Your Vocabulary

Dear Beanie,

When we were at the neurologist a while ago, we were asked about your vocabulary. How many words do you know?

I find this, without a doubt, the absolute most interesting phase of your development. Discovering which words make it into your vocab and which are left out... which are acquired first and why... which are you just parroting the sounds we make (like 'I love you') and which are thought out concepts (like 'Good morning', and 'Another red train!'). But as for how many?

Guessing vocabulary is tough. At the time, your daddy quickly guessed at 100. But then we actually thought about it... and no, absolutely not. In your big animal book, you can point to and name at least thirty or forty of the fifty animals in there (actually, I wrote this an hour ago. Since then, we've read it together and you know ALL of them, even ones like quokka, vulture, antelope and stick insect. Okay, I lie... you kept calling the wombat a bear, but still!). In the bathroom alone, you can say water, toothbrush, toothpaste, washing machine, toilet, shower, iron, Mummy's, Daddy's, Ruben's, clothes... You can tell me what colour all those things are. You can tell me if they are big or not. You can tell me if they are dirty or clean, wet or dry. And then there is food. And then there are body parts. There are your toys, and the occasional description of how you are using them ('Big kick' for your ball, or 'all flat' for your sand). There are all the colours you can identify. And do people count?

Just a little happy snap of us. You can't get away from me! 

You have recently started to use more than just nouns and adjectives and the occasional very simple sentence, such as 'off we go'. You have started to say words that represent concepts, like inside and outside, open and closed, and are using them as commands.

And then there is the who bilingualism business, just to complicate things further. When you have finished eating, you announce, 'All finished' about 70% of the time, and "Fertig!" the other 30%. A 'ball' is occasionally a 'ball' (okay... so this reads the same... but it is pronounced differently, and you obviously switch between the two), a 'car' occasoinally an 'auto'. 'Apple', your first word besides Mummy and Daddy, is occasionally 'Apfel'.

I've been reading that between the ages of two and three, some kids acquire as many as ten new words a day. I just went in to collect you from your nap, and before I could take you out of your cot, you had learnt 'humidifier' (which you say now as dididifier) and 'tail' on the monkey. This morning you managed to distinguish a ship from a boat, and now use them both appropriately. Your new favourite 'power words' -- the ones that make me do something -- are 'Look!' and 'This way'. And while your counting is really just parroting at this point, you definitely have the idea of 'another' down pat, which kind of amazes me. For example, you will point to the left side of my chest and say, 'boobie', then point to the right and say, 'another boobie!'.

So how many words can you say? Who knows. How many can you understand? More than we give you credit for, I think!

I love you and that little exploding mind of yours!
Love Mummy.