Jacob’s vocabulary is expanding and he is constantly babbling now and doing lots of awfully complicated things with his tongue. He strings together words and now and then you can identify a whole sentence. “ik krijg eten” (I’m getting food) while I’m making his breakfast, “Het ligt daar” (It’s there) pointing to his horse lying under the couch. There may be lots more, having two languages to guess from about the sounds coming out of his mouth makes it all the more tricky to identify them.
Jacob speaks mainly in Dutch although on the days when he is alone with me he does start using more English words. But it is clear that he understands far more than he says. I’ve been trying really, really hard to speak proper English to him, (not English with Dutch grammar and the odd-Dutch word) but wasn’t sure how much he was really picking up so carried out an impromptu test the other day while we were playing with his favourite farm animals.
Lining them all up I asked Jacob in turn to pick out the cow, horse, dog, chicken, duck, pig, sheep etc. After he’d picked out each one I re-arranged the line with the full complement of test-animals before asking for the next one. Even I, proud-and-besotted mother, was impressed and a bit surprised when he picked out each animal without hesitation correctly first time! In English!
postcards from the north 