How do we decide when a kid has learned a word? It's a harder question than I'd have thought before Olive came around. Kids spend a whole lot of time babbling semi-randomly, and that gives a lot of opportunities to hear words if you're hoping to.

In the interest of defining a standard, then, let's use these tests to determine whether a kid has learned a word:

• repetition: the child has said the word several times
• consistency: the child pronounces the word the same way each time
• intention: the situation makes it clear that the child is attempting to communicate the word's denoted concept
• plausibility: the word is a real word in a standard human language, or at least a substantial fraction of one
• exclusivity: the word is only used for its meaning; it is excluded from babble

By this standard, Olive knows two words! The first one came over a month ago, though she's gotten even more consistent with it since then. It's a very traditional kid word: nein, which is of course German for "no". She uses it with enthusiasm!

Her other word right now is ba!! always spoken as an exclamation. She uses it to refer to spheroids: balls, balloons, and other similar objects. This one came in maybe two weeks ago?

This is pretty early for speech, and to be honest I strongly suspect that the vocabulary she can understand is growing much faster than the vocab that she can speak; it's just that she still has some trouble with some of the more complicated bits of phonology that English and German require.

We're really excited about moving past gestures and miming to proper speech, but nobody can be more excited about this than Olive is. Once she realized that she could use sounds to denote objects, she got very enthusiastic about taking every opportunity to do so.

She isn't dextrous with a ball yet. She'll kick it away, or pick it up and drop it, but she can't throw or catch or intercept or even aim her kicks¹. A ball as a thing to play with is chaotic to her. Even so, this last week or so, her favorite toys have been balls, because she could announce what she was playing with!

It's going to be really fun to see where her vocabulary goes next. I suspect that once she starts really going in German, I'm going to have some trouble keeping up!