Winter started hear journey into speech with dual fluidity (speaking both english and dutch.) Jessica was determined that Winter would be able to speak to her great-grandparents. It worked, as Jessica spoke Dutch to Winter and Joe spoke english. All seemed fine until Winter started going over to friends houses to be babysat. She would ask politely for "mucka" and nobody would understand what she saying. She would talk about the "fokachas" and the response was the same. She would get frustrated and Jessica decided to let go of dutch (for a while.)
It appears that one of the consequences of Winter's early language proficiency was that she had a real ear for pronunciation and rapidly learned to pronounce things with remarkable clarity. She never had problems with her "R"s or "Y"s. Sterling and Ginger (on the other hand) who have never learned any dutch to speak of, show signs of being a bit slow to learn to pronounce things properly. Did the Dutch lessons early on help? Who knows.
One other little tidbit is that Sterlings tongue was "tied" and we actually took him in for surgery as a youngster to have it loosened. It is conceivable that that may have affected him as well, but Ginger seems to be following closely in Sterlings footsteps.
7 months ago
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Now I regret the fact that I didn't persist. I still would like them to learn some Dutch, so I make them watch their Disney movies in Dutch. They don't really like it, but they have caught onto several words. Every time they figure one out they get really excited. "I know what mom is in Dutch!" Mama. More often though, they'll ask me what a certain word means, which I guess helps them learn too. If we ever win the lottery I will buy the Rosetta Stone software for Dutch, and the kids can play "the Dutch game" on the computer.
They told me kids don't have to have their pronunciation down til 3rd grade.
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