Progress of his speech: Other languages, echo and Brag Book

Picking up bits of other languages

We are pleasantly surprised that he's picking up a second language, Bahasa Malaysia. I speak that to my helper and I guess he's been listening in. At times my helper does speak it to him, just for fun, but most of the time, it's English. He also likes to watch a local animation series, Upin dan Ipin, spoken in Bahasa.

Currently, whenever I ask my helper whether there's something or other in Bahasa, he'll chip in his two cents worth. While at the supermarket a few days ago, I had asked my helper "Masih ada Special K tak?" (Do we still have Special K cereal bar?). He replied "tak, tak, tak, tak ada" (no, no, no, none - which was true) even though the question was not directed to him.

At other times, he'd respond "tak dapat" (cannot) to questions from my helper. This morning, after his shower, he asked for his "seluar" (pants). I was surprised...perhaps my helper had taught him that word. Perhaps he's knows more than he's letting on!

So now, we try speaking to him a bit more in Bahasa and on the rare occassion, in Mandarin. My husband's the one who's good in Mandarin and has taught him to count in Mandarin.

Echo
He's also being our little echo. He frequently echos what my helper or I say throughout the day. I'm fine with that cos I think it helps get him more speech muscle practice.

His Communication book (Brag Book)
Last week I came across an old document in my stack of papers to sort out. It was his "Brag Book". It'll put what I wrote about the progress of his speech in previous posts, into a better context. This bBrag Bok was suggested by his temporary speech therapist (as his usual therapist was on maternity). It basically lists down the words that he can say, and his pronounciation of those words. It's meant to track his progress and help his teachers understand him better when he goes to kindergarten.

That Brag Book (a simple Word document, really) was created in early August 2008 - he was then 2 years, 8 mhts. It had very very few spoken words (just 27) compared to his peers. In the list, were single words like papa, mama, banana which were pronounced quite well.

But most other words were hard to understand.
For example five = ffff; sheep = seep-pa; up = up-pa; two = hooo; manggis = mm-chiss; me = mm-chee.

Today, he probably has several hundred spoken words. I stopped keeping track after he hit 40+ words. Some of those words, he can now say well, for e.g. up = up, sheep = sheep.

We still have a long way to go in helping him speak in sentences and to get his speech intelligible. It's a slow process, but we're making (good) progress. He needs to build up his confidence too when speaking to persons other than myself or my helper. But, I'm still very happy with his progress.