Tag: small children

naamahdarling:

shadowkat678:

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basiacat:

basiacat:

that’s not………. how child speech works…………………………………………..

god okay in an attempt to be less of an asshole, here’s how child speech DOES work (or tend to work, at least)

• kids tend to hypercorrect — this means that they tend to say things like “sleeped” instead of “slept,” “writed” instead of “wrote,” “goed” instead of “went,” etc
• kids tend not to make errors such as omitting verbs (“i hungry”)
• kids also tend not to make errors in the i/me, she/her department (“me am hungry”)
• simplification of difficult sounds — consonant clusters especially, so things like st, sp, ps, etc., as well as f, v, th-sounds, ch-sounds, etc.
• “babbling”-type utterances (“apwen” for “airplane,” using one babbly word for multiple objects, things like that) generally occur in children under the age of three and a half
• say it with me: an eight-year-old child is not going to be saying “me hungwy”
• do not confuse child speech with stereotypical learner english mistakes, that’s not only incorrect but also gross on the stereotypical learner english front (“me love you long time,” anybody?)
• if you’re going to write kidfic please do some * research

Totally. It can be helpful to remind yourself that young children tend to speak as though the English language actually made sense. Our brains are pattern-recognising machines: children are really, really good at puzzling out the implicit rules of the English language, but they don’t necessarily know all the silly exceptions and bizarre edge cases that break those rules yet – those can only be learned through experience and rote memorisation.

Basically, when children who speak English as a first language make mistakes, it typically reflects a tendency to treat English as more grammatically, syntactically, and/or orthographically consistent than it really is. In some cases, this can be compounded by the fact that some kids will get offended at how little sense “proper” English makes, and insist upon using the more consistent forms even though they know very well that they’re technically “wrong”.

for a long young portion of my life I insisted on pronouncing Sean “SEEN” because that’s how it’s spelled.

As someone who spends a good majority of her time working with kids, it irks me to no end when I see children written as if they’re babies.

Past the age of about five or six years old, children can have deep, intellectual conversations about the most bizarre of things. I HAD A CONVERSATION LAST WEEK WITH FOUR THIRD GRADERS ABOUT THE GAS PRICES AND TAXES IN HAWAII.

Were they entirely correct in the facts they were giving? No, because it was all from what they had heard from parents or on the news. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that I was having a genuine conversation with four eight and nine year olds about taxes.

Just about the only speech problems most kids have, unless they have a speech impediment, is not being able to pronounce certain consonants (replacing ‘th’ with ‘fw,’ for example, and some letters are harder to form with your mouth than others) and doing exactly what the person above said: using the English language the way they know how, which isn’t always the way English works.

Kids aren’t stupid. Stop writing them like they are.

I was tutoring a little kid (second grade, I think). He was complaining about a worksheet. “This is hard.” I started to correct him as I knew he was more than capable of it and this bright kid, who had obviously heard the lecture before from others, interrupted me and said: “I know. I know. It’s not really difficult. It’s just time consuming.” Some kids are spooky-smart and even quite articulate.

If you need (plotwise) to emphasize that the child is specifically childish … have them tell the same joke to everyone they meet, cracking themselves up before they get to the punchline … have them ask “Why?” incessantly … have them fidgeting and possibly breaking things (”Oops.” “What?” “Nothing!” “WHAT?!”) … and if you have more than one kid, even of the same age, you don’t have to write them at the same intelligence level or emotional maturity. Some kids are messy and some are obsessively neat. Some are quiet, some loud. Some giggly, some surly. They basically come in the same range of personalities as adults. 

If you don’t want to invest a lot of time writing dialog for kids, just establish that you have a quiet kid. But a kid who gives single-word answers is usually doing so because they don’t like you (or trust you) or they are focused on their own thing and you’re interrupting them. It doesn’t mean they lack the vocabulary or that they don’t understand the adult conversation going on “over their head” (the more inappropriate the conversation, the more likely the kids are paying attention).

I have jabbed the back button so many times on terrible kid fic. This is an excellent resource – kid fic, when done well, is a real treat for me.

The only children I have ever met who did say things like “me hungwy” were the ones who had figured out that if they sounded “adorable” they could wrap adults around their precious little fingers. Kids get it.

Good resource for people who write but spend no time with children.

“KIDS GET IT”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^THIS

In my experience, kids five and up* converse basically like less-educated but still-intelligent adults with smaller vocabularies, a slightly more sketchy understanding of grammar, and really delightful (and often gross) senses of humor.

They are people.  Real people with complex thoughts and inner lives, strong opinions, and the ability to draw accurate conclusions about the people around them and their motives with surprisingly little to go on.  And writing them well is actually a hell of a lot of fun.

Kids are cool.  Write them like it.

* I don’t have much experience with kids younger than this, but I know I was able to read at three, so never, ever underestimate the intelligence of children, for purposes of fic or anything else.

Kids are smart. They haven’t learned much yet, but they’re smart.