Vocabulary improvement in kids!

A few days back, my wife took my kid out for an evening walk. They were passing near to the railway crossing, nearby my home. The gate was closed, and hence both of them waited nearby to have a look at the train and wave at the passengers inside. Two minutes later, the train arrived, whistling in full blast and all the engine and all its twenty two compartments went out of sight in just a few moments. My kid was extremely happy to see the train moving so nearby him and waved his tiny hand enthusiastically. He exclaimed, “Bads train, bads train”! Bads train? What is that? My wife didn’t quite get it, but didn’t want to kill his enthusiasm in the midst of his enjoyment. Some passengers were kind enough to wave back, which increased his happiness and sense of achievement. Soon afterwards, they started their way back home.

On the way back, my wife asked him what does ‘bads train’ mean? He immediately replied, ‘This train has people in it’. “So what?”, she asked. “Yesterday when we saw a train here, you said it doesn’t carry people and is called good train. So this one is a bads train!”, he was innocent in his face when he said that. When my wife told us about this, everybody broke out laughing, except of course my kid. He couldn’t make it out, what is so funny in this. After all, he has applied the right technique (as it seems obvious to him) to identify the train correctly. Look at how kids develop their own vocabulary by connecting things up. Amazing! Of course, this time he didn’t get the relationship quite right, but most of the times his most simplistic reasoning is all that it takes to improve the vocabulary...There are numerous examples when he succeeded, but we won’t discuss them here. In fact, I believe that they fail only because the English language is so funny and doesn’t have much logic or reasoning associated with it. We will talk about this aspect of the language during a future post in this blog, but for the time being let’s stick to this subject.

Another such instance happened just today morning. Mornings, as usual, are busy for all of us at home with my kid getting readied for school, myself preparing to go to the office and my wife to her school. Presently, he just finished his breakfast and was playing in the drawing room. I was having my breakfast. At a moment that was least suspicious, my kid suddenly told me, “Why do always cool up, why don’t you cool down?”. Initially, I didn’t notice it, since I was busy reading the newspaper . But, then I stepped out aside a bit and asked him what he meant by that question? What he said was really amazing, while also giving all of us again a good laughter. He said, “I asked you, why are always angry with me, why don’t you cool down”? It wasn’t really unimportant when was the last time I got angry with him (If you’re a parent, you’ll immediately acknowledge that there is never a dearth of opportunity to get angry with one’s kid, so I surmise, I would’ve got angry with him sometime in the recent past), but the fact that he applied his mind and coined up a new phrase from his knowledge about the opposites - ‘up’ being the opposite of ‘down’ - and from two unrelated words was literally thrilling for me. This time also, like during the train incident, everybody laughed, except my kid. This time, he got it closer than during the train incident. I am sure, he will succeed next time with his innovative vocabulary!