Complete sentences. It's all a bit relative, don't you think? Look at how Sarah Palin managed to speak in complete sentences...or not.
Suzanne is making complete, and rather complex, sentences. Subject + verb + object + random bits tacked on at the end to either complement the information or ask a question. As far as my 2 1/2 bilingual toddler is concerned, it is a complete sentence. And I'm proud of her.
And she's now using multiple tenses. In the past couple weeks, I've heard her use the present continuous, regular past tense and past tense with an irregular verb (although she did use brought as the past participle for buy but who cares). She even threw in a present perfect sentence the other day: I've already got it. I blame that non-Americanism on either Charlie and Lola or my friend M.
I still can't believe how much she is really speaking and communicating in English which she really only hears a couple hours a day. Thus the power of the mother tongue.
I must mention the accent however. I previously mentioned that people hear an American lilt in her French and last night, my mother mentioned her French lilt to her English. I dismiss the former assertion which is completely unfounded - just because she doesn't know how to pronounce her R in French doesn't make her accent American. It just makes her accent childish. But I tend to agree with the latter which I've also noticed a little more recently. And it's normal that she's speaking English with a slight French accent. And who cares!
Obviously at this point, her vocabulary is beyond listing and includes strange words like "hooting" and an excessive use of "actually". My daughter is just so cool. And even cooler because she's bilingual which is just so cool. And she's wonderful and perfect and funny and everything else a doting mother could say.
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Cool bilingual toddler news
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3 comments:
It is so cool when they start talking, isn't it?! Everyone warned me to expect a delay because we were talking in 2 languages to them, but this hasn't happened with either, so not sure if it's just an urban myth! I've even heard my daughter use the subjunctive, which really impresses me as a non-native speaker :-)
Oh, wow! What a fun post.
It is really exciting. My husband still claims Suz speaks better English than French but it's untrue. It'll be interesting to see what she does with her little brother/sister.
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