Father's Daze

Learning a new language can be a real challenge — especially at my age.

Who am I kidding — learning a new language was a challenge for me even when I wasn’t this old. There are more than a few language teachers from my high school and college days who would attest to that.

It’s all coming back to me now, as we’re learning a new language these days — Aiden-speak.

Learning this language has its good points and its bad points.

On the good side, since Aiden’s only a little more than two years old, the vocabulary in Aiden-speak is still pretty limited.

The bad part of it, though, is that his vocabulary is increasing rapidly, which means every day there’s something new to learn, even while you’re still trying to master what came before.

Now that I think about it, that’s one of the many problems I had learning languages long, long ago — including English.

Fortunately with Aiden-speak thus far, it’s often easy to figure out words simply from the context.

We were able to figure out pretty early that “vroom-vroom,” one of his earliest words, meant motorcycle, since he was usually pointing to a motorcycle when he said it.

Of course, like a lot of his vocabulary, “vroom-vroom” can be a multi-purpose word. In addition to motorcycle, it can also denote Mee-mee’s or Poppie’s moped, or a bicycle, even if none of those go “vroom-vroom.”

Apparently, “vroom-vroom” is a general term for any two-wheeled vehicle in Aiden-speak.

Similarly, any sporty-looking car is not just a car, but a “race car” for Aiden.

That category is broken down even further if it happens to be a red sports car, which becomes “Ightning McKeen” after one of his favorite movies, “Cars.”

It so happens that our publishers own a Red Corvette. When Aiden spent the morning at work with me one day that they happened to drive the Corvette to work, he saw it as we were leaving and immediately cried out, “Ightning McKeen,” which he continued to repeat as we walked past it to our car and drove away.

The letter L, as you might have surmised, is one that he hasn’t quite got the hang of pronouncing yet. As a result, when we put him to be at night, we have to make sure to turn out the “ights” so he can go to sleep.

It did create some confusion the other night when we were going shopping in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Every time there was a flash in the sky, we would tell Aiden it was lightning, to which he of course replied “Ightning McKeen.”

Perhaps the way the light was racing around the sky, he thought it was some kind of celestial car race.

A good portion of his language thus far has come from watching his favorite DVDs — over and over and over.

Along with “Cars,” he has decided “Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2” and “Thomas the Tank Engine” are the best movies ever made, bar none. He has watched them all often enough at our house that, if he doesn’t have them memorized yet, his Mee-mee and Poppie certainly do.

His requests to watch them also seem to bring out a bit of his Germanic heritage.

As soon as he wakes up in the morning, he’ll tell us “Me vatch ‘Race Cars’” or “Me vatch ‘Trains’” or “Me vatch ‘Toys’” — the latter being interchangeable between 1 and 2.

That interchangeability is a feature of a lot of Aiden-speak, which is probably to be expected given that his vocabulary is still growing.

For instance, he has yet to distinguish between different kinds of juice.

Even though he will drink just about any flavor we give him — although we haven’t tried prune juice or carrot juice on him yet — they all have the same name — “appah juice.” Or sometimes, they will be just plain “juice.”

We haven’t tried lemonade with him, or as he would call it, “emonade.” We may have to, just to hear what he’d call it.

There is still a lot of what he says that doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone but him, even with applying context or situation to try to decipher the gibberish.

It’s at times like those that Mee-mee and Poppie have to fall back on a language skill that they learned when Aiden’s father was his age.

Just answer a string of untranslatable gibberish with “Oh, really,” or “You don’t say,” or “Is that so,” and that seems to be enough to satisfy the speaker and keep the conversation going — no matter how one-sided it might be.