Amy's grammar is improving
Saturday, 22 December 2007 17:43Amy is getting pretty good with grammar.
Sample from just now: Das male ich gleich, wenn du mich anezogen hast
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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.