Thursday, September 26, 2013

MJ is a Lanugage Genius... Sort Of

It's not until you've heard 3-year old conjugate verbs do you realize just how crazy the English language is. We conjugate so many ways, we have so many exceptions, how do we ever learn to speak properly?

MJ is now a confident speaker. He talks non-stop and he prattles on about everything. He also conjugates verbs with ease. But he doesn't always get it right because of the English language's crazy rules.

The cutest thing he does is say: I swimmed, I taked it, I throwed it away, I catched the robber.

In proper English, swim becomes swam. Throw becomes threw. But how would he know when talked becomes talked, walked becomes walked, fix becomes fixed, play becomes played.

MJ also does funny things with expressions. A couple of days ago, he was playing doctor. He went up to me and he said "I'm taking away your temperature." I didn't understand at first until I realized that he was confusing "taking away" something with "take someone's temperature." Maki will often say, "Marco, don't do that or I'll take away your (fill in the blank, train, lego, iPad)." When he learned that doctors take your temperature, he naturally put 2 and 2 together and decided that doctors "take away" your temperature. He even acted it out. He would come up to me, touch me and then pretend to "take" something. Hilarious and ridiculously cute.

He still makes questions out of declarative sentences (I hope I got this one right). I asked him the other day to go to the kitchen to eat breakfast. He said, "Where I should sit?" It should have been, "Where should I sit?" but that's obviously too complicated at this age. He knows to use "where" and to use intonation to indicate a question.

All of this makes me realize just how hard it is to learn a language, much less communicate effectively!