I remember that for years when I was growing up, my parents tried to get us kids to learn Chinese. We had numerous teachers with numerous approaches, but we never seemed to learn to say anything other than "I want a hamburger." So I can personally attest to how hard it is to learn a language--yet do we even realize how smart one- and two-year-olds are for learning English, possibly the hardest language of all?
I read in a book (I don't remember which one, but I think it was for a class) that we constantly correct children for saying things like "taked" instead of "took", but do we even stop to think how smart it was of them to realize that you put a "d" on the end of a word to make it past tense? Or to realize they needed to use past tense at all? Once you think of it like that, it's pretty amazing what two-year-olds know.
So the other day when Gehrig ran up to me and said, "I doed it, Mommy!" I said, "You did it? Good job!" But I was thinking, boy, what a genius.
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