alligators and airplanes and picnics, oh my (or: why you should never take an impatient bilingual toddler into the dressing room)

(Hmm, that's redundant, the "impatient" bit. Is there any other kind of toddler?!)

Within the past week, Griffin has experienced another language explosion, this time with sentences. He's saying more and more complete sentences, even joining two complete sentences with "and." (Up till now many of his utterances were missing a subject or some other crucial part of speech.)

He's gone from "Need me drink the milk" to "I want to boire the lait," for example, and he's more comfortable expressing his preferences: "I love my penis" and "No I don't like that!" (which he said very forcefully in swim class when we tried to put his ears in the water).

Other times, though, his syntax is still tortured and convoluted and only makes sense to someone who knows him very, very well. "Steamboat not here for nager" actually means "We're going swimming, but we're not going swimming in Steamboat Springs like we did last week, because we're not in Steamboat right now."

As far as other parts of speech, he's still figuring out how to express possession in both languages. In English right now, everything is "her"--"Grandad get in her camionette [pick-up truck]," "Daddy with her friends." And he's applying French syntax to English possession, for instance saying "the truck of Grandad" because he's used to hearing my "la camionette de Grandad" and so forth.

And like any two-year-old, he's picking up new words constantly, but not always using them correctly at first. Here's a scene from a department store dressing room last week, where I'm practically tap dancing to keep him from opening the dressing room door while I'm still in my underwear, promising him we can go on the escalator afterwards.

Maman: Et maintenant je vais essayer cette tunique. C'est une sorte de chemise. De quelle couleur est la tunique? [I told him I was trying on a tunic, which is a type of shirt, and asked him what color it was.]

Griffin: Bleu.

Maman: Oui! Bleu! C'est une tunique bleue! Est-ce que tu vois d'autres choses bleues ici?

(Griffin points out other blue items of clothing, then other colors, while I frantically attempt to find a bathing suit that actually fits and occasionally scoop him as he attempts to crawl under the changing room door.)

Griffin, looking critically at me in a black bathing suit: Maman, you need put on the picnique-nique bleue again.

Maman, to herself: I need to put on a blue picnic? What the what? Ohhhh! "Tunic." Not "picnique," he means "tunique." (And apparently this suit is indeed as unflattering as I had thought.)

Griffin tries to escape once again, and Maman gives up on trying on clothes.

Maman: D'accord, Griffin. On va partir maintenant. [Okay, we're leaving now.]

Griffin: Need me go on alligator, Maman! [He said "alligator" with the French pronounciation.]

Maman checks the dressing room for reptiles. Nope, none in sight. What the what?

Griffin pulls Maman over to the moving stairway heading up to the second floor of the department store. Oh! Not "alligator." Escalator. Escalator!

And finally, despite his penchant for saying cute and/or grammatically and/or lexically incorrent phrases with English and French all smushed together, Griffin can also wax poetic:

"Griffin's pants are falling down, falling down, falling down
Griffin's pants are falling down, my fair baby"

and

"Avion vole comme un aigle, Maman." (Airplane flies like an eagle.)

Mon cher fils, mon amourson, toi aussi, tu voles comme un aigle, sans jamais quitter la terre.

wait, no, that's not what I wanted!

Darn this Pandora's Box....Blogger said "see new templates!" and I thought "Okay!" and now I can't get my original one back and I don't like any of the new options so far but I don't have time to deal with it right now.

Please consider this entire layout a work in progress!

Sunday, June 27
Update: Now I'm happier with it. What do you think of my makeover? :)

flashes of brilliance

Well, of "above averageness," at least. (Mostly I was just looking for a catchy title for this post.)

I have long been skeptical of flashcards as a way to learn languages. The thought of a parent forcing a child to sit still while showing him one unrelated card after another, making him repeat the word aloud, telling him to stop fidgeting and memorize--well, that just makes me cringe. (I once played the role of a precocious but screwed-up teenager whose mom-with-unreasonable-expectations subjected her to Greek and Latin flashcards as a baby in a very good play called Eleemosynary by Lee Blessing. This is perhaps what turned me off kids and cards.)

Now, mind you, I have no problem with using flashcards as a study technique, which I've done with every foreign language I've ever studied. But there are so many other (better) ways to introduce words and concepts!

Yet when I saw this cute box of bilingual (French-English) flashcards when I was pregnant with Griffin, I bought it anyway. (I'm such a sucker for kids' French stuff. I'd probably buy a new set of knives if they had drawings from Le petit prince embossed on the handles.) The company that makes them is eeBoo. Other companies that make French flashcards are here. (I have a few other sets, too, but this is the one that Griffin is drawn to.)

Flash forward 2.5 years, and we discover a toddler with a propensity for dumping things out and transferring things from one container to another. Translation: a toddler who loves flashcards!

As long as this post began in a negative light, let me get my critique of this set of cards out of the way: the sample sentences illustrating the target vocabulary are often either dorky, very dorky, or decontextualized.

For example, "The pig is happy." Really? How do you know? I can't tell. Will this sentence help a learner figure out what "cochon" or "content" means without reading the translation on the back? Nope.

Even worse: "The dress is for my sister." Oh? I don't have a sister. It's not like we're reading a story and we know who the narrator and the characters are, so when someone says "The dress is for my sister," we can nod and say, "Oh, yes, that does look like something Fifi would wear."

A few other pickier complaints: the wrong gender is provided for the word "shirt," which is even featured on the cover of the box; four of the eight "nature" cards show the same tree in different stages (ie, no leaves for winter, buds for spring, green leaves for summer, and other colors of leaves for autumn), which Griffin simply doesn't understand (having, say, snow accompany the winter card would help, but I would have prefered just using different pictures to represents other elements of nature, like a lake, a forest, a stream, an acord, roots of a plant, a garden, rocks, a flower....).

And this is probably a good place for me to mention that you don't even need to buy bilingual flashcards for your babies, toddlers, and preschoolers: if they can't read, it doesn't matter what language the words are written in! (On the other hand, if your husband is trying to learn French along with your kid, he might appreciate seeing the sentences written out.) Or you could just put Post-it notes with your translations on the English flashcards.

And for that matter, you don't need to buy flashcards at all. They're handy, yes, but also limiting. Make your own! (I haven't created any for Griffin--but I could, right? Especially if I'm not happy with this company's nature cards.)

Anyway, here are a few non-flashy things that Griffin and I do with these cards (in addition to the simple displacement of them from their box to his play kitchen to the slats on his crib to behind the changing table). We play flashcards a lot, but it hardly ever involves my holding up the card and asking what's on it.

We put them into categories--all the animal cards together, all the food, all the objects found in nature, etc. What's really cool is that my toddler is not constrained by the categories we grown-ups would create.

For example, he put la lune in the pile of pictures of things in the house. When I asked him why, he pointed out that the moon is in his room. And right he is--his nightlight is a 3D replica of the moon which lights up in different phases. (Yes, we're geeks, and proud of it. It's inevitable when a teacher-librarian marries a rocket scientist.)

Griffin also assigned this card to the "dans la maison" category:

He says it's because he has a stuffed cow that he sleeps with. That works for me!

We also practice identifying colors using these flashcards. But rather than holding up the, say, bleu card and asking him what color it is, I hold up the color card with an object and ask if the combination makes sense.

"Le lait est bleu, Griffin?"

"Non!" (giggle giggle giggle)

"Le lait est noir?"

"Non!" (more giggles)

"De quelle couleur est le lait?"

"Blanc!"

Trust me, this is endless amusing when you're two years old.

And finally, a few other ideas to try:

--Set out examples of objects pictured in the cards. (We do stuffed animals, his toy food, and other toys.) He has to put the card beside the real object like a label.

--Place three cards in front of him. Ask which one is in the middle. Then move it to the left, to the right, up, down, behind, and so forth to practice the prepositions.

--Give him five cards and ask him to put them in order from his favorite one to his least favorite. (Griffin can't do this yet--he either likes something or he doesn't. And that can change from day to day. Just ask the carrots.)

--Count the cards. (Griffin can only kind of do this--and he's better at counting in English, because he always skips "quatre" and gets very confused in the teens.)

--Have I mentioned throwing the cards around and hiding them behind furniture? (That's more of a linguistic challenge for me than for him--I have to work hard to express my displeasure without teaching him words he doesn't need to know yet.)

What other language-rich activities could we try with cards like this? Please share your flashes of brilliance in the comments!

Carnival deadline: June 29

I'm hosting the next Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism here at Bringing up Baby Bilingual on July 1, 2010. If you would like to participate, here's all you need to do:

1. Choose one of your recent posts about bilingualism, multilingualism, multiculturalism, language learning, language teaching, or raising children with more than one language.

2. Or write a new post inspired by the above topics!

3. Email me the exact URL of the post, plus the URL of your blog itself.

4. And if I haven't "met" you before in cyberspace (or real life)--or even if I have!--I'd appreciate a little background information, such as a one-sentence description of your blog or a blurb about your family or your favorite quote about language learning...just to help me figure out how to introduce you when I write a post synthesizing everyone's submissions.

5. Deadline: please submit by Tuesday, June 29 via email to babybilingual (at) gmail (d0t) com.

Questions? Just let me know! For more info on the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, visit Bilingual For Fun (the founder) or email me. I'm so looking forward to hearing about your ideas and experiences! Thank you to all the bloggers who have already offered to share their posts.

to all the father figures, but especially Ed

Happy Father's Day to all the fathers in Griffin's life--my husband and my dad and my father-in-law and my brother-in-law--and also our uncles, our friends, and all the other father figures in our lives. (By the way, when my brother, Matt, becomes a father, he's going to be a fantabulous one.)

Ed, you're an amazing dad, and Griffin adores you for good reason: you give him unlimited love (but also "time outs" when he needs them), you drop what you're doing to read to him when he brings you a book, you let him tackle you even when you'd rather not have his feet in your stomach or his butt on your forehead, you make up songs when you sing to him at bedtime, you ask him "why" even though he can't really tell us yet, you lead him through physics experiments, and you change those stinky diapers as soon as you catch a whiff of his caca.

I'm so glad that we're co-captains here at Team Griffin.

Griffin rewrites the songs

Griffin's pants are falling down, falling down, falling down

Griffin's pants are falling down, my fair baby.

Mommy's bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down

Mommy's bridge is falling down, my fair mommy.

Daddy's jeans are falling down, falling down, falling down

Daddy's jeans are falling down, my fair daddy.

(Upon hearing one verse after another, each rewritten by our delightful little boy, Ed and I just stared at each other gape-mouthed, amazed, checking to make sure we were understanding correctly, and then we burst into gales of laughter. It sounded so cute I didn't mind in the least bit that not a word of his new song was in French!)

more wisdom from more bilingual families!

Hey, have you been to the latest Carnival? Head on over to Mummy Do That! to meet this month's group of bloggers who have been writing about bilingualism.

And then, write something yourself and let me know about it, because I'm hosting the next Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism here on July 1, and I would love to include links to your posts on this topic. Anything related to language learning for you or your young'uns is fair game!

You can click on "comments" for this post and give me the link to your post or send it to me at babybilingual (at) gmail (dot). For more info on the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism, visit Bilingual For Fun (the founder) or email me.

profile: bilingual with Mamapoekie in Ivory Coast

Meet Mamapoekie, originally from Belgium, who now lives in Ivory Coast with her Belgian husband and their toddler. She is a prolific blogger--check out her musings on being a mama at Authentic Parenting. I'm so pleased that she agreed to be interviewed here, because the majority of the families profiled on my blog have been in North America and Europe.

Mamapoekie is a stay-at-home-mom and her husband is an engineer. She has also lived in Sweden and Cameroon. Both parents are both multilingual: her mother tongue is Dutch, she characterizes her English and French as "very good spoken and written" (and based on her blog, I would push her English far beyond just "very good"!), and she can converse in German and Spanish as well. Her husband's native languages are Dutch and French, his English is very good, and he has also studied some German.

To read more about her impressions of the trilingualism of her home country, click here.

Their daughter (DD) just turned two a couple of days ago!

What languages are you exposing your children to, and how?
Currently French and Dutch, we live in a francophone country and the huz speaks French to DD too. I speak Dutch. Our carrier language is Dutch too. She’s a little bit exposed to English (we only watch English spoken TV – which she doesn’t get to do yet, but she hears it all the same - and hear a lot of English music), which we would like to up a notch. After our next holidays, we will be reading to her in English and I also ordered some English lullabies on CD.

Why do you want your child to know more than one language?
That’s a tricky one. I think we always wanted to benefit from our bilingual household situation to also raise our children bilingual. The fact that we now live in a francophone country is just an addition. We’ve gotten a bit more deliberate about it recently as to wanting to add English to the mix, just to benefit from the early language acquiring skills.

How well does your child understand and speak the different languages?
She understands Dutch and French perfectly. She speaks French in whole phrases, but Dutch only in words.

How have you been able to expose your child to the culture(s) where the different languages are spoken?
She has been on holiday in France multiple times and has so far lived in two francophone countries in West Africa. We go on holiday every six months and spend a part of our time with the grandparents in Belgium.

What challenges have you faced as you raise your child with more than one language?
Having lived in a francophone country for close to four years now, surrounded by only French speakers, makes me lose my language. I had set out to only speak French to my daughter, but I feel as if it is impolite to do so around French speakers, so I catch myself speaking more and more French to her. I even start doing it when there’s nobody else around – especially given that she knows I understand, so she will speak to me in whatever language comes first and I tend to respond n the same language, which most often is French, sadly.

Do you have any advice for us?
See previous answer. I find this very hard. We do get to balance it a little by visiting the Dutch speaking grandparents and family twice a year. I think most important is to try as much as possible for the minority language speaker to continue to speak that language, however hard it may be. And to keep correcting them if they address you in the ‘wrong’ language.

What do you think parents, caretakers, teachers, and/or researchers need to know about teaching a second language to children? What do you wish you had known when you started? What, if anything, would you do differently now?
I don’t think we’d do anything differently, although we would like to move to a country that’s neither French nor Dutch speaking one day, just to add a little to the language soup.
I think conversation and immersion are the two most important factors in anyone learning a language.

Kids pick up languages really quickly and understand much more than we do, so as long as we don’t fall in the trap of translating it to the kids language it’s fine.

I think any education of a language should be in that language only. Even if the pupil doesn’t understand, the teacher should not translate, rather point it out throuogh gesture and images etc.

Answer your own question now--what did I not ask about that you would like to comment on?
Just one little thing: A lot of people think/say that language evolves slowlier in a bi- or multilingual child. I beg to differ. I think much depends on how much of the child is spoken to. My daughter, who is a mere 23 months old, has a much larger vocabulary, speaks both languages and speaks in full sentences, when I compare to a monolingual boy she plays with, she is in fact in advance, even while the boy is almost three.

Just talk talk talk and try not to do kiddie talk.

Mamapoekie, thank you for being such a compelling advocate for bilingualism and also for admitting that it is a real challenge for you. I think a lot of families are in the same boat, and it really helps to hear that others struggle with using their mother tongue when living abroad. Can we revisit this profile in a couple of years when DD is older to see what has developed?

And one more question from me: Can you address the fact that West African French is a bit different from Belgian French? Does your daughter notice the differences? And does your daughter hear any African languages as well, the way that two-year-old Julia does in Namibia?

I'm always looking for other bilingual or multilingual families to profile...email me at babybilingual (at) gmail (d0t) com if you'd like to volunteer!

vivent les "pommes frites" with "Monsieur"!

Griffin, Ed (my hubby), and I spent the weekend in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where we stayed in a bunkhouse on a working ranch while cattle lowed outside our bedroom window. Griffin frolicked in the grass, chased the cat, petted a baby kitten, and had a ball in the hot springs pool downtown and also up in the mountains.

We had lunch one day at the Epicurean, a cute and cozy restaurant run by a Frenchman, Marco. I was thrilled that someone besides me was speaking French to Griffin, and Marco seemed delighted when he brought two rubber duckies to Griffin, calling them "canards" (ducks), and Griffin corrected him to say "canetons" (ducklings). (Okay, I'll confess, that delighted me too.) Every time Marco appeared, Griffin would shout "Monsieur!" with joy.

Anyway, when Marco brought Ed's merguez sausages and French fries, he called the latter "pommes frites." All along, I've simply said "frites" for fries, so that's the word that Griffin learned and uses. But Griffin immediately started saying "pommes frites" just like Monsieur!

Griffin and I had fries yesterday, and he called them "pommes frites" then too. I am convinced that this is Marco's influence, a lasting impression made by a real live French person who spoke directly to Griffin about things he loves!

(By the way, the Epicurean's food was exquisite. Ed proclaimed the lobster bisque and the frites among the best he'd ever had, and I really enjoyed the chunky creaminess of the gratin d'artichauts. And Griffin ate his very first escargot! We almost went back for dinner before we left town.)

brainy baby, but bored maman

How we learn languages most naturally: We are immersed in the language throughout our waking hours, encountering words and phrases in context, hearing multiple repetitions of many words from many different speakers.

How "Brainy Baby" wants our toddlers to learn French: by watching a short video whose unseen narrator tells us what we're looking at in one- and two-word phrases, repeating the words five times or so. We see clips of noses, for example, while the narrator enunciates, "Le nez. Le nez. Le nez. Le nez. Le nez." Then it's off to ears, colors, simple greetings, numbers, and so forth.

To my surprise, Griffin will actually sit and watch this, even though he already knows all the words. (In fact, he even corrected the narrator when she called the parrot a "oiseau"--bird--by saying, "Non, un perroquet"!) This could just be because of the novelty of it; he has not watched many DVDs in his short life. Do you know a three, four, five-year-old who would sit through this more than a couple of times? (The DVD claims to be appropriate for ages 1-5, which is quite a range.)And even if your one-year-old could, would you want to plop him in front of the television for an hour or two? (Well, okay, if you're like me, there are plenty of times where you've been tempted just so you can take your first shower this week and then fix dinner.)

The teacher in me, though, wished that the Brainy Baby folks would move beyond naming objects and actually do something with the language! Eventually, they did present numbers paired with objects, colors with objects, and greetings and leave-takings via children at a door, but that was it as far as real-life contextualized usefulness. And who can learn a word with only five repetitions? Not me, even in my native language, and I'm a grown-up with lots of metalinguistic knowledge (and a year of high school Latin) to draw upon.

When the video started introducing verbs, it got my hopes up--we see a baby drinking from a bottle, or a child eating, and the narrator tells us the infinitives, boire, to drink, manger, to eat. Why not take it a step further and make sentences? We have already seen the words for baby, boy, girl. Why not tell us that the baby is drinking milk or that the girl is eating a pizza? Then give the girl milk, and bring in a boy to eat pizza and drink milk, and point out that the milk is cold and white and the pizza is hot and red, and then bring a stuffed animal or two to pretend to eat pizza and a baby who smears the pizza over her face and arms but doesn't actually eat it....and then our would-be bilingual babies might eventually conjugate the verb and make their own sentences without even thinking about it! We'd get lots of repetition in context of more than one or two words at a time, at the very least.

"Boire. Boire. Boire. Boire. Boire." Really?

Oh, and while it's great that a native speaker of French was pronouncing all the words, why not have several speakers--a male and a female, someone with a mainland French accent along with someone from Quebec and someone from West Africa? And why not get kids to do the talking--surely children watching the video will respond better to hearing another child's voice tell them what color something is?!

It also seems like a video purporting to teach kids French could also touch on some elements of culture, even simple things like pointing out colors using the French flag, or introducing the word "oeuf" with a child using a spoon to eat a soft-boiled egg in a little egg cup, or presenting the word "boire" as a child drinks hot chocolate out of a bowl. It wouldn't have to be filmed in France or Martinique or Madagascar to be able to show francophone culture! (Although it would be fun to see, say, a Mardi Gras or Carnaval parade to teach colors or monuments like the Eiffel Tower or cathedrals to introduce other adjectives. If this video even attempted to introduce any adjectives other than colors, that is.)

The too-few sections that encouraged the viewer to respond were welcome, though. Griffin would wave hello and good-bye to the kids, and when the narrator asked, "De quelle couleur est....", Griffin would call out the name of the color. More of these types of questions would be helpful, just easy ones like "Do you have a teddy bear too?" or "Can you hold up five fingers?" or "How many Eiffel Towers do you see?" or "Where is your nose?"

Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about he most heinous part: the "music video" section of children frolicking on a playground while a French translation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" played over the soundtrack. This just seemed ridiculous to me: one, use a real, traditional children's song in French, for pete's sake, and two, have the video footage at least attempt to mirror what is happening in the song! Could it have been that hard to take a kid to a farm and film him playing with a lamb? Better yet, even easier, show kids playing in a garden for "J'ai descendu dans mon jardin" or kids with musical instruments for "Bonhomme, bonhomme, sais-tu jouer"!

So, overall, I'd say this is worth checking out from the library if you want your kids to see video clips of other kids while a French lady says some words. And if you speak French and can supplement the meager soundtrack with a running commentary and help your children interact more with the video, then go for it. But spending $20 in hopes of getting a brainier baby out of this? I wouldn't recommend it. Sorry.

from "too young for any videos" to "too old for these dopey DVDs"!

Here's our newest dilemma in raising a child who speaks English and French thousands of miles away from a francophone country: finding age-appropriate DVDs in French!

I (mostly) scrupulously followed the guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (and more importantly, from our pediatrician and our librarian) not to expose Griffin to screen time until he was two years old. So it's only been during the past few months that he started watching the DVDs that we had started collecting for him. I was eager to show him these educational French videos!

• Brainy Baby French
• Bonjour les Amis
• Globe-Toddlers: Aventures in France
• Little Pim: Foreign Language and Fun
• French for Kids
• First Fun with French
• Baby Einstein Language Nursery

And then I started watching them with him.

Overall, I've been disappointed with their approaches to language teaching and their appropriateness for a squirmy toddler. It seems like he's now too old for most of these, or that he already knows too much French and is no longer part of the videos' target audiences! Yet he's too young to watch a lot of the other videos we have (mainly kids' movies)* or could borrow from the library and watch with the French soundtrack (if the DVDs even offer one, that is). Hence my dilemma.

(Thank goodness for YouTube and its offerings in French--comptines, animated shorts, clips of cute little French children doing cute things in French! But that's another post....)

Thus begins my foray into movie reviews on this blog. Stay tuned for the first one, which I will title "Brainy Baby, But Bored Maman"!

*Thanks again to Eve over at Blogging on Bilingualism for passing on some of her kids' outgrown DVDs! I've also bought a few on eBay, at yard sales, and at public library used book sales.