Cindi Simmonds (September 8, 2011) - In all the languages linguists have studied there are over 500 different phonemes (the exact number escapes me at the moment, but 589 comes to mind). A phoneme is the smallest meaningful unit of sound in a language; changing a phoneme changes the meaning of the word. For example, in English "bat" and "pat" differ by one phoneme—changing the sound "buh" to the sound "puh" changes the meaning of the word. While there are over 500 potential phonemes, an individual language uses only a subset of the possible phonemes.

English uses only 30-40 and Spanish uses 24-28. (I tried to find a phoneme count for Mandarin, but was unsuccessful—Google is NOT my friend). In Japanese, for example, there is no distinction between the sounds "l" and "r, that is, they are heard as the same sound because the distinction between those sounds is not meaningful in Japanese. So a native Japanese speaker, who learned a bit of English for a vacation, would have trouble with the instruction to "Turn right at the light." This speaker would hear "right" and "light" as the same word. Phenomenal—eh??

As infants we are able to distinguish between all of the various phonemes that have been discovered by linguists—we truly have the potential to be multi-lingual. Phenomenal, eh? However, our brains quickly prune away all the unneeded connections; thus, we begin to only hear the distinctions that are important in the language(s) to which we are exposed.

In Mandarin, there are many phonemes we don't have in English. As an adult trying to learn Mandarin with my daughter, I can't always hear the difference between what the teacher said and what I said; my brain literally cannot distinguish between the two words—because English doesn't use those phonemes and I was never exposed to Mandarin as a child. Even more frustrating, sometimes I can hear the difference (kinda), but my mouth still cannot recreate it.

The word for "meat" in Mandarin is "ròu." The "r" sound is somewhere between the English sounds "l" and "r." Liping, Katie's and Nick's Mandarin teacher, tried to help me make the correct sound through a series of mouth gymnastics. Eventually I was able to make the correct sound—but only after a lengthy series of mouth contortions. Not really very useful for conversation. Worse yet, I couldn't tell when I said the word correctly—even less useful—especially in Mandarin.

A slight difference in sound can change the meaning of "four" (Sì) to dead"( Si), or "teacher"( Laoshi) to "mouse" (Xiao shu). I use these examples because we moms frequently make these "phoneme" errors in class. We moms count, "One, two, three, dead" while our kids sing, "Yi èr san sì" with perfect accents. I can't even count the number of times I called Liping "mouse" instead of "teacher." Thankfully, she is very patient!

Remember the "Ma mà ma ma" example from my first post? In Mandarin, this translates as "Did mother scold the horse?' because the tones change the meaning of the word. We don't have these tones in English. If we interpret this sentence using English phonemes, "Did mother scold the horse?" changes to "Ma ma ma ma," which can only be interpreted as a babbling baby.

As an "English-only" speaker, I was never exposed to these phonemes, therefore my brain just lumps the entire sentence into a single category. Which is fine when I am speaking English (where they all belong to one category), but not when attempting to speak in Mandarin (where they don't). Frustrating, eh?

By now, you're probably wondering where the "fantastic" part comes into the equation. One of the most wonderful things about Language Stars is that our kids are exposed to these phonemes at an early age—when their brains can still take advantage of all those phonetic connections and distinctions. I'm happy to say that my kids have no problem with "Ròu," "Sì" "Si," "Laoshi," "Xiao shu".

In fact, they both like to correct me, not understanding why mom always uses the wrong word despite their repeated assistance. "Mom, I told you . . . ." or "That's not how you say . . ." I thought about explaining that my brain does not work as well as theirs, but do I really want to give them that ammunition for when they are older? Early exposure to multiple languages allows children to retain the ability to distinguish between all the phonemes in all the languages to which they are exposed. Fantastic, eh?

As a side benefit, which I may discuss at a later time, the ability to distinguish between these phonemes also helps them develop the proper accent. My children sound like native Spanish speakers when they speak Spanish, unlike me, who sounds like an English speaker trying to speak Spanish— don't even ask me about trying to roll my "r's." The same with Mandarin—they sound like native Mandarin speakers. I love listening to their cute little accents. FANTASTIC!