Autism

Anna's saying more new words while watching Logan's Run - DuoLingo Chinese for 2+ yrs paying off

We're watching the movie Logan's Run movie from 1976 with our autistic daughter Anna near the final scene, where Logan is talking to an old man in the capitol in Washington DC, whose partly senile and talking to his cats.  The cats meow and he meows back, at a certain point, and Anna said, "He's mimicking his cats meowing", a spontaneous sentence with a newly used word.  When I pointed out that was a spontaneous sentence that moreover used a word I had never heard her use, to "mimick", she repeated the sentence substituting the word "imitate", to which we said "No, they're both right!" 

Anna's been picking up words spontaneously with some frequency during the last approx two years of leaning chinese together using DuoLingo.  I do a lot more that just that to enhance the experience, such as:

  • having her close her eyes and not look at any word translations because she was rearranging characters and words and not listening enough, so I would have us close our eyes and listen, beginning with the light off so she could avoid distractions and using the something like 30-40% of the brain being occupied processing speech, so instead she's have the benefit of focusing all her attention to sound.  I had to also help her parse what she heard, such as having her repeat the last word she heard, then ask what was the word before the last word and have her repeat that upon the next pass, then the one before it, etc., and/or making a pass from first to last words in a similar way, then listen for what followed the word(s) she identified, etc. 
  • I also had her repeat words and their translations in both directions five or ten times, like "ni - you", "ni-you", etc. counting out iterations on her fingers whenever she had trouble learning a word in either direction,
  • we spent a lot of time doing the time-race/ competition part of DuoLingo early on, eventually coming up in the top three in the country in points,
  • I make up stories about how the chinese characters display a cartoon that resembles the meaning of the word, to help and me her remember them,
  • I look up and have her look up words we use often but don't know the Chinese expression for yet, using google and/or yabla chinese dictionary, so she gets in the habit of looking up and learning new words along with me and practicing incorporating them.  For example, I recently realized we didn't know the words for the colors of a rainbow, and looked them up and rehearsed and practice them with her during out evening walk (since I'm trying to do 10,000 steps a day, and she sometimes walks with me at night in our apartment building hallways), etc.

Anna enjoys the musical sounds, the repetition, the cartoonish software, etc. like she enjoys all software, so I thought, why not do a software experience that gets us somewhere, and by the way, it causes neuroplasticity and increased IQ to learn a new language, so why not learn a language together?  I figured it'd be useful for business relating to supplement purchases, since I hope to start a supplement business in the near future, or other equipment related to that or any other businesses in the future, given so many centers of manufacturing in China.  Duolingo is around $70 a year, I think.


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Barbara Rose

A mom finds happiness and a way around her own limitations through helping her autistic daughter recover.

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