Anti-strong verbs

Today as Palmer and I were driving up the 5 freeway, he started telling me a story about a black knight and his group of grey knight friends who "fighted a dragon." I corrected him, "who fought a dragon."

Palmer has decided, starting sometime in October or so, that all verbs should be formed by adding -ed to the end of them. I am therefore I fairly regularly trying to correct him. His normal response is to complete ignore me and keep saying things liked "thinked" and "drived".

But today when I interjected "fought"into his story, he said, "what? fought? what? That doesn't make ANY sense! It is supposed to be fighted" and then he kept going.

This made me realizing that teaching him Icelandic might be a little more tricky than I thought.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is a phase almost all children go through and a natural part of learning to use the language correctly, so I wouldn't worry too much. Don't actually correct him but rather repeat what he said without a "correcting tone" and without expecting him to repeat after you.

It will be difficult for him to learn Icelandic unless you bring him here very regularly and over a fairly long time, each time, though...
I was going to say exactly the same as Hildigunnur...
Heiða said…
óliver gerði alveg eins. hann vildi leika við vin sinn og sagði mér svo frá þegar hann "leikaði" (í staðinn fyrir "lék") "Snúði mér við" í stað "snéri mér við" var lengi lengi að lagast, en svo loks gerðist það. Allt svona gengur yfir, engar áhyggjur!
Anonymous said…
I of course meant for you to repeat what he said, but correctly...
Lissy said…
Haha, Hildigunnur! That is what I do most of the time, just repeat the sentence correctly without any kind of correcting tone. Usually he just ignores me, but the time I said fought instead of fighted, he was like "no way!" That is what was so funny.
Anonymous said…
yes, that's what I thought you did - and yes it was funny :D

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