It's hard for me to known Yana's level of Japanese, since I rarely see her at school (where she is really using it). But she is getting really proficient. In fact, at this point I'm not even going to include a list of words she's learned, as there's just too many. She's also quite fluently speaking in sentences now, as opposed to the beginning, when she could just speak single words.
She is using Japanese more and more at home and legit full-on sentences, too. She'll often play with her toys in Japanese or sing little songs (ones she learns at school and ones she makes up). One of the funniest things was, one night I heard her speaking Japanese in her sleep!
She is engaging in conversations with people quite easily. She often can have a real back and forth with the cashiers at the grocery store. She always likes to tell them which foods she picked out. One day we were walking home and a group of my students were in front of us. Yana went up and joined them, and just natural as anything, started chattering on and on in Japanese. Also, recently she's had to have a lot of dentist visits. She's able to go in there on her own and communicate with the people there.
She seems to be doing great at school. In February they had a recital. Yana's class sang several songs, did a bamboo drumming routine, and did a play. I'm super impressed that she managed to remember all that!
And, most impressively, she even translated Japanese for us when we couldn't understand! Often, she'll tell us that [word] is "called [this] in Japanese/English]. It's quite amazing that she went from an oblivious four year old to a third culture kid who understands about different countries and languages.
