Mummy-talk in a Second Language

Jacques and I were brought up in villages and our childhoods were very simple. You either played in your own garden with your siblings or popped round to play with other kids. You could stay for tea and no-one would bother, and you went home when it was getting late. But thirty years on all that has changed and playing with other kids is timetabled, along with the other after-school activities. You therefore need to ‘network’ other class mothers and work out what day their children are free. I have had to do a crash course in ‘second-language-mummy-talk’ to get by.

The French mothers don’t know anything about me (they are very curious) and on the first official get-together I have to go through the whole thing in French…. where I am from, where we live now, how many kids we have, which class and teacher, why I put kids in French school, what my husband does and even where we are going for the next holiday. When I have got through all that there is the confidential mummy chat….what do you really think about the teacher and have you heard about so-and-so who had an affair…. After emerging from the home a French neighbor, who offered me a coffee when I arrived to pick up Gabriel and interrogated me for 40 minutes, I felt like I was 16 again and taking my oral exam in French. I just need a certificate in ‘mummy-talk’ now!

AZERTY or QWERTY?

With a newly installed wifi system at home the children can use a spare computer downstairs. I hope that having more access to the internet might inspire them to read and write more in English. But we discover that having two languages can sometimes complicate computer literacy. Marc and Nina ask for email accounts, and I register them with same free email provider as me. But no, they don’t want the English-language version, they want the French one. So we sign on with the French language network. We need to create a username. Marc, follows the French pattern, where surnames come first, and chooses ‘hauwaertmarc’, while Nina goes for the other way round ‘ninahauwaert’. Secret passwords are the next step. Marc chooses an English word, saying that no French person would guess it. Nina picks her rabbit’s birthday. I tap the passwords in and ask them to re-type them. There’s a brief glitch as Nina retypes French ‘mai’ instead of my English ‘May’. ‘Does it matter?’ says bilingual Nina, ‘It’s the same word.’ The computer disagrees with her and says no.

I sit with them as they write their first email, but the instructions in the French email inbox are totally unfamiliar for me, supprimer, brouillon….the only word I recognize is poubelle (trash). I feel out of my depth since it barely resembles my email inbox. We struggle along setting up the address book. Marc dictates an address saying jeanlucarrobayahoo.fr, which makes no sense to me and I write Jean Luc Arroba twice until I realize that arroba means the @ sign in French. We try to compose a brief message to my dad in England. Then we hit another problem. They use AZERTY keyboards at school, but we have a QWERTY one at home.

Marc and Nina are painfully slow with the QWERTY one, desperately searching for the full-stop, exclamation and question marks, which have mysteriously ‘moved’ and shouting, ‘Mummy, there’s no A on your computer!’ Their typing skills are so horrifically bad even my spellchecker goes on strike and asks if I want to install a French one. Left to their own devices they prefer phonetic spellings or text abbreviations. My dad nearly got “How R U? Im OK. Skool gud.’ After a frustrating half hour composing an email they tell me that emailing is boring, and I should set up Skype so they can chat to Grandpa via the computer. Even if emails are not for them, they can surf and flick from site to site with speed. I admire them googling sets of keywords in French and English, comfortable and confident in either linguistic zone.

Which language would you like, sir?

OPOL families can be annoying sometimes. One never knows which language to speak to them. Or which parent is the bilingual one? Or whether they all speak both languages? Or which language they prefer? An airhostess friend told me she makes a quick linguistic judgment based on the book or newspaper the person is carrying when he or she boards the plane. Is this true? To test the theory on a recent Jacques boards first (with a Le Monde newspaper in his hand) and the airhostess greets us all politely in French. We all reply in French (it would be impolite not too). Later on, she hands out the gifts for the children and hears the kids speaking English together and apologises for speaking French. The kids say their mantra, which explains everything ‘It’s OK, we can speak both languages, Mummy speaks English, Papa speaks French…’ She is a little annoyed that she misread us initially, and asks the kids which language they prefer. That’s a difficult question. Should they risk upsetting Mummy or risk making Papa feel like they don’t like his language? Both, they all reply, diplomatically. When she comes back with the snack she sticks with the French for all of us.

On the way back I board first, with the Times displayed obviously, and the reverse applies…the airhostess greets us all in English and we all politely reply in English. This time when she comes round with a the free gifts the kids amuse themselves, Marc speaks English to her, Nina French and then Gabriel English, so the poor airhostess is not sure if they are from the same family or playing tricks. When she asks them exactly which they speak they chorus their mantra: Mummy speaks English, Papa speaks French.

Falling Apples

The children come home at 5pm. They have a snack and talk about their day. At this point in the day they are swinging between two languages; the French of school and my English at home. Some stories can become a guessing game for me, as they flit from French to English expressions, which are sometimes untranslatable. For example, Nina begins to tell me a story….

‘Today, in the canteen, this girl, Beverly, ….just fell…fell in the apples…at lunch, you know what I mean?’
‘What, she fell in her apple dessert?’ I guess, hopefully.
‘No! She fell.. in the apples!’ says Nina.
‘There were apples on the floor of the canteen?’ I ask, wondering if she slipped on a crate of apples, misplaced on the floor.
‘There were no apples, silly Mummy,’ Nina says, looking grumpy. ‘She fell over, like that…’ and she mimes a girl fainting and a teacher saying ‘Elle a tombé dans les pommes’
‘Ah!’ I say, playing along with the Charades games, ‘She fainted!’
‘Maybe’, says Nina, not really knowing what ‘fainted’ means. ‘Like I said, she fell in the apples…’

With some investigation, we discover that ‘to fall in the apples’ literally means to fall over and faint. You learn something every day in the OPOL Family!

For more French expressions and their translations in several languages visit:
http://www.expressio.fr/expressions/tomber-dans-les-pommes.php

Chicken or kitchen for dinner?

Gabriel officially has a minor speech problem. He can’t say double consonants like ‘ch’, ‘pl’ or ‘tr’. Some words come out different, for example, he says ‘kitchen’ instead of ‘chicken’. It’s taken almost three years to pinpoint it. His pre-school teachers in Malaysia, America and France had all hinted that his language was ‘immature’. There was also an unspoken message that his bilingual home was perhaps a factor too, so he was given extra time to ‘catch up’ verbally. The question for us was whether the French language was bothering the English, or vice versa. However, the same speech problem occurs in English and French. By the time he was five and a half it was clear there was a problem, because the children in Gabriel’s class were making fun of his way of talking. But at what point do you take your child to see a specialist?

Gabriel also speaks French with an English accent, which worries (and amuses) family members. This should have faded away, especially since we have been back in France for over eighteen months and he spends most of his days in a French environment (or watching French television). It appears that his model is me, with my English-accented French, when he should be copying Jacques’s perfect accent. How has our carefully organized OPOL practice gone so wrong?

At the end of the school year, a speech therapist came to his class and finally checked him properly, and recommended I go to see the orthophonist immediately. Initially, I thought she meant to see an orthodontist for his teeth. After a dental check-up, and realizing it was not a dental problem, I finally found the local speech therapist a few months later. I made the appointment with some trepidation. What if she asks me to stop speaking English to him? Even armed with all the research and academic proof it’s difficult to justify the OPOL strategy when your child is talking wrong.

Fortunately, my local French orthophonist, Agnès, is married to a Danish chap (they speak English together as a couple) and she understands bilingual children. She is also working with several English kids who have moved to France. Agnès could see straightway that his English side was not the issue; she found that he cannot roll his ‘r’s (which makes his French instantly sound ‘English’). Agnès immediately started him off practicing ‘tiger growling’ to get the ‘r’ sound right.

The sessions with Agnès have made me realize that there has been some denial on my side too, a rather naïve idea that time will sort things out. Because we were successful with our older two children we thought that our third child would simply follow. There’s a side of me that feels guilty too. Perhaps I did not speak as much to Gabriel as I did to the others? Did I not correct him enough, like I did with Marc? Did I not sing to him enough, like I did with Nina? Have I left his speech development to other people? Homework from the older children takes up much of the evening these days and he certainly gets less time for bedtime stories (and a tired mother!). But, as Agnès assures me, it is a minor problem, and with a bit of extra help he’ll soon be rolling his ‘r’s and ordering ‘chicken’ instead of ‘kitchen’ in the restaurant in no time!

Don’t dub Troy!

Nina loves the High School Musical films, as do most nine-year-old girls from all around the world. She’s seen the first two films on dvd in English and sings along to the music all the time. When the third High School Musical film came out recently in France there was no way she was seeing it dubbed. I’m not that fussy about which language films are done in, as long as it’s a good film, and suggest a local cinema in Poitiers. To persuade me, she argued that if Troy said ‘I love you’ her French it would mean nothing to her. ‘You would miss out on the real feeling.’ she claims, gazing at her poster of Troy on her bedroom wall.

It’s the school holidays so off we go to Paris to find a cinema that does version originale. There will be the original soundtrack with French subtitles. The only show is on at 9am on a Saturday, and Nina is awake at 7am, already wearing the HSM 3 t-shirt and matching necklace. I watch the film sleepily, as Troy sweet-talks Gabriella, and wonder if it really matters whether he says ‘I love you’ or ‘Je t’aime’. But Nina is absolutely convinced it makes a difference, and she wouldn’t have Troy say it any other way. ‘It wouldn’t sound real,’ she says. A few months later Mamma Mia is released in France. As Nina scans the Paris cinema listings I know it’s time to book the train tickets, after all, Meryl Streep just wouldn’t be the same speaking French either….

At last, a Foreign Language!

In collège Marc can learn a Foreign Language. Marc never had any choice about learning English and French. When people say how lucky he is to speak two Foreign Languages so easily he must wonder what they mean. It was no fun for him - especially with two parents who were determined that he would speak each language to a high standard. Poor Marc was the first child and the guinea-pig of the family. Right from day one he was blasted with English from his mother (and all her family) and French from Papa (and all his family). There was never any other option than to speak both languages. It’s not that he is ungrateful for the languages we chose for him; he just would have liked a choice in the matter.

Now age eleven years and eight months, he has a real choice at last. English is obligatory all through the four years of collège, but there is an option for a second language starting in the first year. This is where Marc has his wish come true. On the menu is German, Latin or Spanish. Marc discusses each language seriously and meticulously, questioning us on which one we think is the easiest, which one is useful, and which one will help him in the future. He picks German in the end. Jacques is happy since he speaks excellent German. In fact, his mother fought to get a German class established twenty years ago in the same school, rallying round parents to give the children more choice.

The German class is small and is run via webcam, so the teacher can cover four schools at the same time. I am a bit skeptical about this futuristic set-up, but the kids accept it as normal. Talking to the microphone or the camera has become second nature. It is a delight to see Marc saying ‘Ich bin Marc!’ and chanting ‘ein, zwei, drei…’ He is fascinated by the differences and the similarities between English, French and this new language. He is amazed that German has an extra letter (the ‘ss’ sound or ß) and that they use capital letters for so many nouns and enjoys the lack of pressure to become fluent and the slow pace of learning that beginners can indulge in. Watching him enthusiastically tackle his German homework I am glad that finally language learning is fun…