My kids progress in learning English and Lojban

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Since Dan asked, I'll give a brief status.  I'll let others indicate whether
they want repeated updates.  I also will address And's question.

The kids of course WANT to learn English, and are doing reasonable well by
my standards.  They can now count to 10 easily, and Angela rather more
easily than Avgust can do larger numbers up to 50, with some errors.  This
is about the same as their level of numberical mastery in Russian.  I thus
observe that learning numbers is, at least in that age group, one of the
first things learned and learned well (Avgust counts virtually anything that
occurs in numbers greater than 1, and pretty much solely in English.  He has
experienced some language confusion in numbers: giving the English word 'five'
when asked in Russian for the number (pyat'), but he still recognizes and uses
the Russian word in a purely Russian conversational context.)

The kids know several set phrases in English - politenesses like Please, and
Thank you, good morning and good night, and generally use them appropriately
(and remind me when I forget).  They know perhaps 2 dozen concrete nouns in
English well, and somewhat more perhaps by recognition only.  They are starting
to grasp how English does plurals, especially Angela, but they do not use them
productively since they don;t create new English sentences yet.  They do not y
yet know any verbs, much less how to conjugate them, though they (and I) use
"careful" as a verb in both English and Russian pidgin for "Be careful".
They have imported several English words into Russian speech, declining them
in the Russian manner (schoolbus being the one that comes to mind).  No
adjectives, though I think they recognize some of the color words, they still
use only Russian for the colors.  No, sorry - they know "big", though they do
not use it, even with English words.

Their pronunciation is pretty good, still accented, though not in the stereo-
typical Slavic accent to my mind: Angela says her name almost as a French
person would (given my French last name, this is not too unexpected).  They
have some trouble with English 'th', and love to make fun of the heavy English
aspiration of stops (Angela is hilarious when she emulates my "Peter Piper
picked a peck of pickled peppers ..." at high speed).

As for Lojban, they both know "coi." (Greetings) and used it spontaneously last
night when we had a conversation session and people arrived.  Angela has
learned "co'o", goodbye.  They have probably got some recognition of a couple
of Lojban words that we've explained to them, but we are as of yet using less
Lojban around the house than we normally did before they arrived, so they get
little exposure except in our weekly sessions.  Our own Lojban is getting r
rather rusty, amidst the onslaught of constant Russian use and study.

Avgust seems to have an especially good sound mimickry ability, and has more
readily been able to replicate sounds, words, and phrases in both Lojban and
English more accurately than his sister on the first attempt.  This is
especially interesting in that he has speech problems in Russian with l/r
and s/s'/sh distinctions (among others).  These problems carry over, but less
severely, to his normal English, but he seems to be getting over the problems
in both languages very quickly.  He rarely misprounounces Lojban words when
mimicking them, though he hasn't much used them except in mimickry.  His
sister mimicks less well, and is more  perfectionist - not liking to need
correction - so she doesn't always want to try new phrases, and makes errors
that we have to be sensitive in correcting.  But she does learn well, and loves
the compliments when she gets it correct.  The words she actually knows, she
then says spontaneously with a better accent and clarity than Avgust, even
when he might have said it better the first mimicking repetition.

Probably more than you want to know, but this is what comes to mind of a
linguistic nature, and I figure it is better to let you people tell me what
you do and don;t want to hear about (and how often).

lojbab