My three-year-old son likes to play a guessing game about which Pokémon character he is. So I need to guess what kind of a Pokémon character he is as we are playing.

This time, he picked a character that I didn’t know.  So as he gave me some hints, I threw character names randomly as many as I could. Still I wasn’t correct. Finally, he gave me the character’s name. Then I repeated it but he said, “No!” Seemed like I was saying it wrong. I tried my best to pronounce it correctly and repeated the name after him. This went back and forth several times until he said, “Stop it!” He complained and said, “Say it the way Daddy says!” It was funny because I simply couldn’t do that. I wish I could and if I could, I’d have done it in the first place! If he could spell it out, I would have been better, though.

This reminds me of him wondering and saying, “Why Daddy doesn’t speak Japanese?” Also, when my husband said some words in Japanese, my kids didn’t get it. I guess understanding languages with thick foreign accents is difficult for kids.