One small step for a child, one giant leap for Amy’s language development!

[pne]

Amy said today, “I’ve got a tummyache and Mummy doesn’t want me to eat any chocolate.”

What’s so impressive about this is that she used the accusative and infinitive construction for “want”, which English does but German doesn’t. This is a construction that she has never really used before, so I was pretty impressed that she got it!

(She’d usually word things the German way, with a subordinate clause, as in “Mummy doesn’t want that I eat any chocolate”, which is—I suppose—syntactically correct English but idiomatically unusual.)

Now I wonder whether or when she’ll give up saying “immer” for “always” :) I wonder whether she thinks that it’s also an English word, given her general reluctance to mix languages and how commonly she uses this German word.