The essence and purpose of this blog is to document the progress in language acquisition of my daughter, Sophie. Of course, to every parent every aspect of development of their child is fascinating, and often is unable to be appreciated fully because of the pressures and time consuming aspects of everyday life. There has been much research into the language acquisition from birth of children, and I will be highlighting some of it in this blog. 

So, why do I want to write a blog about the development of my daughter? Well, that’s a good question. As I say it is obvious all parents are fascinated with their own child’s development. I have often wished I had taken more specific documentation of my 8 year old son Logan’s development. You know how some parents take a picture every month in the same place for twenty years, then put all the pictures together in a film to show a pictorial representation of how the child has grown. I wish I had done that with Logan.

But the pressure of time and the way time is eaten up on a daily basis made this a difficult task to commit to. Those video montages documenting years of development are instantly fascinating to watch. How the body grows and develops, how the hair is short, becomes long, short, long over time. The vagaries of fashion.. So the interest in the development of language from pre birth and beyond holds a similar interest. Especially to a teacher of English as a second language.

OK, so time for a bit of background. Let’s put some flesh on the bones. I went to China in 2007 to teach English. I had been living and working in London for about 10 years when I had the opportunity of accepting redundancy from my job in swinging Camden Town, London. Not my job swinging in Camden Town, you understand. I went travelling for 9 months. To find myself. And, as the old joke goes, I found myself somewhere in between a Thai beach and a homeless couple of nights sleeping in Sydney Railway Station. As so many people do.

The first country I went to on my nine months travel was China. A lot of my friends at the time had said that they thought I must be mad to go to China first. But the language! But the road signs! But the food! My reasoning was that as it was the start of my journey I would be fresh and ready for whatever questions China had to throw at me. This turned out to be good reasoning. 

On arriving in China, at Beijing Airport, it was admittedly a bit of a shock. I remember soon before leaving sitting on a bus in London, and there were a couple of Chinese women nattering away in the seats in front of me. Ooh, I thought to myself, don’t they speak loud. And high. And a bit shouty. Then it dawned on me. I was going there in a couple of weeks for the first few weeks of my nine month expedition. Cripes! Luckily, the experience of being in China was a fascinating and, thankfully, easy endeavour. The people were all smiley, they knew what I was pointing at, and they were very polite. To foreigners at least.