Proudly showing off their own-design t-shirts!
I've long been resigned (though secretly thrilled!) that my 6-year-old daughter corrects my French, but I didn't expect my 3-year-old son to start just yet! But a couple of days ago, when I was offering him some 'raisins verts' (green grapes), he indignantly stated, ' Raisins blancs!' (white grapes), which I suppose must be the more accurate translation he's heard at school! Since then he has joined his sister in earnest with the corrections - a gender here, a grammatical correction there! So is he 'lancé' into the francophone world? Can I leave him to his own devices? Have I taught him everything he knows? Probably the answer is yes, but the trouble is as soon as I switch to English it immediately becomes his dominant language, to the point that he stops speaking it so much at school. So for now I am ploughing on, despite being firmly put in my place linguistically on a regular basis!
I can't complain too much though, because while I long to share more with the children by speaking with them in my mother tongue, after 6 years French has definitely become *our* language and I know I will miss speaking it when we do stop! In a way, this is a gradual fading out and I am already speaking mainly in English with Schmoo, especially when her brother is not around (it's more for his benefit now!). So today, for example, she had the day off school for an appointment and we simply spoke English all day. I have to admit, it was very relaxing!
Saying that, one of the things I love best about our continuing language journey is how every language is like a window into the world of its country. So teaching your children another language goes hand in hand with learning about other cultures. For example, in French there is a festival called 'La Galette des Rois', which involves eating a yummy cake and discovering a 'feve' within (a bit like the coin in the Christmas pud). The finder becomes King or Queen for the day and gets to wear a crown! The children celebrate it every year at their French schools, and it's a celebration that brings lots of new vocabulary. Meanwhile, in Twi, there is an expression, 'fem fem', which describes the sensation of nails scraping down a blackboard, something this culture clearly wanted to give a name to! To say 'I'm angry', you can say 'me beafu', which literally means 'I've got hairs on my chest' or 'me ni abre', which means 'My eyes are red', both nice and evocative of the emotion!
3 comments:
I'm not exactly sure what I want to share...but wanted you to know that I'm thinking a lot about your post, especially the part about how relaxing you found it to spend the whole day in English. Sometimes I'm SO tempted to "try out" English, my native language, with our daughter, after having spoken 99% German with her since birth...but it's a little like chocolate ice cream: I know I'll love it, and it will be hard to wean myself off it once I start. Not that I have that attitude about ice cream, necessarily...I eat it now and again because I love it so dearly. But, it's also MY body, and not my kids'...it's so much easier to make the sacrifice for her, knowing what a gift it will be if I stick with this, even through the challenges.
Are you switching/fading French because you guys moved? (I haven't been following along lately)
Thanks!
Tamara
Hi Tamara, yes sometimes I think talking to other parents raising their children with a non-native language is the only thing that gets me through the tough moments... and there are a few of those! I've always seen it as a balancing act of bilingualism - something *is* lost when you talk a non-native language with your child (or is in my case, I think this also depends on your own language level - mine is good, but far far from fluent!), but something very precious is also gained. And I realised early on that so much of communication is through other means, touch, expression, tone of voice, etc, that there was no danger of my children doubting our connection, whether I could express it adequately in words or not! However, as you may've read from my own blog, I think it's something you can reassess as the years go by and I am now slowly easing off the minority language, which we can get away with since they go to an immersion school. I do notice that my eldest child's English at 6 is probably not quite at the level of a monolingual 6-year-old - I'm being super picky here, we are talking a few gaps in vocab and grammar, but she chatters away in both languages with an ease that takes my breath away! - but I know she'll catch up - as one of my adult friends raised in the UK with the minority language at home and school said, 'My parents only ever spoke to me in French, I went to school in French, all my friends were French - but I somehow speak English!' (and you cannot tell she is not monolingual English)!
Take care,
Omma
"I realised early on that so much of communication is through other means, touch, expression, tone of voice, etc, that there was no danger of my children doubting our connection, whether I could express it adequately in words or not!"
Yes, I so appreciate being reminded of this, Omma. We non-native speakers still manage to share lots of love with our kids even if our grammar and pronunciation is imperfect!
I also like that you're in a way giving us "permission" to have English days once the second language is firmly established. It's so hard to imagine my Griffin being at that point, though!
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