while both daughter and son move ahead with their korean vocabulary, it is claudia — at six and a half months older — who begins to grok the CONCEPT of languages, and how there is some connection between the language called “korean” and the PERSON who is “korean” — her brother.
most pivotal i think is her recent “understanding” of the word “english”. she now gets, to some extent, that “english” is what we speak in the default. she is, however, trying to line it up with the intuitive relationship between the words “korea” (“béla was born in korea…”) “korean” as race (“béla has delicious korean toes”) and the speaking of the “korean” language.
even before she got “english” or “korean”, she had isolated “speaking” as the word that meant “another language”. after all, we “talk,” and we say we are “talking”, but when we or anyone is doing it in something OTHER than english, we say they are “speaking” that language. at dance camp in june, she heard kun-yang lin speaking chinese, and we discussed it. later that day (and week, in fact), she reminded me many times that kun-yang had been “speaking”. she forgot the “chinese” part, but it was clear to what she was referring.
then, she began to recognize korean words as the thing we called “korean”, but she also knew that BELA was a “thing” we called “korean”. since she knew HE was korean and SHE was black, she chose, for awhile, to express the act of speaking korean language in THOSE terms — when b. did it, it was “korean”. when she did it, it was “speaking black”. she’s still looking, i think, for the quid pro quo terms for her own situation. “black” is what she “is”, but so far there’s no special place, or special language, that goes with it, and she seems to know it.
i was surprised to find her helen-keller-at-the-well moment was with the word english. she had just finished some semblance of counting to five in pure korean numbers (leaving out four/넷 and adding six/여섯, which she still calls “yo-yo”), and i said, “great, now let’s do it in english.” she looked at me doubtfully, but as soon as i started to count, the light went on. “english!” she said.
and once our primary language — her birth language — had a name, she was much more effective at distinguishing it from words that were in korean. almost immediately, saying things like “it’s milk in english, 우유 in korean,” made sense to her — not that she would always remember the korean word, but suddenly, i saw that she understood the concept behind it.
this morning, in her usual fashion. she donned an arbitrary selection of dress-up items, put “sunblock” on her babies and made them a “school lunch,” pushed a shopping cart to the door, and said, “goodbye!” — but whereas she usually says she is going to “target”, “acme,” or “ikea,” she said, “i going english!”
and now, a song about carrots.
and, a kickass song by 자우림. it’s this korean, edith piaf, grudge-match kinda thing, and the kids like it too!
