“I wash the bras periodically”, Anna says, slowing down to say “per-i-o-di-cally” as if reading a word for the first time in a dictionary. We’ve been doing DuoLingo app’s Chinese course for nearly two years on a streak but in reality started a few months before staying in the streak. It’s teaching her that learning what words mean is just something you do regularly, something she didn’t used to do before we started that course. It’s teaching her - and I am as well - how to learn a language as an adult, including asking her to look up and then we use words in Chinese for things that we say in English a lot.
My daughter Anna has had particular difficulty with using time in sentences because she doesn’t understand it at all, but we use “every day”, “yesterday” “next week”, last year etc all the time in Duo Lingo units I’ve spent extra time on, and she seems to have spontaneously taken on this word not in our Chinese lessons yet, but spontaneously like normal children and adults. Also, she’s been much much easier to teach new language to in the last month or so, when it suddenly occurred to me she’s learning and getting better at using some language in Chinese than in English and set out to become “DuoLingo Mom” repeating important questions often like DuoLingo does, and she’s been learning at a more normal level from me since then. For example we were talking about something being hot and I was asking her how hot, and decided to teach her adjectives describing versions of hot like “burning”, “scorching”, “boiling” hot, etc and she learned them right away, something that nearly never used to happen.
It appears my attempt to use DuoLingo daily, in this case to learn Chinese, which I find more logical and simpler to teach an autistic person than English due to pictures representing words plus phonetically spelled written words for the same concept, no plural or singular, no male and female nouns or adjectives (which I thing is a problem in Spanish and French, two languages I considered before settling on Chinese), fewer articles (no “a” or “the”, only “this” “that” and “every”) - is finally paying off with regard to improving my daughters language skills! It’s proven that bilingual children score higher in testing and us Neuroplasticity inducing which I tested and gradually have seen improvements in her spontaneous incorporating of language she never used to use and also better uptake or targeted DuoLingo- like teaching it key info she needs to know - but only today decided to start recording these changes more regularly, which I’m happy to share and hope helps somebody else with an autistic child try this activity which - by the way - is an easy 5-20 min daily thing to do together which my daughter and I both enjoy and get something out of 🙂🙂👍🏻
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