Griffin's French friends

Proof that Griffin is realizing that English and French coexist and that Maman prefers to hear him speak the latter?

Griffin, leaning over his pack and play, reaching unsuccessfully for his favorite stuffed animals: "Friends! Friends! Uh-oh friends!"

Maman walks into the room. Griffin glances up, then continues, "Amis! Amis!"

He knew that "friends" and "amis" refer to the same thing and he knew instinctively which word to use with me!

losing track of words

It was not that long ago that I bragged about tracking Griffin's vocabulary in French and English on a spreadsheet...and now he has so many new words every day that I'm hopelessly behind! Despite all the scrawled notes ("diaper," "chemise mommy," "want that," and such) that I rediscover around the house, in the diaper bag, and at my desk, I've fallen so far behind on actually entering them and pinpointing their debut date that I suspect my spreadsheet has lost its usefulness.

Griffin has also turned into a true parrot in the past two weeks, repeating nearly everything he hears (or the last word or two of someone else's sentence when he's paying attention, at least). So I'm also trying to document when he says one of those recently repeated words on his own, without prompting, in context.

For example, today he tried on some of the yard sale outfits that his grammy found for him, including a snazzy outfit with a red velvet vest, matching bow tie, porkpie hat, and suspenders. He repeated the word "bretelles" (suspenders) several times, but until he sees someone else wearing suspenders and identifies them as such on his own, then I won't count "bretelles" as part of his vocabulary list.

(I've decided this also applies to the one curse he seemed to have picked up--"Nuts!"--which he said over and over for a short time but fortunately hasn't used since.)

I really need to update that spreadsheet and get all his words recorded in one place...nuts!

Entre les murs

Several friends had recommended a recent French movie to me: Entre les murs (English title: The Class), and now I in turn would like to recommend it to my readers! Based on a young teacher's published autobiography, with a script developed in improvisation workshops with French middle school students who play characters named after themselves, it dances between documentary and fiction. (I will also add it to my slowly growing list of French Films That Aren't Freaky.)

Entre les murs seems an honest portrayal of an ethnically diverse middle school classroom on the outskirts of Paris as seen through the eyes of a young, smart, genuinely caring, but flawed and frustrated male French teacher. Watching it took me right back to my year as an Assistante d'anglais at a highschool in Mulhouse--students named Samia and Yasmina and Nabil sitting two to a table along with the Sophies and Mathieus, all with their little trousses of fountain pens, ballpoint pens, pencils, highlighters, rulers, and white-out perched above their grid-lined notebooks, asking me to translate the latest Nirvana song for them. Oh, and the teachers smoking in the staff room, yes, the principal giving the teachers their schedule the day before school started, the students congregating during lunch in an asphalt courtyard.

(However, unlike in the film, at my school in France no teacher ever announced her pregnancy by popping open a bottle of champagne to share with her colleagues in the teachers' lounge!)

The reason I've watched this movie twice so far is that the language use strikes me as true-to-life, which means it's a real challenge for me without the subtitles. (Not that a mumbling, sarcastic, slangy, fourteen-year-old is that easy to understand in English either, for that matter.) It's excellent practice for my French listening comprehension.

I particularly appreciate the commentary portion of the special features on the DVD: the writer and director talk about two of the key scenes, and they pause the movie frequently to discuss it in detail, not like most commentaries which quickly degenerate into the speakers' recollections of inside jokes from the filming and lavish praise for each other's acting/directing/outfits.

Instead, these two explain the process of leading the improv workshops for the students in those specific scenes, ponder the characters' motivation, ask each other questions, and more. This commentary is even better listening practice, because it involves articulate adults speaking in a non-scripted way! If I were still teaching intermediate (or higher) French classes, I would be tempted to develop some lesson plans based on the DVD commentary.

Any recommendations for other French films whose commentaries could be useful for language teachers or slightly rusty francophiles like myself?

Who cares what language I use? I am Toddler and must be obeyed!

Griffin started talking in January 2009 with the words you would expect--Dada, Mama, uh-oh, arf. He had four general categories of words: people's names, sounds, nouns in French, and nouns in English. (Verbs and adjectives arrived much later, and we're still waiting for pronouns, prepositions, articles, and adverbs.) He would learn one word in either French or English and use it with everyone, regardless of what language they spoke with him. (This was fine and dandy for words like ball, soup, and panda, which sound more or less the same in both.)

With rare exceptions, everyone around Griffin speaks English to him except me, so it's no surprise that he says more words in English than in French. On the other hand, I spend more time one-on-one with him than anyone else, so it makes sense that many of his early words in French described elements of a baby's daily routine: couche (diaper), lolo (breast milk), dodo (sleep), pain (bread), biscuit (cookie/cracker).

Because I tended to use words like these constantly and contextually, it was easy for my husband and his parents to understand Griffin when he asked for something basic. (In fact, Ed uses the words himself now, eg "Griffin, you can have lolo after I change your couche.")

It's only the past two weeks that Griffin has shown us that he can refer to the same object with different words in the two languages. When he wants Ed to hold his hand, he says "hand" to him, but he'll turn to me and say "main." When he needs to be changed, he takes a clean diaper to his daddy and says "diaper," but he uses the word "couche" with me. His grasp on numbers and how they work is still quite tenuous, but he seems to use French-like sounds with me ("dooo," "cat," deeeese," "douche") and Englishy ones with others ("foh," "sih," "ay," "den"). When Ed and I both took him to the pumpkin patch, he learned to say both "pumpkin" and "citrouille" (the latter is quite difficult to pronounce--see-twroo-ee-yah--so he tends to use "pumpkin" more frequently even around me). In his newest pair, "all done" has joined "fini."

In most areas, though, he sticks with what he knows best, even if it seems arbitrary to the rest of us: "please" but "merci," "awwwww" (which means elephant and airplane--you have to watch for the hand sign to know which one he wants), "pomme" (apple) but "bean-bean" (usually refers to peas, though can also be green beans or black beans), "marche" (walk) but "jump."

This is SO much fun to observe and try to figure out!

Griffinventions

Sometimes Griffin says a new word (for him) in English; sometimes he'll bust out with a new word in French. Other times, his utterances are his own creations!

Griffin-English Glossary

Bayoo: butterfly/papillon

Bee: a prefix which seems to mean "I want a different one than the one I'm currently playing with or looking at," as in "bee-book" and "bee-awwwwww" (airplane)

Clop: block/cube, which could be an amalgamation of the sounds in both French and English pronounced by a toddler, or perhaps a reference to the sounds that blocks make in a French book that he likes

Mimi: stuffed baby doll which is supposed to be the Little Prince/Petit Prince en peluche

Tah-pee: pizza, plus any take-out or delivered food (He's probably just inverting the syllables, but why with this word and not any of his other two-syllable words?)

Uh-oh-way (with sharp rising intonation): We never did figure this one out, but it seemed to be distinct from his "uh-oh."

Up-or-down: For some reason, he said this for months, but he also knew how to say "up" and "down" separately. We think "up-or-down" had some other meaning for him (but what exactly remains a mystery).

What inscrutable words have your toddlers invented? Click on "comments" to let us know!

French underwear

That title caught your attention, didn't it?

(First let me take a moment to welcome the visitors who googled "French underwear" and were very disappointed to land on a website about language learning. No, don't leave so soon! You just got here! I don't think you're all perverts, really I don't.)

Because I haven't been around many native French speakers since Griffin was born, I rely on dictionaries, wordreference.com, and one child-rearing book in French to brush up my vocabulary. There are SO many essential words and phrases concerning babies and toddlers that I never learned in college! ("Griffin had a diaper blow-out all over his onsie while he was sitting in his bouncy seat," for example, or "We can tell that Griffin's entering the Terrible Twos by the increase of frequency and volume of his tantrums and the amount of yogurt that ends up on the floor during every meal as he conducts experiments in physics despite our assurance that yogurt is delicious and gravity still works, no you don't need to check just in case. Oh, and also because of the number of times we look out the front window to see if there are any Gypsies passing to whom we could sell him. Cheap.")

Anyway, this vocabulary word has been on my mind for a couple of weeks, ever since we started reading Un petit pot pour un grand garcon (a board book whose title translates as "A Little Potty for a Big Boy") and the grand garcon in question proudly wears his big-boy underpants at the end of the book. His "culotte." His culotte?

Now, when I lived in France and had to shop for unmentionables, I learned that men wear a slip and women wear a culotte. Hang on--so boys wear culottes too, but graduate to slips as they age? (What do little girls start off with, then? Culottettes?) Or have I just missed out on on the latest Continental cutting-edge undergarment lingo during this past decade and a half in the States?

It's not that we're starting to potty train Griffin--nowhere near that. But he likes to help me sort laundry and identify the garments, and right now he refers to both his father's and my underwear as a slip. I don't want to keep reminding him that my underthings are culottes if he's later going to get confused when his undies look like Daddy's but have the same name as Maman's. The dictionaries I have consulted only complicate matters. (I should have expected that--wasn't it the French who invented, or at least named, lingerie?)

So someone, please, take pity on me and my undergarment nomenclature dilemma (and my poor readers who have been subjected to waaaaay more paragraphs about undies than is appropriate for a G-rated blog with an educational bent). Would a native or near-native speaker of French familiar with men's, women's, and children's underwear please let me know what to call the darn things?

Thanks. I promise I won't write about this topic again for at least another year.

music your munchkins might love

Tired of cloyingly sweet or frenetically hyper children's songs in English? Want to expand your child's musical library with new artists and groups? But you don't want to spend a ton of money on CDs and downloads and then discover that you can't stomach the songs a dozen times in a row while an enthusiastic toddler sings off-key and bangs on things that were never intended to be used as drums?

Griffin likes to climb into people's laps while they're working on their computers and ask to listen to music. As a result, he's totally hooked on the video for Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me," which my husband, Ed, bought off i-Tunes. This means that the staid, traditional children's songs that I have saved on my computer (after burning them from CDs borrowed from the library) just don't measure up.

Fortunately, we have found Jitterbug, a free website that streams interesting children's songs (with the slogan "Music for Hip Kids." You can search by artist or category (such as "kindie," independent music for kids), through your "favorites" file, by format (song or video), or simply browse by clicking on pictures or the names of songs that catch your eye. The videos which accompany many of the tunes range from old-school Sesame Street to whimsical animated line drawings to live performances. Jitterbug also offers music from other countries (mostly Spanish-speaking from what I can tell, though I haven't explored the site extensively). The founders even invite us listeners to suggest other music-makers to include on their site.

I would LOVE to find a site like this with French songs for kids! (Can anyone offer any leads? Or if you know of similar sites in other languages, please share them via a comment.) But in the meantime, Griffin will continue to enjoy these fun ones in English, and I hope that those of you whose children or students are learning English in faraway countries can take advantage of this delightful resource.

(To read about another tremendous resource with engaging English, French, and Spanish materials for kids, check out this post about Tumblebooks.)