Associative thinking

Coincidentally, both my sister and I focussed on babyboo learning Mandarin this past week. His pronunciation is not as crisp as how a native Mandarin speaker should, but he has got most of them right. Pretty much still sounding very English.

We spent Saturday morning playing audio animal games before I left for yoga. It was very interesting to see how this little child relates one object to another. It started out very random, and he was throwing all sorts of wrong answers. Dad insisted it was not because he does not know, just that he was not at all interested in getting the right answers. Hmmm. Hmmm. Now I see how I got the habit of randomly throwing ideas into a pool, and pulling everyone off-tangent. Hehe.

I chased him around the house, and he finally made a few serious attempts. The wrong ones were very interesting. I asked him what a 骆驼 (luo tuo = camel) is, and he actually answered “horse”. My guess is that he identifies them by shape! Which also means that he probably does remember (vaguely, at least) what luo tuo looks like. So I told him that this is a Camel.

Revision early this morning. I asked him again, “baby, what is a luo tuo?” This time his reply came very promptly, “Kangaroo!” Dad still insisted he was just not interested in answering me properly. A granddad so full of excuses! My guess this time is that babyboo now knows what a Camel looks like, but can only remember the Cam part of it, and the closest he could fish out from memory was Kan-garoo. It’s a little like our guess-the-crystal game. Any name he does not remember, he will smoke us with a random xx-yy-quartz, and the xx-yy usually sounds somewhat like the real names of the crystals.

He also has a habit of cooking up lyrics for songs that he can only remember the tunes. It is really interesting to see how he relates one thing to another. ❤