Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Conjugation: Singing grammar


I don’t want Bosnian to be boring, but we do, in fact, need to learn by rote verb endings if we ever want to conjugate verbs. So I made up a song with a singsong melody--better to annoy them than to bore them!. The song consists wholly of pronouns and their matching verb endings. Here are the (witty! sparkling! unforgettable!) lyrics:
Ja -im
Ti -iš
On/ona -i
Mi -imo
Vi -ite
Oni/one -e
Then I started to sing it. All the time. Walking to school. Setting the table. Playing with Lego. Washing their hair.  When they started begging me to quit, I told them I would if they’d sing it to me once without any help. Isaac did it perfectly the first time he tried. (And then I had a hard time quitting, it was such a habit.)

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