Unless you’re a linguist (or any other incarnation of language expert), learning a language will likely be just a skill to get by in life.
Now, if you do focus on the journey and not the destination, however, you will learn just how fun it is to learn a language. Especially if you’re somewhere between the ages of 2 and 6 when you learn complex words and mispronounce them with equal, yet entertaining complexity.
And then your parents laugh about it with the rest of the world because social media requires a sacrifice.
One of the superpowers that humans have is to soak in knowledge and information in the early stages of life. Language is one of the major things that we acquire as kids and continue to refine as we grow older. This happens automatically and requires no formal teaching. As long as they are surrounded by language, it will come to them eventually.
It is important to note that surrounded by language means interaction. Parents and other people (not just adults, but kids too) do still have to interact with the kid in order for them to pick up the language and to be able to use it for communication. That’s in. In fact, it’s just as easy for them to acquire multiple languages this way, as long as it’s done in the early stages in life for maximum effect.
TBT when I flew Qantas to Japan and found that their OFFICIAL pronunciation in Japanese – as in, the one they use on all their Japanese documentation and in their Japanese inflight announcements – sounds like “cünt åss”. They are Australian, I guess.
And as is with every journey, learning a language comes gradually. Kids will start off from babbling and move on to monosyllabic and polysyllabic words, then will venture into building simple two word sentences, then add words to build longer sentences ad infinitum.
In all the same manner, they will also experiment with and practice language, leading them to making mistakes in all facets of language use, including mispronunciation.
My younger sister, who is a total dinosaur geek, corrects me and my family on dinosaur facts all the time (and is usually right) yet still manages to mispronounce this one.
There is this hilarious video where a little girl is eating puto, which is a Filipino rice cake as her mom is Filipino, but her dad who is Colombian is not comfortable hearing her happily declare “It’s puto!”This gets even funnier when she says it around her grandma. “It’s big puto!”🤣
To paint a picture of both making mistakes and gradual learning of language, consider this: a kid first learns by mimicking language. So, if they learn the word feet, they will for a time say it perfectly. But then, they might revert to foots.
Now, saying revert is not really accurate—they have actually moved forward, just that they started applying grammatical conventions instead of just mimicking.
At this point, the kid understood what the singular form of feet was, and they understood that plural words take an s at the end. Hence feets. But it was wrong because English is a hot mess of a language that follows rule sets from ten if not more languages and folks who learn it as a foreign language have to deal with the constant facepalming when they realize that buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo is a grammatically correct sentence.
There are multiple people in my life who repeated even ruder expressions that they learned from their respective parents in the car. 🤣
And so learning a language happens pretty much in the same gradual way, no matter if it’s language production or reception. And this is where mishearing and mispronunciation come into play.
When children learn languages, they will sometimes learn to pronounce them just like they would other words they already know. Hence, cheese crisis and whack-a-mole like guacamole.
It’s this similarity that empowers kids to learn further, applying the rules and paradigms they know to words that the English language ends up ruining for them.
So, yes, it’s quite logical to pronounce fettuccine as if it rhymed with medicine, mishear French hens as henchmens and, instead of saying heebie jeebies, you say Hebrew Bee Gees.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is fun in more ways than one. Not only are these tiny linguistic mishaps cute and adorable, it also shows the beauty of watching kids grow up and grasp concepts that are mundane to us. Yet, how they experience it might just defamiliarize us, broadening our own perspectives, thus continuing the cycle of learning and better understanding the world.
For anyone that is thinking of extended breastfeeding, be careful what you call it as they will ask for it in public after they learn to talk a bit. We called it boo boo. No idea why.
In fact, kids are an amazing source of understanding the world. Because of their unrestricted way of thinking outside the box, they often find very smart, and sometimes funny ways of expressing their problem solving skills. And that’s just what we see on the surface—inside their heads, tons upon tons of processes are going on, and creativity is just one of many results that follow.
At around 2 years old, I screamed “BUNNY MILK!” for a few days until my parents figured out it was Nestlé Strawberry Milk powder I was after. Their mascot is a rabbit.
Curiously, kids in my school joked that the song said “La cigüeñaaaaaaa se comió a tu mamáaaaa….” (The stork ate your mother)
So, with all that said, have you ever heard kids mispronounce the heck out of something to a degree that made you crack up? Why not share those instances in the comment section below!
Be sure to upvote the listicle, and if you want more, then check out another of our listicles about the times kids delivered stories in their own words that could only ever result in awkward and hilarious misunderstandings.
My granddaughter used to say punjelly for a pb&j sandwich. 🤣
The Japanese word for “cook” (as in a person who cooks professionally, not the act of cooking) sounds like “cøck” too.
I still call it a merote, and eat “melly melon” because that’s what my 46 yr old daughter called it when she was three. And because she now owns and directs a daycare, we still go potty and frequently point upwards, exclaiming “Airplane!”
I called escalators alligators as a child forever.
These make a lot of sense and it’s easy to understand how new dialects spring up in different communities!
If he pronounces “cat” as “tat” maybe a lot of people are curious about mom’s artwork.
use the horse! erect a horse field! Luke, I am your siiiirree
Swing and a miss for the auto-censor. From now on, I declare that the F-bomb can now be spelled “KFC” on this forum. What the KFC is going on here?
Maybe your toddler helped to program the “speech to text” function on my band friend’s phone, because he’s always talking about the sex parts.
Parma John Cheese is tasty 😋
My daughter when little would remark “the problem is dissolved.” Many years later that’s become standard.
Note: this post originally had 76 images. It’s been shortened to the top 50 images based on user votes.
