or the car wash too small for the truck?

These few concepts are obviously not the only ones Thomas has learnt (see below).  Instead they are the ones I have enjoyed watching him learn.  Are there any conepts that you remember watching your child learn?

Extra reading:

Infants Grasp Gravity with Innate Sense of Physics – livescience.com

Babies understand numbers as abstract concepts – newscientist.com

I did it!

These colour names are a bit complicated for Thomas at the moment.

We reached a milestone the other day.  Thomas got hold of his crayons and started scribbling all over the window out onto the balcony.  I stopped him as soon as I realised what he was doing, but by that time he had already used up a lot of the blue crayon.  A bit later I was showing his vovo what he had done and I asked him ‘Who did that’ and he pointed at himself.

This is the first time he has explicitly shown that he is aware of himself and he has since done it when asked other questions in both Portuguese and English.  He still hasn’t said his name yet, but this shows that he is learning a lot even if it isn’t immediately obvious to us.

I suppose, though, that one of the next concepts he will learn is to say ‘I didn’t do it’ when it really was him.  Not that he would have learned that from his father.

Getting Around Curitiba: Pavements

I like walking.  Give me the chance to walk or drive or get the bus and I’ll walk almost every time.  I walk a lot in Curitiba, but very few other people do.  Here follows a bit of a rant, but it’s all true, I even have photos to back it up.

Curitba’s streets are not paved with gold.  At times it seems that they are more paved with holes than anything else which means that walking around the city can be a challenge.  You will need a good pair of walking shoes, or at the very least a comfortable pair of trainers.  Forget those heels, ladies.  And as for walking around with a pushchair; not a chance!

Traditional Streets

The authroities here in Curitiba seem to thing that the material you use for paving your streets gives the city some sort of identity.  Traditionally they used these square blocks of stone that were the bane of many a pedestrian’s life.  They are uneven at the best of times, and at the worst you could easily break your ankle on them.  After a short while one of the blocks would become loose and allow water under it.  If you stepped on the block at the wrong angle a shotof water would fly up all over your clean white trousers.

Sometimes, for some unfathomable reason, one of the blocks would be upside down, so that the not-so-flat part was on the bottom and the really-unflat part was on the top.  Why?  How?

And then after a few more weeks some of the blocks would just be missing completely and so you would need 4×4 to get around the pavements.

A not very flat pavement.

The grey brick road

So the prefeitura (council), in its infinite wisdom decided to introduce a new type of block that would be flatter (yay) and easier to maintain (double yay).  Here is a picture of a pavement that was laid about 3 months ago.

Two different types of shit paving. shit.

Watch your step

Nice grass.

 

It might not be the brick’s fault.  It might well be shoddy workmanship.  But it’s probably both.

In some areas of Curitiba they have this pretty nifty idea of marking the walk for blind people with a different type of paving slab that has ridges to make it easy to follow.  Or easy to fall over.

There’s one missing

Ground level view

The roots are showing

Apparently, the responsibilty for the upkeep of pavements lies with the owner of the land directly behind the pavement.  The prefeitura only has the responisbilty to make sure the landowner is looking after the pavement.  Obviously this system is not working.

Obstacles

Then there is the fact that many people who drive cars seem to think that the pavements are just an extension of the road; that they are place to leave the car when you have to drop the washing off at the laundrette.

You b#%$&*@d!

At least the traffic can move

In this first picture, the gate to the drive was open so the driver culd have gone into the building, but he decided it was much safer for all concerned to leave it across the pavement.  Grrrrrr!

And it isn’t just the the mindless drivers, it is also the mindless prefeitura (council again).  Imagine this, you have a narrow pavement with a bit of grass to the side.  You want ot put a huge lamp post somewhere in the vicinity.  Where do you put it?  On the pavement or on the grass?

The bin bag doesn’t help of course, but that’s just another one of the challenges to walking around Curitiba.

The thing is, they do have some pavements that are excellent and flat and brilliant for walking on.  You could push a pushchair with no problems and the blind would be able to walk down them without fear.  They are easy to maintain and cheap to install.  They are called cylce lanes.  Although nobody cycles in them because there are too many peolpe walking on them.  The problem must be that they don’t give the right impression.

Ahhh, bliss!

Curitiba, where very few streets are paved with tarmac.

The impression I get is that this city is not designed for people to walk, only to drive.  Get off the pavements and into your car.  And unfotunately, that is exactly what most Curitibanos do.

And these stories only come from a few neighbourhoods around the centre of the city.  If you move out a bit the only pavements are mud.

Crossing the road

I mentioned in another post how it can be difficult to find a place to cross the road.  At a crossroads you can only safely cross the road at two points because the other points always have cars coming into them.  There is rarely a pause when all the cars are stopped to allow pedestrians to cross.  This is made even worse by the fact that drivers see the amber light as a signal to speed up rather than slow down.  This means that they come flying through the lights just as the next set of cars starts up, giving the pedestrain no time to even run across the road in those few seconds when the lights are red for both arms of the crossroads.

Rant over.

What Do You Know About Brazilians?

Flag of Brazil (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If I wanted to tell you about Brazilians and what they are like I could spend ages talking about their likes and dislikes, their politics, history and culture, how they spend their free time and what they spend their money on. It would take ages and would probably leave you not much wider than you were before.

Alternatively, I could point you in the direction of this brilliant blog called What I Know About Brazilians. It is written by Manuel Schneider, a German who lived in Brazil for a while, including in Curitiba, the city I live in. It is funny, insightful and, to my eyes at least, mostly true.

I have shared it on Facebook with my Brazilian friends and used it with a number of students and the feedback has always been positive.  A few people have even remarked about how it takes the eyes of a foreigner to tell you something about your own country.  There are one or two things that I might take issue with, but i’ll leave it up to you to decide for yourself.

The Loudest Roar

I like this book.  It is a simple story of a little mischievous lion called Clovis who likes to cause havoc with his roar.  Clovis has the loudest roar in the jungle and he is very proud of it.  He likes to wait until the other animals in are quietly going about their busy when…all of a sudden ‘there’s Clovis’ scaring them all half to death with his roar.  The result is all manner of animals from parrots to wlderbeests and elephants being too afraid to do anything.

Of course, the other animals are non too happy at the prospect of some deafening rorar when they least expect it from little Clovis.  So they all get together to teach Clovis a lesson; one that he is not happy to learn but accepts it anyway.  Well, more or less.

It is a simple and well told story by Thomas Taylor who also did the great, colourful illustrations.  Most kids will love the fact that they can imiate to the roar of the tiger and the noise of the animlas.  They will also have fun pointing to the differnt animals as they appear in the book.  It should be a huge hit with any kid from around 1-3.

Except it isn’t a hit at all with Thomas and I can’t figure out why.  Thomas loves making animal noises, and this book has loads.  He loves colourful pictures with lots of different things to point at for me to name, and this has got them by the dozen.  And yet, for some reason, he has never been a fan ; I might like this book, but Thomas doesn’t.

I’ll Have Peppa Pig for Lunch, Please

Bacon

Despite being one of the greatest people ever to walk this earth, I am still human.  And as such I have been known to make the odd mistake.  As a parent I seem to be making more mistakes than normal, but, like I said, I am only a mere human, despite appearances.  In this post I will talk about one of the mistakes I have made as part of the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival.

Our son is now approaching 21 months old and we are currently dealing with a mistake that I first made about 15 months ago.  In order to keep my parents involved with their first, and so far only, grandchild, when Thomas was first able to sit up straight and started to eat proper food I decided to call them on Skype so that they could see him.  It turned out that there were a number of advantages to doing this; Thomas was captive and so couldn’t crawl away; my parents could talk to him, sing songs to him and coo over him as if he was really in the room; Thomas seemed to like interacting with them while he was eating and would often offer them his food.

We didn’t do this all of the time.  We would often have a weekend breakfast together when Thomas would have some mashed up fruit, I would have some corn flakes and his nana would eat her toast.  It was all very satisfying and felt like a proper family breakfast, just a few thousand miles apart.

It got to the point where if Thomas saw the laptop in the kitchen as he was eating breakfast he would call out for nana (he still can’t say granddad) until I fired it up and called her.  Once she was on the screen everything was fine.

One day I turned the computer on and the problems started.  Nana wasn’t online.  But Thomas was still calling for her and was not all that interested in his food.  What was I going to do?  The computer was on, I had a recalcitrant child who was brewing up a tantrum.  There seemed only one answer.  I put Peppa Pig on youtube and the resulting silence was only interrupted by giggles and the sound of food being eaten or dropped on the floor.

Fast forward a year and whenever Thomas isn’t starving he calls out ‘Pee, Pee!’ for his favourite pig.  We sing songs to him, dance for him, once I even got the newspaper and kept turning the pages over in front of him.  All of these strategies work for a couple of minutes, but eventually it is back to ‘Pee, Pee!’  We shouldn’t do it.  We know it is bad for all concerned. We know we are storing up problems for the future.  But right now it is easier just to put Daddy Pig and Mommy Pig on youtube and revel in the few minutes’ quiet that ensues.

In terms of his language skills it hasn’t really done much for him.  He now uses ‘pee pee’ for pig and he tries to grunt, but it comes out as more of a sniff.  He also use ‘pee pee’ for the colour ‘pink’, which means he now has two colour words, and both are in English so far (the other being blue).  He understands most of the other colours in both English and Portuguese, but these are the only two he can produce.

So what have I learned from this?  Well now I phone my parents on Skype on my phone and they watch Thomas playing with his toys.  He tends to ignore them quite a bit, but they still see him growing up and developing.  I’ve also learned that maybe, just maybe, I am not as great as I once thought I was.

Related articles

This post was inspired by the Raising Multilingual Children Blogging Carnival which is organised by thepiripirilexicon.com

This months carnival is being hosted by mulitilingualmama.com and should be available from April 29th.  Head over there to find lots of other blog posts, all on the theme of ‘Looking Back.’

How We Chose Our Son’s Name

Names not to be forgotten

We had a number of criteria when choosing our son’s name.  To make it slightly more complicated we chose not to know his sex until he was born.  Here in Brazil this is almost unheard of and actually led to a couple of barbed comments from certain people.

We spent a long time discussing various names, and most of the ones we came up with we discarded for some of the reasons below.

Two languages, one name

We wanted a name that would work in both English and Portuguese.  It didn’t have to have exactly the same pronunciation, but we wanted people in either culture to read the name and recognise it.  This meant that a lot of traditional Irish names were out of the running because Brazilians would have no idea how to pronounce it.  I can remember what it was like at school for other kids who had exotic names and some of the teachers would make a right meal out of saying them, to giggles from all of the other students.  I didn’t particularly want anything like this to happen to my son.

Not overtly-religious

We live in a very Christian country but my wife is not particularly religous and I am positivly anti-religion.  I didn’t want to have a name that would always be asociated with the Bible, so names like Christian or Pedro/Peter were out.

Connotations

There are some names that just sound wrong.  Here in Brazil Arthur is quite a common name, but whenever I hear it I just imagine it being said in Cockney accent on Eastenders (recently this image has been waning a bit).  I like the name Douglas, after Douglas Adams, but even I have to admit that it sounds really bad in Portuguese.

No family and friends

Neither of us wanted a name that was already taken by somebody else in our close families, or that one of our friends had given to their kids.  It shows a lack of imagination and can get very confusing, nevermind the fact that our son might have to live up (or down) to the original person.  I like the name Alex, but that is my father-in-law’s name.  We both like the name Jack, but I have a friend with a son of the same name, and a cousin.

In the end, about the only name we could agree on was Thomas, but we still waited until he was born to decide for sure.  It is a religous name, as Thomas was one of the 12 disciples, but at least he had the good sense to ask for evidence.  The name works in both languages, with only a slight difference in word stress.  There are a number of positive connotations for me when I hear the name; Thomas Beckett, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Payne (my favourite) and Thomas Morem, although I hate Tom Cruise and I am not sure about Thomas Aquinas, which is the name of my old school.  And finally, I can’t think of any close relatives or friends’ kids who have the same name.

If we had had a girl then it would have been a lot more complicated as we couldn’t really decide on anything.  If we have another child (and that is a big if at the moment) the name choosing will be even more problematic as we don’t have anything that we agree on anymore.

Related articles

That’s Not My Name: thepiripirilexicon.com

Naming Our (Future) Bilingual Baby: spanglishbaby.com

How To Name A Child When You’re An Expat: The European Mama

My Favourite Walk

The view of Birmingham from the Lickeys: a great walk, but not my favourite.

The pavements in Curitiba are awful and make walking a challenge for a grown adult, nevermind a toddler of 20 months.  However, I have a new favourite walk right now which is the few blocks from my flat to the playschool where Thomas spends his afternoons.

The walk is actually quite dangerous, not just because of the dodgy pavements but also the dual carriageway we have to cross that doesn’t have a pedestrian crossing for about 2 km, and to get to that we have to cross a different dangerous road.  I am super careful at this point, as are the countless other people who gather together at the same spot to try to cross.

If we ignore the fact that I have to take our lives in my hands, the walk is great because of the time I get to spend with Thomas.  I prefer the walk home because it starts with Thomas being brought out of his classroom by his teacher, and as soon as he sees me he shouts at the top of his voice ‘DADDYYYYYY!’.  This has quickly become a sort of tradition with many other teachers thinking it is just so cute.

I get a quick hug and then he starts talking about the cars that are parked in front of the school waiting for other kids.   I put his bag on my shoulder and we start the 20 minute or so walk back to out flat.  We walk through a mini-park so we see lots of dogs, the occasional bike and, if we are really lucky, some older kids playing football.  All of these have to be remarked upon. ‘Mamãe car’ if the car looks like ours.  ‘Daddy, au au’ whenever we see a dog.  ‘Ah! Pi’ for all of the bikes.* Plenty of vocabulary practice.

I try to talk to him about the other stuff we can see, but I am often interrupted if he spies a car parked on a drive, or when we pass the bakery and he sees the motorbike that is always parked there.  A little further up the road there is a house that has three dogs who are normally outside the house.  Last week I saw for the first time that they had puppies, but this wasn’t half as exciting for Thomas as the time they all came running down the drive barking at him.  he didn’t stop enthusiastically shouting ‘au au’ for about 10 minutes.

He has started to take an interest in stuff above him as well.  He likes the telegraph poles here that have hundreds of wires coming out from them and can stand looking up at them for a good few minutes.  He has started to pay attention to trees as well and I am not sure if he recognises that the trees are different to the telegraph poles.  The other day I took him up to one of the first trees we passed and got him to touch the trunk; now we have to touch all of the trunks on the way home  or we’ll have tears.

One day, when I was taking him to school, it started to rain when we were about 400 metres from the school.  It promised to be a proper thunder shower so I picked him up and ran to the school.  It was the funniest thing in Thomas’ short life as he bounced along down the street in my arms.  Less than a minute after arriving the heavens opened an unleashed a torrential downpour on us that forced me to wait a while before returning home.

Last week Thomas started to cry and shout when we passed in front of the bakery that is on our route.  Initially I thought it was because he wanted to go up to the motorbike that is always parked outside and so I mentioned this to my wife.  She

Pão de queijo

told me that when she fetches Thomas she had been taking him into the bakery and buying him a juice and some pão de quiejo (a sort of bread and cheese roll), sitting at a table in the window and spending a leisurely 20 minutes or so having a snack on their way home.  So now I am also having a bite to eat while Thomas sits on the chair swinging his legs and eating his pão de quiejo.  He looks all grown up and I am just waiting for the day when we start talking about his day at school, or gossiping about the other people in the bakery as he sips his orange juice.

I know there are more beautiful walks in the world, and plenty of safer ones to boot.  But at the moment this is my favourite walk in the entire history of the universe.

Do you have a favourite walk that you like to go on with your child?

*You can see more about what these words mean and Thomas’ other vocabulary here.

Related articles

A Spectacular Walk Around Point Lookout – littlemeninmylibrary.wordpress.com

The Dog’s Favourite Walk – my-rutland.com

The London Perambulator and Deep Topography – underagreysky.com (This post has to have one of the best titles I have ever read.)

Language Change

Languages move and change around the world (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although I assumed that this blog would be all about how Thomas’ language changes over time, it has become apparent recently how the process of him learning two languages is having an effect on the language of other people who are close to him.  I am going to write about three people: his mother, myself and his Brazilian grandmother.  It’s pretty obvious why I am going to write about me and my wife as we are the primary caregivers.  However, for the last few months we have been living with my mother-in-law as we build our own house, so she has become much closer to Thomas than otherwise might have been the case.

Mamãe

Being the only truly fluent bilingual person in the house, I don’t think Thomas’ bilingual adventure has had too much of an efect on his mother.  There are, of course, the normal changes in that her intonation changes when she is talking to him, she uses more child-like vocabulary, simplifies her grammar and often repeats herself, but this is common to most parents.  She does this in both languages and doesn’t seem to have altered her language outside any interactions with Thomas.

Vovó

While she would never describe herself as fluent, Thomas’ grandmother speaks fairly good English and can understand most of what people say to her.  She has been very supportive of our endeavours to use two languages at home and the fact that she has more than a working knowledge of English is reassuring to me because I don’t feel I am pushing her away when I speak English.

She has been using English words a lot more since Thomas has been in her house.  She will say a sentence in Portuguese, but use the word ‘daddy’ instead of ‘papai’.  She also tends to use the English names of cartood characters because we try to watch them in English rather than Portuguese to increase the amount of time that Thomas is exposed to English.  The fact that she is watching programmes in English, often without any subtitles must also be having an effect on her listening skills.

Sometimes Thomas asks his vovó to read a book in English.  At these times, rather than read English with her Brazilian accent, she chooses to read a sort of translation.  I say sort of because there are times when she can’t translate it and so makes it up according to the pictures.  I am not sure if this would be accepted by academics and OPOL extremists, but I think it is great.

Daddy

I have found myself code switching more than I thought I would.  If I am not paying attention to what I am saying I find sentences like ‘Would you like some agua?’ or ‘Did you see the au au?’ just slipping out of my mouth.  Although Thomas understand the English words ‘water’ and ‘dog/woof woof’ they just don’t come naturally to me because he doesn’t use them himself.

There are also times when I decide to use a Portuguese word on purpose because I want to make sur ehe has understood.  I sometimes ask him ‘Do you want to papar?’ when it should be ‘Do you want something to eat?’, or I use ‘nanar’ instead of ‘sleep’ when I am pretending to go to sleep so that he can wake me up.  I think this might have something to do with accommodation but I am not entirely comfortable that it is in his best interests in the long term.  I do it because it is useful at the time and I am hoping that so long as I am aware of it and don’t let it get out of hand then it won’t become too much of an issue.

The other effects on me have been the need to learn a lot of vocabulary associated with babies that I am not sure I even knew in English.  I have also had a lot more chance to talk to random people on the street as they all want to tell me how cute Thomas looks.

Have you noticed any changes in your own language use when bringing up bilingual kids?

Related Articles

Code Switching: Can it Affect your Child? – thepiripirilexicon.com

Examples of code-switching among young adults – youtube

What is code switching and why do bilinguals do it? – spanglishbaby.com

I Hate Scuffers

A modern scuffer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is an infamous story in our family.  Like most such stories it involves my brother and I am totally innocent.  When he was about 4 there was a parade near our home one afternoon.  On a street corner there was a policeman watching the crowd and the parade go by.  My brother let go of my mom’s hand, ran up to him and slapped him on his arse and shouted as loud as he could “I hate scuffers!”*  The copper was shocked and didn’t know quite what to do when he turned around and saw a little child running away from him and my traumatised mother didn’t hang around to find out what the copper wanted to do once he had made up his mind.

A few nights ago I was at a wedding and talking to a friend who has a son just a few weeks younger than Thomas.  She was telling me that her son has started to slap her on the bottom and say ‘Bunda da mamãe,’ (Mommy’s bottom).  This started out as mildly amusing until he started doing it in shops and has now become highly embarrassing.

Today, Thomas has found out for himself that slapping people on the backside is extremely funny.  He isn’t quick enough yet to do it without putting the person in the correct position which involves calling them over and then turning them around.  He doesn’t say anything either, just laughs long and hard.  I am waiting for the day when he slaps me in a shop and shouts out ‘Bunda da daddy!’

*Scuffer was a slang word for policeman in the 1970’s.