Wednesday 8 October 2008

Suzanne reinventing English grammar

What better way to avoid thinking about work overload and impending political doom (more on that once I've watched the debate) than to dote on your daughter's amazing progression in bilingualism?

The most amazing part at the moment is that Suzanne seems to have gained much confidence over the past few months and she's actually testing her language skills, making up words and being generally inventive to get her point across. Granted she still bursts out in tears or throws herself on the ground if we don't get it, and I occassionally have to ask Jerome for interpretation (he seems to understand her new words better than I) but she's pretty cool.

Pronouns : she is beginning to use them a little bit, mostly in preformed sentences like "I'm stuck", but this morning she wanted something from Jerome and when I asked what she wanted, she said "him pillow" which although she was attempting a possessive shows that she knows the pronoun nonetheless.

Possessives: She mastered the apostrophe s a long time ago with "that's Suzanne's!" but out of the blue last week she said "that's my's" which is totally logical, but helas, wrong. I've been trying to gently correct her by repeating back the correct form "mine" but so far we've only gotten to "mine's".

Negation: She's still negating à la française, but has attempted a couple of double negative sentences as in "Pas not want it" which I think was an attempt at English negation more than actually saying she wanted it.

Questions: Suzanne is still not aware of all the W questsion words and shows a strong preference for "what". This caused me a bit of embarassement in the store when Suz pointed to a large woman and said, "what's that?" to which the woman responded in English, "a monster!". Oops. she's mastered simple sentences like, "what's that?" but is still unsure of more complex questions like "What doing Mommy?" and "where papa go?" where she drops the helping verb in each case.

Vocabulary: I think this is the part that amazes me the most about her since her access to English is mostly limited to me, books and DVDs and she still seems to have a word for everything! Random words come out of her mouth like afterwards, remember and boobie. I guess I'm mostly to blame/thank for this since I'm the main source of English.

Basically, she's amazing.

4 comments:

BabalDad said...

Did you ever think about being a sat dish and having her watch CBeebies every now and again?

Compared to what I've seen in France and Germany, CBeebies is high quality stuff and it would be one more source of English...

My daughter has taken a lot of her English from CBeebies.

Reb said...

We listen ot Cbeebies sometimes and she loved it but I think got a little too much at one point...I'd love to have a sat dish so I could watch something other than French TV too!

Anonymous said...

Yes, boobie is a very important word to know! The cutest thing ever is my friend was talking to her baby sister and laughed at some joke, and her sister replied - "Stop humalating me!" Now, it takes us some time to figure out if we are saying it right.

Elisabeth said...

This was a great entry! And, yes, Suzanne is amazing!

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