For the longest time -- maybe two years or more -- V has indicated something that happened in the past by saying "yesterday." It doesn't matter when the event in question actually occurred -- could be last week, last year, yesterday, or in the morning of the same day -- but the way to indicate that it was situated in the past was to say "Yesterday we went to Grandma's house" (or whatever).
Last week came the first ever instance of the use of the phrase "the other day." V said, "We got an ice cream the other day." Not yesterday; the OTHER day. Wow, well done, V! Let's see if she continues to use this construction.
Her use of the verb "to be" is also changing. In the first person singular (ie, "I"), she used to say pretty much exclusively "I are." Now, most of the time she says, "I'm are." So in other words, there are actually two copula, but I am pretty sure that she doesn't recognize "I'm" as a subject pronoun + copula, but only as a subject pronoun. This is what the books on language acquisition pretty much seem to say, too.
The other day one of V's daycare teachers asked me if I think her English or her Swedish is strongest. That's a tough question, because it depends very much on what she is doing and what she is talking about. From what I understand, this is really typical of bilingual children. It's hard to say which of their languages is "better," because they might use them for different things. The reason the daycare teacher asked, anyway, was because she said that sometimes V doesn't seem to understand what they are saying in Swedish, so they switch to English, and it seems to help. I don't necessarily think that means her English is stronger, though, because she actually uses quite a bit of Swedish words in her English these days, too.
One more thing: we spent the weekend in an almost entirely Finnish-speaking environment. V is able to follow the conversation, and she speaks Finnish, but it's not grammatically perfect. Her vocabulary and pronunciation seem pretty good, but it's the word endings that trip her up.
I find it interesting that she has some of the same problems with Finnish that we English speakers do. Is that because she goes to Finnish from English? Now she does not have so much Finnish in her daily life, does she? Fascinating, always!
ReplyDelete