Every language has its quirks of pronunciation. Romance languages (those based on Latin, such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) are among the easiest to pronounce. After a short lesson, an absolute beginner can do a decent job of phonetically reading, say, a poem in Spanish. English has its innumerable examples of "the amazing changing consonant sound." One of the most famous example of this is the invented word "ghoech," which, if pronounced according to certain rules, would sound an awful lot like "fish." Chinese, when translated to the English alphabet, apparently allows each vowel six possible sounds. My friend Vicki, whose family is Chinese and who speaks Mandarin well enough to make fun of the subtitles for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, likes to explain it this way: "Ma ma ma ma ma ma." Each of these "ma"s sounds decidedly different. And that's all I know about Chinese.

My son Max is just beginning to pick up English. He's got a spoken vocabulary of about 150 words (he understands many more than that), but he's not exactly Mr. Enunciation. Most of his words sound like "ba," "boo," "dah," "doo," "cah," "coo," "ma," "poo," or "wee." He does have a few multisyllabic words like "ASH-kr" (ice cream), "tank-OO" (Thank you, one of Max's catch-all phrases) and "DAH-di" (daddy), but mostly he sticks to the basics.

You may think that it would be hard to come up with 150 words that share these sounds. Au contraire. Take "dah," one of Max's favorite sounds. For a long time, this stood for daddy, though he has now graduated to a better pronunciation. It still stands for "dog," "down," "duck" and, if he's being careless, "door." "Ba" can mean anything from "ball" to "block" to "beer" (Max loves the smell of beer) to "bowl" to "bear," though sometimes "bear" comes out as "boo."

Every day Max adds new sounds and words. Just today he began imitating Barbara and me when we said "See ya!" to our neighbors as we left. "See? See? See?" he kept saying as we walked away. He knows (and more importantly, understands) one verb: Go. Which is only fitting, since like most 17-month-olds, Max is on the go most of the time.

Still, until he begins to properly end his syllables, it can be difficult to understand what he's saying. When he points in some direction and says "Ba," he expects me to see what he's seeing and say, "Yes, that's a ball" or "I'll get your blocks for you" or "No, this is Daddy's beer. You can't drink it." Understandably, he gets frustrated when I don't immediately recognize what he's pointing at and thus can't understand him. But as his vocabulary growth outpaces his advances in enunciation (which will be the case for some time to come), we can't help but get crossed up from time to time.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of ours who has a 20-month-old. She observed that it's getting much more difficult to understand kids of this age because each core sound is picking up so many more words. It's like you have to go through a Rolodex in your head with each word spoken, particularly if the word expressed is one you've never heard your kid say before.

These are joys more than frustrations, of course. The reason so many kids have a tough time from about the age of 18 months to around three years old (the notorious "terrible twos") is that they're learning new things about their world every day, and more importantly, they're trying to process all that information. The first year to 18 months of a child's life are all about learning the basic skills that older kids and adults take for granted: breathing, sleeping, eating, walking, etc. The learning curve for these core skills is extremely steep, but most of us parents don't see it that way because we don't think about doing these things. Hey, folks, that's why they're so hard!

Talking and picking up the names of everything in the world is a somewhat easier task, but it is infinitely more complicated. The constant incremental improvement is not as difficult for us parents to see, which is probably why adults are often are much more fascinated with this stage than the early learning. I like this stage better simply because I'm able to communicate with Max pretty well. He understands almost everything I tell him (I try not to talk down to him, mostly because doing so annoys me), and he can express certain wants and needs to me, either verbally or with gestures. When he's hungry he walks over to his high chair and holds on to it. When he's thirsty, he walks over to the sink and points. If he's really thirsty, he'll even say "wa-wa." When his teeth hurt, he lies face-down on the floor and bashes his mouth into the hardwood. I can't do much about that last one--painkillers of all sorts haven't seemed to help Max much. But in any case, I enjoy being able to talk with him and understand what he's seeing, hearing and thinking.

There is something magical about the eruption of a string of nonsense syllables ("nonsense" as we hear them, of course), especially when a child repeats them, sound for sound, in an attempt to help the adult understand what is being said. When Max finally figures out how to say "ball" and "block" and "bag" and so on, I'll probably miss the days of trying to decipher his speech. But not too much, because there's always something new to discover, even when you think you've seen it all.

Jon Worley is pretty sure Max's first word was "dog," though it might have been "door." Or "down." Or "duck." Or...