Speaking Kate

Kate has been babbling away for months now and it's terribly cute to hear her speak. Okay, not so much speak, but to be able to name items that she recognises. Her spoken vocabulary (spoken because her level of comprehension is higher than what she is able to say):

papa
mama (different intonations and slight variance for the MIL, my mom and me)
yeye
yiiiii (yi yi)
gong gong (she doesn't say the word properly but has all intention of doing so - the sound she makes is pretty much the phonetic of the 'g' which barely sounds like anything except that we understand her since she does that repeatedly when she sees the FIL)
ball (this has got to be her clearest spoken word)
mum-mum (food)
random animal sounds (not very clear, but she imitates sounds of tiger, barks like a dog and has a weird cute sound she makes as a cat's meow)
O (letter O, oh-oh or simply when she wishes to make a sound)
shoe (she only manages to do 'oe' than the whole word)
open (again, she manages half the word - "op")

What's amazing is that Kate speaks mandarin too! It took me a while to realise that she wasn't just making random sounds (as it didn't sound English to me) and they were really words!

Her spoken mandarin vocabulary:
pao3 (run)
pao4 (make milk)
wo3 (me - this is her clearest mandarin word)
ya1 (duck)
yao4 (want. this sounds abit weird though, not very accurate but it's the right meaning as she typically goes yao-yao when she wants food)
yu2( (fish. but the way she says it sounds more like yi2)
ma3 (horse)
bao1 (bread, short form of mian bao)
yeye (grandfather)
an4 (press. She says this when she wants the TV - pressing the buttons on the remote - and when she wants to press the ear of her rocking horse for music to play)

What's also interesting is that Kate speaks mandarin to the MIL and English to me.

Ahh, how clever the brains of these little ones work!