Marta's English (again)

Marta is 3 and a half now and her English continues developing - sometimes it's funny to see how she makes sense of things.

She asked me the other day what her Uncle's Jim's cat was called. I told her it was 'Smokey'. "Don't be silly daddy, smokear es lo que hacen los señores mayores" ["smoking is what big men do"].

We usually watch kid's films in English but she asked me lately to put one on in Spanish. "That's a pity" I said, "I thought you could speak good English". "Look daddy," came the reply, "You ARE a big boy and Tristan IS a small boy". Which had nothing to do with anything, she was just proving to me she could indeed speak English when she wanted to do (and that she could conjugate the very TO BE much better than most of my university students).

This weekend we had two English speakers visiting us. I warned her they couldn't speak Spanish and it was incredible the amount of full English sentences she produced. Many more that she would normally use with me. It's obvious that she can speak much more English than she usually uses at home but she will only use it when she sees a need to use it. And you can't blame her for that, I suppose.