Today I noticed that Ruby is speaking more and more in full sentences. It seems like she made a leap recently from simple verbs and verb/object pairs to completing her sentences with pronouns and articles.

Ruby’s language development has really been zipping along this month. Her grammar seems to be better day by day. She understands and uses pronouns and possessives and is starting to experiment with verb tenses.

At first, of course, it was just the infinitive: (to) sit, (to) play, (to) eat. Occasionally she would repeat (and seem to understand) a past tense word we said. Now, though, she’s starting to grasp the present participle (sitting, playing, eating) and is applying it to words on her own. She’s still not clear that there’s a difference between nouns and verbs, so she will often take a noun and add the -ing to describe what she’s doing. She calls putting her feet on something “feeting.” When we were sitting on the couch last night, she said we were “couching”.

I’d say she’s just about at the point where her English is surpassing my (left over from high school) French. Like her, I understand way more French than I can speak. I too have a decently large vocabulary of French words and understand pronouns, but get tripped up constantly when it comes to conjugating.  So I sympathize with her.