UPDATE 1: Language

It's been a while since we've updated this blog, and that's mostly on purpose:  the intention of the blog was to let people know how our trips to Russia were panning out; now that we're home, I don't really want to turn it into a "funny thing our kid did today" blog.

But there are still some things that are related to travel, and Russia, and orphanages, that are interesting, so I'll do some occasional updates.  The first one is on language.

Probably the most common question we get asked is how well we can communicate with Elena, and how quickly she's learning English.  I'm going to answer that question, in the form of "Tips for parents thinking of adopting Russian chlidren."

TIP 1: Buy a Russian-for-adoptive-parents book.  We bought "Russian Phrases for Children;" it includes two pocket-sized phrasebooks (one for each parent!) and an audio CD.  The phrasebooks (and CD) are divided up by use: basic questions (are you hungry?), directives (come here), endearments (sweetie), and the like, so it's pretty easy to find what you want.  We memorized a few phrases and were able to look up more, so we could actually hold a mini-conversation with Elena in Russian right away.  Totally worth the money, because it really smoothed the language barrier.

TIP 2: Memorize a few basic words.  It's not that hard.  Yes and no.  Come here.  Would you like this?  What's that?  Who, what, where.  Hungry, thirsty, pee, poop.  Hi, bye.  That collection of words got us a long way in communication.

TIP 3: сказать.  "сказать" is Russian for "say," as in "say please."  That's one word that *wasn't* in our phrasebook, yet is extraordinarily useful.  How can you teach English without asking someone to say the Englich word?

TIP 4: Caca.  Yeah, caca, but not what you think.  (more after the jump)

Before we picked Elena up, we participated in a teleconference, set up by our adoption agency, on what to expect.  Eight or ten families participated, as well as Alla, our Russian-born moderator.  One of the families had adopted a Russian child a few years ago, and commented that their child kept calling things "caca," which, they had been told, was babytalk for "poop" in Russian, as it is in English.  Alla was a bit confused, thinking that "caca" isn't a Russian idiom like it is in English, and the conversation moved on. 

When we picked Elena, though, damned if she wasn't calling everything "caca."  She called everything caca. A really puzzling orphanage trait, I thought.  Until three whole weeks later, when we finally figured out, through context, that she wasn't saying "caca" as in poop, she was saying "какой" (KAKoy), the Russian word for "which" or "what."  As in, "what is it?"  All this time, she hadn't been calling things "poop," she'd been asking what they were called.

TIP 5: Repetition.  Every parent knows this, of course, but repetition is the key to learning things, and language is no exception.  As should be obvious, the first English words she learned had to do with the things she liked. "Up" and "down" (as in being picked up and set down) and food words were at hte top of the list.

TIP 6: Books.  I don't think anyone ever sat down and read a book to Elena in the orphanage.  Certainly, at first, she didn't recognize the fact that a book contains a story.  She was perceiving the book as a collection of pictures, not necessarily connected.  This was fine for a short while, as we got used to paging through books, pointing out objects, and naming them, but because she didn't get the story aspect of the book, she didn't understand that a book is read from front to back; rather, she would jump around from page to page depending on what interested her.

That is, until one night when I forced us to read through "The Cat in the Hat," (or the "кошка в шапка" -- koshka f shapka--as we read it) reading every word in order.  She was kind of fussy, but less so when I did it the next night, and the third night she asked to be read The Cat in the Hat, and started anticipating what comes next in the story.  It's kind of neat when a two-year-old figures out how something is supposed to work, and now she knows the English word for almost everything in the book.

TIP 7: Context.  Not really a tip, just a way to round out this blog post.  Elena has been picking up English at a fairly rapid clip--not surprising for someone that age immersed in a new language.  But I've noticed a recent uptick in her vocabulary, and I think I know why: context.  She's reached the point where her vocabulary (of words she can understand, if not say) is large enough that she can pick out the meaning of other words from the context.  Whereas before, her vocabulary was almost exclusively of words we taught her, now she's picking up more on her own--learning them, in other words.