For whatever reason, Petra’s verbal skills have always been markedly more developed than her siblings’ were at her age. Well before she reached age two, she was putting together long, grammatically correct sentences in English, and she’s gotten only more advanced since then. Olof and I are surprised nearly every day at some new thing she says, something beyond her years that we didn’t know she’d picked up.<\/p>\n
In the past year or so she has also started picking up a lot of Swedish. She seems to have no problem understanding Swedish family and friends, which certainly wasn’t the case for Tage until after he started going to pre-school when he was four. She switches between languages easily, and has a keen knack for knowing when to speak Swedish and when to speak English.<\/p>\n
Her pronunciation is very good as well, in both languages. She has no trouble with “L” or “R” or “S” — letters that little kids frequently have difficulty mastering. In fact, her Swedish pronunciation and accent are better than Tage’s, and she gives him a run for his money in English, too.<\/p>\n
I’m sure that a good deal of her skill is natural. Some people just have an easier time with languages than others, and some are downright gifted (I hope that turns out to be the case for Petra). It can’t be denied, however, that she’s gotten additional benefit from growing up with older siblings whose language usage she learned early to model.<\/p>\n
There is also no denying that this modeling has sometimes been of questionable benefit to Olof and me. Case in point: last night Olof was trying to get her to settle down and sit on the couch with him, when she pulled away and stomped off, stopping only when she was out of reach to turn and declare, “I hate you. You’re mean!”<\/p>\n
Three guesses where she learned that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For whatever reason, Petra’s verbal skills have always been markedly more developed than her siblings’ were at her age. Well before she reached age two, she was putting together long, grammatically correct sentences in English, and she’s gotten only more advanced since then. Olof and I are surprised nearly every day at some new thing… Read More Copycat<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beverlyrevelry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}