Enter the Life of a Toddler

Do you remember those moments as a kid when your parents were in a long, dull conversation with their friends and you got bored and either egged your parents on to get a move on, or found some more interesting, exciting play to engage in?

We all have known some mom or dad who complains about their young child just learning to grasp language, but not yet able to make themselves fully understood, throws tantrums and fits because they can't make themselves truly understood.

I feel like I'm living the life of one of those small children. I'm a slightly more competent toddler, though, because I can hop on a bus and get myself to the university every morning for Chinese class. When I'm in a social setting my mind blanks out quite quickly because I can only keep up with a minimal amount of the information being exchanged. When I engage in conversation (and I've been avoiding simply reverting to English although I could generally get by with it) the interaction requires 2-5 times the energy because I have to stop the speaker to ask the meaning of a word, or I have to get at an idea in a round about way or try to ask how an idea or word is expressed in Chinese.

I am listening to the Ramona and Beezus books on my phone right now and I found that I can empathize with Ramona when she is learning to read. When she was just beginning to learn to read words, she would read books by inserting a buzzing sound for each word she did not know. "The boy zzzz the zzzz on the ball and zzzz zzzz into a zzzz. How fun!"

This is me when I listen to Chinese, and it's even more exaggerated when I read.

Sometimes when Rex is driving the motorcycle and he wants to find some food for dinner, he'll ask me to keep my eyes open and tell me what I can see. I don't really like that suggestion, so I do what I can realistically do. In a sign full of what may as well be nonsense, I recognize a few sparse words, "hand" and "beef noodles" and "coffee" amid long lists of menus with some mysterious foods listed.

I tell Rex, "Let's go to the place where we can eat hands!" Because I can't actually offer anything useful in this scenario.