Kids: What they learn

I have a four year old son. I try to teach him English but it's slow going (he speaks Brazilian Portuguese). What's really weird, is that I'll speak an English word with an English accent and he'll repeat the word with a Portuguese accent. For example "build" comes back as "bilge" or "mouse" comes back as "mousey" or "step" comes back as "steppa". It's like he's cut up the phonemes and put in Portuguesed versions of the English phonemes, adding letters if necessary - very weird.

I noticed another oddity today. He was playing an SNES game where the protagonist has a variety of weapons and shields (or pogo stick, helicopter, etc.). The character can use one type of weapon and one type of shield at a time. You select the action button to go to the screen, but instead of using the "cursor" keys they decided to use the X/Y and A/B buttons for up/down weapon, and up/down shield, respectively. The to exit this menu, you press the action a key again. What was interesting was how this change in UI confused him. He expected to be able to go up/down with the cursor then press, say, "A" to select it, then, up/down for the shield and "A' to select that and then have it exit. So he already has preconceptions of how a computer interface should work - weird.

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