Happy Solstice!

Happy Solstice, everyone!

IKEA

We went to IKEA today.

Turned out to be a pretty good day to go—it was about as full as on weekdays, certainly less full than on a typical Saturday, and the Christmas rush seemed not to have touched IKEA. (Presumably because it doesn't sell many of the "typical" Christmas gifts, so people were out shopping for those at other shops if they were doing last-minute Christmas shopping.)

We bought a new table for Amy, since she had outgrown her previous one, along with two chairs and a stool. We also bought two wooden stools for ourselves (finally! they had been out of that model the last two times we went), and some wrapping paper.

At home, the typical post-IKEA chores: assembling the furniture. The plastic stool proved especially recalcitrant, with the legs tending to come out. It turned out to need a few loving blows with the hammer, no holds barred—none of that wimpy "bang on it with the palm of your hand" stuff. But now Amy's furniture, at least, is assembled—and ours looks as if it gets screwed together, which is harder to get wrong so I don't foresee any difficulties.

Because some neighbours will be away the next week or so, we might be getting their garage place for that time. That would give us a guaranteed space to park our car (free guest parking spaces are in fairly short supply, especially when some people who live here seem to use them as well rather than paying for one of their own), as well as a bit of protection against the weather.

Amy's grammar is improving

Amy is getting pretty good with grammar.

Sample from just now: Das male ich gleich, wenn du mich anezogen hast.

Compound verbs (auxiliary verb + infinitive), correct conjugations, cases, clause-final verb order in subordinate clauses, verb in second position in main clauses (giving verb-subject order in this case)... about the only thing that's not standard in that utterance is her perfect morpheme, which is often zero or, as in this case, schwa, rather than /g@/.

She's even conjugating irregular verbs "correctly" (i.e. in the traditional form, rather than regularising them) more often.

When did all that happen? I think it's pretty impressive.

Her English grammar is also slowly improving, though it's still lagging behind quite a bit.

There's also a fair amount of transferral of German grammar to English, for example, in word order ("Want you play with me?", "Coughing you?", preferring "cannot" over "can't", preferring "also"—which goes in the middle of the clause, like German "auch"—over "too", which goes at the end) or choice of verb or verb form ("Miffy has hungry", "Und jetzt bist you turn").

All in good time, though, I expect.

...Wow, there's even an "impressed" system mood. I didn't know that.