Which Things are Easy and Which Things are Hard
It has been a long time since I posted an update about Vidar's language skills.  I have to hurry up and write this down because I think its all about to change again.
The past 2 months have been great for Vidar's English. He speaks to me in English most of the time now, and it is really catching up with the Swedish.  Both languages have some interestingly consistent features, but I describe them here for English since I am most sure about that:
No past tense, no inversion in questions, no do-support, unsupported negation not preceding verb (Not DO that,  mamma).
Yes  modals (must, can, will)!  Also a progressive in place (sometimes with and sometimes without helping auxiliary).  But no perfects, and obviously no passives.
Instead of just saying yes, he often likes to repeat the sentence with the verb heavily stressed.
yes, I is tired.
yes, we must do that. We must do that now.
He is beginning to use pronouns more consistently for himself, and getting them right, instead of just referring to himself by Vidar.   Not much agreement on the verb. Past tense irregular verbs only when repeating what I have said back to me. No spontaneous past tenses.  He has begun to produce a smattering of regular past tenses spontaneously in Swedish, but its really just beginning there too.
He has some errors that he carries over to both languages:
so lots of cars
så masse bilar
 He keeps trying to translate from one language to the other, often repeating things once in each language. Sometimes the translation is a little wrong, but it is usually pretty good. One clear mistranslation from Swedish into English is maybe that, mamma instead of maybe so. which seems like a literal translation from the Swedish/Norwegian.
He seems to understand quantifiers. I said to him, of a particular jigsaw puzzle that we were doing, that 'We don´t have all the pieces´, and he answered but SOME of them, mamma.
On the other hand, his pronunciation is not clearly improving. He still cannot say /k/ or /g/, and he uses /y/ for all the liquids.
I was away from him for some  days at a conference, and when I finally showed up again I came towards him and he wasn´t sure how to react and was looking at me a little shyly. He said There are lots of cars here. Which apparently was the first English he had uttered in 3 days. So he didn´t miss me, he missed English.  :)
Some cute things:
Oh my dod. What a mess.  (The latter he must get from Dr Seuss)
I DOIN someting, mamma
How man DO this? (How does one do this?)  The latter is very common when he gets stuck with something.
He is actually asking a lot of questions (in both languages). (Where are we now? What you doing? What sounding like that? What call that? (What is that called. He says Va heter den a lot in Swedish, but I only hear him try it once in English and he surprisingly inverted the main verb, so I think he was just calquing from Swedish. It took me a while to understand what he was saying since he can´t say /k/, but anyway he has not tried it again).)
He has relative clauses, or at least comparisons: som i X /as in X, like X  which he likes to use a lot. He is always reminding you when he saw or heard a similar thing.
He is beginning to understand about time.  He knows what tomorrow is, and he can tell you who he met and what he did `yesterday´.  He likes to use now  and not now  a lot, and has started to say soon, which he uses correctly.
He likes to repeat the verb to give a long duration to the action: I want to play and play and play.  Vidar must wait and wait and wait.  etc.
Ok, that´s enough for now. But I just felt today that he was on the brink of big changes again, so I may be blogging about it again soon.