Amy's grammar is improving

[pne]

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.

Comments

[elgrande.livejournal.com]

"Miffy has hungry", "Und jetzt bist you turn"

Looks like she's mixing the German way of saying it with the English words she knows she knows from you. Those sentences look pretty much like "Miffy hat Hunger" and "Und jetzt bist du dran" to me. Possibly she hasn't even figured out that "hungry" doesn't mean "Hunger" and that "turn" doesn't mean "dran".

[pne.livejournal.com]

Those sentences look pretty much like "Miffy hat Hunger" and "Und jetzt bist du dran" to me.

Indeed, yes.

Possibly she hasn't even figured out that "hungry" doesn't mean "Hunger" and that "turn" doesn't mean "dran".

Possibly; I'm not sure how to analyse her errors in that respect.

She also has difficulty distinguishing between "eat" (verb) and "food" (noun), since they're both "essen"/"Essen" in German -- she'll say things such as "Where my eat?".

It probably doesn't help that "trinken"/"Trinken" are the same word in English: "drink".