Just curious. Is it hard to teach a Finnish toddler to talk basic Finnish words? My Vietnamese daughter learned to talk about most of the basic things in the house at 15 months old. The table is for comparison.

5 comments

1. That’s interesting because I’ve heard that Vietnamese is one of the hardest languages to learn because of tonality. Maybe all languages are easy if you’re a toddler.

2. Depends on the kid. By 15 months some kids speak sentences that consist of a few words and some say barely anything.

3. All kids learn from exposure and repetition – they won’t know what the sounds are at first but repeat them, then they start putting two and two together. The ‘r’ sound is usually the hardest to mimic, along with ‘v’.

   I learned basic words at 9mo, and simple sentences at 12mo – admittedly my language development was faster than most, and I learned both English and Finnish from the getgo. My son is close to three years old, and has a few phrases and a lot of words, but no real conversational skills beyond simple yes and no answers and please/thank you. Depends entirely on the child, is what I’m getting at.

4. Pretty much every child has the same capacity for learning any language.

   A child growing up in a Finnish speaking environment will learn how to speak Finnish well, but a child growing up in a non-Finnish speaking environment, bar a few random words, will end up speaking virtually no Finnish.

   This applies to children born to Finnish parents in Finland or born to Vietnamese parents in Vietnam.

5. Kids are great at learning languages. Just toss them into an environment where they need to learn it. But naturally there are big differences in what age they actually start talking… And making sense.