It's amazing to see how English grammar is getting sorted out in Henni's head. She is still talking a lot in present tense, even when she is talking about something that had just happened or days before. When spotting a picture of a lion in her book, she will say "Umma, I see lion yesterday." We saw lions in the summer when we went to the zoo. After coming back from the playground, she will exclaim "Umma, I ride my swing!" (She certainly has her possessives figured out. Well, kind of. Everything is preceded by "my" these days, especially with Elliot.) She has been using gerunds a lot lately. "Let's clean up your toys." "No, mom, I am still playing." (I can't understand how kids pick up conceptual adjectives and adverbs, such as still, yet, too, etc., but Henni has those down.) Today, she made me laugh so hard on the playground. When she figured out how to climb this one wall that had been really hard for her to do on her own, she said out loud on the top of the wall, "Umma, I have funning!!! I am climb upping all by myself!!" After laughing and laughing, I wondered if children who just have one language to deal with make such mistakes too when they start speaking. Although she doesn't really talk in Korean, she understands a lot of it, and she can tell I am reading or talking in a different language altogether when she hears Japanese. She said, "what are you saying, mom?" the other day when she heard me leaving a message on someone's answering machine in Japanese. So is making funky grammatical mistakes a 2-year old thing or a multilingual thing?
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