Talking about the future

Russian has one future tense and two aspects: perfective and imperfective (совершенный и несвершенный вид). The use of the imperfective aspect in the future tense requires an auxiliary verb ("быть"). Hannah uses both aspects equally well.

Щас принесу.
Я буду кушать конфетку.
Je буду отрезать хлеб. (sometimes falling short of the perfective aspect)

Sometimes she will say, "Ханна буду..." (or "Je буду...") and pause to ponder what it is that she is going to do. I believe, this is where her French creeps in. There is a weaker connection between "aller" and the infinitive in the French Future Immédiat, the future tense corresponding to the English "going to + infinitive" (compare with the Spanish "acabar de"--it talks about the past but has similar formation). Future Immédiat is very much a tense functionally but "aller" still preserves some of its lexical meaning (the English "going to + inf." appears to be in an even more infantile stage of grammaticalization)."Va jouer" is a fairly loose structure allowing for pauses, much like "gonna play". On top of that, both "va" and "gonna" are stressed pretty heavily and allow for prolonged phonation. Quite on the contrary, the Russian "буду" leaves no room for pauses. "Буду" means nothing on its own, it's a shell, a tense marker, a lowly deictic word, almost a morpheme, and the intonation pattern throwing it far outside the spotlight is a great indicator of the subordinate role of the auxiliary verb. "Буду играть" are two separate words but our brain appears to produce them in single unit. Well, much more so than "va jouer". Anyhow, when she makes this pause after "Я буду...", she totally sounds like a foreign touristo.

No sign of proper future tenses in either English or French yet. Just the Future Immédiat type forms. (Slacker.)

Hannah/je gonna go outside.
Hannah va aller chez le docteur.

If it were not for Russian, I would say that she is not yet ready for a synthetic future tense (such as Future Simple in French) requiring an often irregular verb form, but "щас приду", "дай покажу" and the like prove the contrary--she can form them just fine...that is when she is left high and dry with no easier option. Thing is Future Immédiat is virtually non-existent in Russian ("я собираюсь + inf." doesn't count as it has not really been grammaticalized, besides it's bulky), and the analytic imperfective aspect that Russian does have just doesn't work in every situation, so mastering her "дай покажу" and "щас приду" was pretty much the only way to get that perfective meaning across. And since the English Future Indefinite is almost just as indispensable, I should probably start enforcing some "I'll's", bet they are either overdue (and she is just taking a shortcut via another language to avoid mastering a new form in English) or I've been missing her using them. French doesn't have an analytic future tense and the synthetic one it does have (Future Simple) is not so frequently used in colloquial speech, so I wouldn't expect to hear that one any time soon. Or should I?

On a related note, her concept of time is still very vague. Anything that's not "today" is "tomorrow"/"domain"/"завтра". There is also "soon" and "very soon" (birthday and Christmas), "apres" (when it comes to putting away her toys), "attends minute" (when she needs to get dressed), and "see you in a bit".

Ты вота здеся? Hannah va see you in a bit!

Облико морале

French words always end in vowel sounds (well, kinda), unless the last consonant is a nasal (which, strictly speaking, makes it a vowel anyway). So guess what? So must Russian words then in this poor toddler's mind.

Заклити дверь.
Это то[р]тикə.
Тута естя.

And here is the flipside: chopping terminal vowels off if they are not stressed.

Собак[ə] (instead of "собака")

No wonder why! In the world of the beautiful French language a word just can't end in an unstressed [ah]. It has to be either [sa-ba-kA] or [sa-bA-kə]. (Please excuse my Russian transcription skills.)

This doesn't happen all the time but does happen a lot. Never in English though. My guess is that the rhythmical patterns and articulation bases of the English and the French languages are so far apart that they can't really interfere with each other.

Who is this? -- This is YOURS!

English

Possessives are often used in place of nominals in predicative phrases.

-Who is this in the picture?
-This is mine [=me] / -This is Daddy's [=Daddy] / -This is yours [=you]

English-speaking children tend to master nominals before possessives. So they say. At any rate, Hannah is doing the opposite. Why? And why substitute at all? Something to think about.

She doesn't do this to any other nouns though...

This is Mike. (NOT "This is Mike's".)

...except for her own name: "This is Hannah's" (="This is Hannah").

Why the exception? Her 3-year old mind must be treating her name (along with the "names" of her next of kin: Mommy and Daddy) as a pronoun (Hannah = I). Here is a misused first-person singular verb to prove this:

Ханна буду смотреть телевизор. [=Hannah am gonna watch TV.]

Russian
Same thing but she uses her name a lot instead of "я" to talk about herself.

-Это мамина/папина [=мама/папа].
-Это Ханна (instead of "это я").

French
No such issue.

C'est moi. (This is me.)
C'est a moi. (This is mine.)
C'est Maman. (This is Mommy.)

Since she makes no substitution of possessives for nominals in French and no mistakes in this domain, does it mean she is more advanced in French or is it because French possessives (in predicative structures) require two words (e.g. "à moi") so there is no shortcut anyway? Or is the preposition "à" such a strong marker of case that it leaves no room for confusion?

That being said, she often uses the French "je" in place of English and Russian pronouns.

Je vais играть. (Also "Hannah va играть" -- but her name gets pronounced in Russian here, not in French!)
Je буду танцевать.
J'ai peed.

COMMENTS:
* "This is Hannah's" VS "Это Ханна" BUT "Это мамина" OR EVEN "Это Mamma's". I suppose "Ханнина" is too much of a challenge phonetically. The Russian palatalized alveolar sonorant [n'] definitely takes a well-trained mouth to pull off.
* "Я" is her least frequently used personal pronoun while "je" is most common (even if she has to cross the line and mix languages). The English "I" is somewhere in the middle. Could be a reflection of how her competencies in the three languages rank compared to each other.