Our bi-lingual baby

Tony Buzan is usually the champion of not underestimating our abilities. In his book, Brain Child, he gives some guidance tables for charting the development of a baby's various faculties. According to those tables, a baby might start to say simple words (such as Mama) at about nine months.

At a little under two and a half months our daughter has already said a number of words in two languages! We even have some video footage to prove it (well, some of it)!

As Buzan is fond of emphasising in Brain Child, babies are incredible mimicking machines. As testiment to that fact, the video we have captured here shows Violetta saying, "yejo xochesh?" a couple of times, which is Russian for "Do you want some more?". Then you hear Liea repeat, with startling accuracy, the whole sentence (well, more like, "akliklili xochesh?" - so only one word was right, but listen to the intonation of the rest - it's a good copy).



So, that's mimickry. However, around the same time she has also started saying, "inga-inga" when she wants a drink (as well as the usual, faithful old crying).
And this morning I caught her calling for "Ma-ma", twice!

So there you have it - our daughter - bi-lingual from the start!
Tomorrow I'm going to try and teach her chess.