[graemep]

She does seem to have a talent for languages. Not many people pick up that many easily. I have even managed to forget a language I was fluent in (I was bilingual and I spoke Sinhala as well as I did English, and could read and write it to the level expected by schools at my age until I was six) as a child. It has a phonetic alphabet, BTW.

As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).

[faster]

I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.

We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.