The Ching Chong Method of Children's Language Acquisition

We found a new Hawaiian language picture book--at Target (on O'ahu) of all places. This one has more words than the others we have; some pages just have one long sentence, but others have entire paragraphs. I'm sure I read it very poorly, but I can attempt it at least.

The first time I read it to the kid, I was impressed with her attention span. I mean, she played around a bit, but I was reading both the Hawaiian and the English parts. And again the book is a little on the longer side compared to others (English or Hawaiian) that we read with her, so with those two factors combined, this was a really long book for her!

As I was reading, she started making noises that sounded like approximations of Hawaiian. You know, like how English-speakers say "ching chong" to pretend to speak Chinese? It was like that.

My gut reaction was that this was a bad thing. I mean "ching chonging" is racist right? But then I thought about how babies learn to speak, the babbling, the "bababababa" and "dadadadada." That's also what she's doing right? Just like an infant imitates the sounds around her, my daughter was doing the same thing with this new language that she is hearing more of.