little miss chatter-box

Leona is in a full on language explosion. But since it's four languages at once, she has them all jumbled together (as is expected) - though she is surprisingly (?) adept at using the majority of the right language with the right people, e.g., mostly Norwegian with my mom, mostly Mandarin with Judge's mom, etc.

It is only recently, however, that she has started to talk with other kids at the playground...it's just that she can't express herself fully in even the combined languages, let alone just in Mandarin, so she just kind of chatters away with Mandarin sounds, slipping in some key words here and there, as well as a lot of body language complete with pointing and gesticulating.

An example is when she is telling a kid coming up behind her when she's sitting at the top of a slide to go slide down the other one (she tends to just sit and sit and sit at the top of slides), or when she's trying to organize a couple of kids on the teeter-horses, to make sure they don't go on the one she's going to go on, etc.

She does something similar at Judge's grandma's house when she is talking with the relatives there. They understand almost none of it, but if they ask her a question she can often answer now in Mandarin, often surprising me with new words I have never heard her speak before.

She is seriously cute!

A current gem: Backisle (bicycle)

She has also started to:

• drop the 't' on some words, sometimes. Like 'move' is not always 'moot' anymore.
• say 'I' in very few circumstances: "I wanna..." - while most of the time she still uses Noona or Oona.
• say Liana and Eliana (rather than just Ana), and Eona and Leona, but not super often yet.

And her sentences are getting soooooo long (4-5 constructs strung together)!

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