“Carry You, Please”

When Anthony first started talking, one of his first phrases was “carry you” (meaning “carry me”). He didn't understand the grammar, of course, but just took the parts from “Do you want me to carry you, Anthony?” as the sounds to make when he wanted to communicate the idea.

Now, a year later, he's still saying “carry you”, and I'm starting to wonder how you teach first and second person personal pronouns. "When Anthony says 'you', it means Daddy, and when Daddy says 'you', it means Anthony." hasn't worked yet.

These days, when he says “carry you”, I respondcarry me?” and he then says “carry me”, but he still doesn't really get it.



All 2 comments so far, oldest first...

When I was a kid, my mother used to say “Come, I will show you some sparrows”. Basically she wanted to feed me and I would refuse to eat and that was her way to get me motivated and for some weird reason, I was excited to see the sparrows outside my house . Eventually when I got hungry, apparently I just used to say “I want to see the sparrows” 🙂

— comment by Kalyan on August 12th, 2005 at 4:39am JST (18 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I often read your blog and with great pleasure each time!

I have a son who is one year younger than Anthony (he’s born on October 29th 2003), called Siméon. I must tell I often wonder about his ability to understand things: I can’t figure out how he learnt some common things like ‘I’m cold’ or ‘My leg hurts’, since we couldn’t *explain* that to him. So I guess there’s some kind of very clever part in children’s mind that allows them to learn language automagically… Anthony will probably say ‘carry me’ someday without any reason for this change… automagically!

— comment by Benoit Lacherez on August 12th, 2005 at 7:39am JST (18 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink
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