Last night I was reading a book to Tesla that had a bunch of animals. I pointed them out to teach her the Japanese words. She knew "cat" and said neko.
But then, as I taught her other animals (she also knew pig, but not cow, dog and duck), she forgot neko. When I asked her several times later in the book, she hesitated, and tried her best with "Wakame!" or "Katsuo!" even though she initially knew neko on her own. She retained all the other new animals names though.
It was like my cats were crowding out neko in her brain suddenly. We went over it several times, and she consistently forgot neko, and kept trying my cats' names.
Today, in the bath, I asked her, what is cat in Japanese. She started to say "Wa..." then corrected herself neko so it stuck, but boy, language is fluid.
I do understand this as I forgot a lot of English at age 9 when I stopped using it. At some point, I think we'll live in Japan so Tesla can really soak in Japanese as my dream is to banter and joke with her in Japanese. がんばってTesla!
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