Netanya started babbling and screaming since she learned that she can make noises, about 5 or 6 months old (not too sure). But she spoke her first intelligible word at around 11 months old. Guess what it was? Mama? No. Dada? No. Milk? No. You’ll never guess, it’s a 2-syllable word, ‘biscuit’! Yes, her first word was biscuit, though she said it without the ’s’ sound “bee-cuit”. It was too cute. Needless to say, her favorite thing in the world at 11 months old was eating biscuits. When we were in Singapore, everyone was so amused and enchanted by her ability to say this word so well that she was rewarded, all day long, with biscuits of every kind. And for a month, everyone around her pronounced biscuit as ‘bee-cuit’.
Since she turned 1, she has learned a few more words. Here are some:
- family: dada, mama (finally), 哥哥，姐姐，婆婆
- animal: doggy, bird, fish, 大象，猫猫
- others: ball ball, more, 奶奶 (for milk), “mom mom” (when she wants food), “da” (means wait), “bom bom” (means to take a bath), “by-per” (can mean both diaper and apple), “na na” (means banana) and bubble
Sometimes the things she said all sounded the same, but looking at her gesture and the context in which the word was spoken, we could guess what she was trying to tell us. Even though she only speaks a handful of words, already we could tell that she’s going to be quite a chatterbox. Oh, and the strange thing is, she has totally forgotten how to say the word ‘biscuit’, but in no way does that mean she doesn’t love to eat biscuits anymore. Guess there are so many types of foods she likes to eat that she doesn’t focus on just one.
