Caca boudin
My first born's prowess in the language of Molière never ceases to amaze me. I can feel the envy oozing from the pores of my middle-class friends back in the UK, whose lumpen, monolingual offspring have to make do with toddler French classes. Here's the deal: they have houses and careers - I have the trilingual wunderkind.
He started maternelle last September. The first term elicited nothing beyond 'I don't like school mummy, the children hit me', but come February he started emitting magical phrases such as 'caca boudin' (sausage pooh? Don't ask me, that's not even GCSE-level French), 'ça c'est n'importe quoi' (that's rubbish), and 'NON, ARRETE!' (no, stop!). Maybe the last one could be useful in later life, who knows?
Seriously, he has picked up a lot - he can count, recite nursery rhymes, and is slowly finding his feet. About my only regret in deciding to leave France is that he will soon lose the shaky base (as I think we can call a vocabulary that centres around wee wee words) he has built up. My middle-class chums will no longer envy me, I will envy them, as they can surely be only a few years away from the farmhouse in Normandy, while I will just have a stack of toddler French DVDs.
Maybe traces of French will remain. He still has a scar that he got from a scratch on his first day at school (when he learnt not to talk English in the playground). I wonder which will fade first.
My first real-life encounter with French was on a camping holiday, aged 12. My mum sent me to a van to buy some chips, thinking that some concrete motivation might loosen my tongue. The guy responded to my 'pommes frites' cue by shovelling chips into a cone - magic! But then he ruined everything by asking a question ; 'Maintenant?' (as in do you want your chips later ie should I wrap them, or do you want them now, in which case I'll cut the crap and hand them right over). My prize was hovering in front of my nose, but there seemed to be an unfathomable complication, as is so often the case in this country. He repeated his question several times, until I was nearly in tears. I did not get those chips. I fled in confusion.
But who knows, maybe, if my parents had had the foresight to have me born and live the first four years of my life in France, I would have had the presence of mind to shout 'caca boudin' first.
He started maternelle last September. The first term elicited nothing beyond 'I don't like school mummy, the children hit me', but come February he started emitting magical phrases such as 'caca boudin' (sausage pooh? Don't ask me, that's not even GCSE-level French), 'ça c'est n'importe quoi' (that's rubbish), and 'NON, ARRETE!' (no, stop!). Maybe the last one could be useful in later life, who knows?
Seriously, he has picked up a lot - he can count, recite nursery rhymes, and is slowly finding his feet. About my only regret in deciding to leave France is that he will soon lose the shaky base (as I think we can call a vocabulary that centres around wee wee words) he has built up. My middle-class chums will no longer envy me, I will envy them, as they can surely be only a few years away from the farmhouse in Normandy, while I will just have a stack of toddler French DVDs.
Maybe traces of French will remain. He still has a scar that he got from a scratch on his first day at school (when he learnt not to talk English in the playground). I wonder which will fade first.
My first real-life encounter with French was on a camping holiday, aged 12. My mum sent me to a van to buy some chips, thinking that some concrete motivation might loosen my tongue. The guy responded to my 'pommes frites' cue by shovelling chips into a cone - magic! But then he ruined everything by asking a question ; 'Maintenant?' (as in do you want your chips later ie should I wrap them, or do you want them now, in which case I'll cut the crap and hand them right over). My prize was hovering in front of my nose, but there seemed to be an unfathomable complication, as is so often the case in this country. He repeated his question several times, until I was nearly in tears. I did not get those chips. I fled in confusion.
But who knows, maybe, if my parents had had the foresight to have me born and live the first four years of my life in France, I would have had the presence of mind to shout 'caca boudin' first.
posted by francesca tereshkova | 3:06 PM
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