Growing up steadily

My child Konamiru
is growing up steadily.

Around this time the year before last,
thinking "this is dangerous as it is,"
I was scrambling to get into a nursery school,

and around this time last year,
while crying during a solo move,
wishing for them to speak more Japanese,
I was in the middle of transfer procedures to a larger nursery school.

It has been one year at the new nursery school,
and really, all sorts of things have happened.

Compared to children of the same age,
their speech is delayed, so there are various pitiful moments,
but they are living
at their own pace, resiliently.

Meeting Hiragana

In November, they suddenly took an interest in Hiragana,
and now they can write it.
They noticed vowels and consonants.

"Toooooooo"
"Maaaaaaa"
They noticed the rule that
it always ends in
"aiueo".

But that's where the confusion started.

"Why is it that
older sister is written correctly as 'oneesan',
but father is written as 'otousan'?"

I spent about an hour
trying to figure out the question
because I didn't understand what the doubt was.
Because at first,

"Older brother is 'i',
so why is clock also 'i'?"
they asked me,
and I was like, what?
What are you talking about?
It feels like I'm being made to solve a mystery.

And then I ended up worrying about it together with them.

But then I realized it!!! I did!!!!

Konamiru... it's the other way around.
"We are mistakenly saying 'otoosan'
for 'otousan', so the correct one is 'otousan'."
I felt like I had made a brilliant invention.

Konamiru

thought phonetically,
"Because you read A as 'ah'?"
and replied, which was annoying,
so I told them that's different.
Japanese is read exactly as it is written.
That's what I taught them.
"But sister is sister..."

They seem confused.

Japanese is one character, one sound

Come to think of it,
at the new day service,
training to get used to Japanese has started.

They were told it's one character, one sound,
and to clap their hands to the sounds,
so for 'orenji' (orange),
while clapping,
"o-re-n-ji"
"(clap clap clap clap)"
they were supposed to clap 4 times,
but they couldn't do it.
In Konamiru's mind,
orenji is Orange,
"Orange"
and they could only clap once or twice,
"(clap clap)".

If it's 'onigiri' or 'sakana',
they can keep the rhythm properly,
but for words like orange, T-shirt, and pants,
where English can be used as is,
the rhythm is English.

The teacher was confused,
and Konamiru was confused too.

Compared to those days,

now

they handle Japanese well,
and even try saying bad words.
They seem to want to imitate cool phrasing too,
"Like, you know... I..."
what are you saying... even though their cheeks are still chubby.

But they still love English.

I feel like they aren't exposed to English at all,
but even so, they still love English.
They are learning it at the after-school program at their nursery,
which has a real lesson and app style.
The app portion they do at home
they advanced on their own all the way to the elementary school level,
so now I've stopped that
and they are doing Todo English.

After English time at the nursery,
they once cried loudly saying "I want to do English!"
and were scolded by the teachers,
"That was English just now!!"
poor Konamiru.

They still love numbers and space as always.

I'll skip the details here as it would get long,
but today I felt embarrassed
being taught by Konamiru about 49...
They gave me a quiz,
"What times what times what equals 49?"
and I answered that there is no such number.
They insisted, "There is!"
I got a little irritated, saying "What is it?💢"
but they said, "7 x 7 = 49!"
I understand that, but that's not
what times what!
You were multiplying one more thing, weren't you?💢
When I got angry, they said,
"7 x 7 x 1 = 49!!"

I... I was beaten...