Words, Words, Words.

Anya's language is growing day by day, almost in an exponential way. The other day she told me, "My English so smart." I'd have to agree.

I was amazed last week at a fully clear, grammatically correct sentence. First you need to understand that in Russian, the verbs are conjugated and they also add endings to nouns and such for "cases". So, in loose explanation of their sentence structure, since words are identifiable by their endings, you can put words in lots of different orders in a sentence. They also don't use articles (a, an, the) and that is why you'll often hear a native Russian speaking English and it sounds funny and wrong to us.

So, Anya's belt broke and she was a little bit sad. She looked at me and clear as a bell, with no accent and in perfect word order as well as being in the past tense (none of which I ever learned in Russian), she pouted a little and said, 

"Scott gave it to me." 

The delivery was such that you'd really have no idea she didn't have English as a first language. Of course, she still has other crazy ways of saying things, but if she wants to convey that something was given to her, her sentence is very clear and understandable.

We have a Pug and the word "noisy" comes up often. Since we say he's noisy quite a bit, she thinks the word is "snoisy". For example, one of her sentences is, "They're snoisy."

She will also say in a very smug, but proud kind of way, "That's riiiight," with a satisfied crossing of the arms and a three quarter turned head that nods. Now, what is even funnier than the delivery is that she says it about brand new information that was just given to her. For instance, Anya will ask, "How old are you?" When you answer, she affirms you as a proud teacher might to a student, "That's riiiight." Oddly enough, you do feel like you did a really good job answering!

I brought Anya and two family friends to the duck pond to feed the birds a couple of days ago. It was a rainy day, but we caught a half an hour where there wasn't rain until the end. My friend sent a rain slicker for her daughter but Anya used it instead. She was calling the birds like you would call a dog, and forcefully chasing the pigeons, trying to get them to eat the bread in her hands. 

Okay, who can tell me what the deal is with this duck's head?

 Pigeons eating off of Anya's shoes!!

 There are LOTS of ducks at this pond! These are just a few that were near us.

 Whose is this fashionably dressed and well matched child, and why 

is she rolling around in wet duck droppings?!?

~Monica

ps stay tuned for the next post "She Swims!"