In this journey of arming your child with new words, what helps enormously is familiarity of context. What this means is they learn a new word and have enough occasions in their surround-sounds where these words are naturally said again and again. For example, you teach the word "glass" and frequent use of a glass to drink water from enables the word's easy entry into the child's vocabulary.
Conversely, learning a new word whose relevance is limited in one's social context creates cognitive load on the child. For example, use of words such as "granny" where in reality, the child refers to the grandmother as "Naani" can create confusion and cognitive stress. "Supper" is not the same as "dinner" and even though 'fig' is easier to pronounce than "watermelon", the abundant presence of the latter makes it far easier to learn. Herein lies the importance of marrying culture with language.
Make your child start by learning simple names of animals, fruits, vegetables, cities that are locally used so that the journey of learning new words becomes relevant beyond the moment of learning. They get a chance to use these words more often, thereby experiencing subconscious delight every time a familiar context presents itself along with the word learnt. This makes the journey enjoyable and meaningful for our little ones.
While Choomantraa books are predominantly curated in English, we take care to ensure to keep the context familiar to our culture for easy assimilation of newer and newer words. We also encourage parents to actively use more native products to familiarize their little ones into the land they are born to. So, eat more local, speak more local, get your child to meet more local inhabitants of the city across different social strata. This will lead to a personal relationship with their environment and a consequent natural blossoming of native sensitivity.
