Ce n'est pas juste

Lately I’ve been recalling a conspiracy that was launched one evening a few years ago, while Pierre fed Laurelle from a glass jar of mushed-up peas. 

 

My husband and baby daughter were seated at our kitchen table in Denver, Laurelle like toy sentry stationed squarely in her Eddie Bauer high chair.  As he spooned, Pierre babbled away to my baby in his Quebecois French about who-knows-what. 

 

Then I overheard a sentence I could understand.

 

Papa’s voice was all cutesy and engaging.  He spoke in English.  “Pretty soon you and I will be able to talk about things,” he told Laurelle, “and Mommy won’t be able to understand!”

 

Ha!  Never, I thought.

 

Never, I vowed.  And so I’ve plugged away at the French language.  Seven-some years later I’ve ended up with a working knowledge of Anglophone French, as I described in The Beautiful Language (my blog dated 15 May 2009).  I can get the technical bits of the language, but try as I might, I fear I’ll never sound like a local.

 

Today’s post, on the other hand, could be called The Beautiful Language 2.  Or better yet, French for Four-Year Olds.

 

Now four years of age, Laurelle has been gathering her command of the French language for precisely four years.  Put one way, that’s a lifetime.  Put another way, her efforts are only half of mine. 

 

In short, I’ve been struggling at French nearly twice as long as Laurelle has been ALIVE.

 

Worse, Laurelle’s French – unlike mine – is perfect.  As my child plays with schoolmates on the playground after school or makes friends with other pint-sized swimmers at the beach, she’s my little French girl.  It’s as if no one suspects she has an ounce of English-speaking blood in her. 

 

Until her mother swoops in and opens her big, smiley, American mouth, that is.  Until I try to fit into the conversation and completely blow her cover.

 

“Ce n’est pas juste,” I say to the local parents.  It’s not fair.  The other adults often find this comment funny.  I do, too – but I don’t.

 

The world is even less fair when you consider that the French language actually underpins a couple of our family’s “life goals” (if I may use such an inward-reaching term) in living here this year.  And we’ve fairly turned our lives inside out to achieve them: 

 

For Pierre it’s straightforward.  He’s taking a first stab at living abroad. 

 

For me I get a first stab at living abroad in a foreign language.  Ah, the language thing. 

 

And for Laurelle, well, it’s a chance to attend maternelle, French preschool, and learn a second language with the same fluency as her first.  There’s that wretched language thing again.

 

I shouldn’t be competitive with my own daughter.  Honestly!  But if Laurelle accomplishes her “life goal” in a single year, I don’t know whether I should punch the stars out in hearty, romping joy or in a self-centered funk.

 

The language thing is just so darned easy for little ones.  Too darned easy.  Ce n’est pas juste.  They enter a foreign land with blank slates, their minds free of all preconceptions about whether French is easy or difficult to learn – even whether the language is beautiful.  French just IS.  It is the way people around here communicate.

 

By the time we reached France last summer, Laurelle was three, and she at least understood the language.  Pierre had spoken French to her over the changing table, her backside thrust into the air awaiting a clean diaper.  He’d explained, as only a Frenchman can, that this jar of yellow mushed-up food tasted like juicy mango while that beige paste was organic chicken and rice.  He’d read French-English picture dictionaries (think “dog – chien, tree – arbre”) and storybooks with real plots (think Elmer flying in the wind). 

 

So last summer Laurelle understood the language.  Or at least she understood the bits she heard over and over again – like stuff about diapers, strained foods, and flying patchwork elephants.  What’s more, while her English language vocabulary was quite stellar (and I’m not just being her mother speaking, promise), my child spoke exactly no words of French. 

 

In September last year, on entering her first day of maternelle, Laurelle went from being the classroom’s original chatterbox, the one with the greatest command of language – to the pupil in a class of 33 three-year olds who said the least, who knew nothing.  She couldn’t even ask for the loo.

 

My precious, precocious baby soon learned – as did I – that the phrase French schoolteachers bellow to misbehaving subjects is “au coin.”  Go to the corner.  But I’ll write more on Laurelle’s school experiences in another blog.

 

And then, voilà.  My daughter began to speak the beautiful language.  By mid-October, a month and a half after school had begun, her little, button mouth began to form French words.  Her first words were those she picked up at school.  She mingled them with evident pride into her usual English conversation, often on school nights when our family convened at the dinner table:

 

 Ecoutez!  (Listen!) 

Arretez!  (Stop!) 

Regardez!  (Watch!) 

Regardez-moi!  (Watch me!) 

Vas-y, Papa!  (Let’s go, Papa!)

 

I quickly realized that Laurelle’s new French vocabulary was made up of verbs.  Verbs – those wretched, impossible, French verbs!  Her every use was conjugated into the imperative form (commands), always choosing the second person plural vous, just as her teacher would in addressing 33 three-year olds. 

 

But now, of course, I am speaking like an adult trying to learn French.  Three-year olds don’t worry about first- or second- or third-person anything.  They don’t conjugate verbs in their heads.  They just talk.  They launch themselves straight off a ski jump and never look back.

 

But what impressed me most about Laurelle’s acquisition of language – other than the fact that she’d managed to do it at the ripe age of three – was its perfection.  Her pronunciation of the beautiful language was, well, beautiful.  Hers was perfect, local pronunciation.  That’s not exactly Parisian French, it should be said, and it’s certainly not Quebecois.  No, Laurelle’s is good “06” French.  French with a sing-song, southern softening that comes from the sunshine lifestyle in Département 06, basically the French equivalent of “State Number 6.”

 

Take the letter R.  The Chinese characteristically have trouble with all Rs that crop up in our English language.  Anglophones barely look twice at the consonant.  Single R, double Rs.  Never mind, it’s all the same sound.  Rrrr.

 

The letter R is not so easy in Romance languages.  The Rolled R gave me years of trouble in high school Spanish classes – both the long-rolling Double RR and the more subtle Single R, its short-form cousin.  After years in front of a mirror, I could finally get my tongue to flutter behind my front teeth in the fourth year of class.

 

The French R is doubly cumbersome.  First off, there’s a fundamental question:  Do I pronounce the letter, or not?  If so, there’s the second issue of how. 

 

In the south of France, locals attack the R – at least in my view – with a rather German bravado.  They throw a throaty, phlegm-like sound into the middle of their words.  That’s supposed to be an R.

 

Soon, my pronunciation-perfect Laurelle soon began tossing the phlegmy R into her own conversation.  The first time I heard my rose-scented jewel utter such a guttural sound, I nearly coughed out my own phlegm.  I don’t know what it is about kids, but their accents – whether British or French or Texan – are stronger than those of adults.  Same with the phlegm-y thing.  Laurelle, like her peers on the playground, executes her Rs with terrific prowess.  They even muddle her name:  Lau[phlem-y thing]-ELLE.

 

Of course there are those famous French vowels, too.  I still struggle with them.  I write flashcards with music notes in their corners to indicate words where I’m working not on their meanings but on their pronunciations.  Invariably, correct pronunciation involves getting my vowels right. 

 

Vowels are all theory to a four-year old.  (Mommy, what’s a vowel?  What’s a flashcard?)  The sounds that little ones can form in their mouths are distributed along a much less punctuated scale than the adult version.  They are like musicians without a home country.  They can be fluent in the Western tonality made up of flats and sharps (so-called half-tones).  And they can jump straight to a Middle Eastern scale, intertwining new sounds between half-tones to create quarter-tones.  But kids never worry about what half-tones or quarter-tones might be.

 

So let me illustrate how this anti-Mommy conspiracy has blossomed over the past year.  Take Laurelle’s first friend at school.  Her name is Clotilde.  Early in the school year, I suggested to Laurelle that we might invite Clotilde over for a playdate.

 

“It’s not Claw-TEELD, Mommy,” Laurelle told me strictly.  “It’s Clo-TILD.”

 

My baby began correcting me.

 

Things got worse.  One morning shortly thereafter, Laurelle was watching a morning episode of Dora la Exploratrice.  To be fair, to be juste, I wasn’t actually engaged the cartoon, just listening in.  Dora was outlining her journey in the day’s episode:  forêt, lac aux crocodiles, le grand buisson bleu.  Forest, crocodile lake, the big, blue – what?

 

“What’s le grand buisson bleu?”  I called to Laurelle.

 

Her voice was that of a teenager rolling her eyes.  “It’s the big, blue bush, Mommy.”

 

My baby began teaching me.

 

Recently when Laurelle and I walked toward our car after school one day, she said with some urgency, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”  Then again, “Key-ma-pel-AY?”

 

I hadn’t a clue what she meant.  The sounds mushed together, just like French had sounded to me at the very beginning – one, continuous sound stream devoid of discrete words.    

 

So I had to ask my daughter.  “What are you saying?”

 

She replied quite simply, “Who called me?” 

 

Of course.  Qui m’appelé?  Key-ma-pel-AY.  She had said it perfectly.

 

And thus, my baby began translating for me.  The mushy-peas-in-an-Eddie-Bauer-high-chair experience came slamming back into my face.  The conspiracy had come to fruition.  Father and daughter actually could enjoy their own, perfectly pronounced, Mommy-protected conversation.

 

It seems that Laurelle, my little Laurelle, has two language boxes in her brain.  It is true.  Granted, at times they do get confused.  A couple months ago I overheard her breathless explanation of the English board game Candyland to Anitou, our occasional, French sitter.  Laurelle taught the game to Anitou in French English.  That’s to say, in English with a French accent. 

 

Et voilà, she said.  If you get the card with the kahn-DEE….  Or else there’s the card with the ice CREEM…

 

Poor, sweet-souled Anitou.

 

There are times, too, when Laurelle amalgamates her languages.  “I want to explique you,” she tells me.  She wants to explain something to me.  (So here’s one good reason for me to continue French:  to translate, on occasion, my daughter.) 

 

Or she sometimes says, “I want to pleasure you.”  (Now where’d she pick up THAT phrase?)  Fortunately my own studies of the French verb plaisir (to please) have revealed that it’s more cumbersome for Anglos to use correctly.  I get what Laurelle is saying – and why she’s saying it that way.  The rest of it we can fix later.

 

But most of the time Laurelle’s two brain boxes remain segregated.  We drive to school in the morning chattering away in English.  I walk her to the building and up to her classroom door, arrange her coat and backpack on the allotted pegs – and do it all in English.  Laurelle then crosses the threshold of the classroom door, and she shifts brain boxes.  She greets her teacher with a perfect “bonjour” (often kissing her cheek as good French schoolchildren do) and then joins up with the nearest flock of girls (boys are bad – we’re at that age).  My baby shifts language gears like I do a car’s clutch – unconsciously, innately.

 

Genius, I think.  Pure genius.

 

So today, literally this morning, Laurelle attains language-learner nirvana.  Pierre and I bring Laurelle to our pilates class this morning; a low-grade fever keeps her out of school.  As we finish the last minutes of our workout, the next client arrives.  A pretty, forty-something blonde in sports gear, she stows her belongings and joins Laurelle on a small balcony that overlooks the pilates studio. 

 

I hear the two of them chatting as I finish my leg pumps.  The blonde woman is learning that Laurelle is four, that she is missing school today, that Dr Laurent is coming to dinner tonight and Kaiya coming for a tea party tomorrow, that her stuffed dolphin doudou comes from Marineland – and then Laurelle’s cross-examination begins.  Has she ever been to Marineland?  Does she know that there are orques (killer whales) at Marineland?  And that the dolphins do a show, too, but only in the afternoon?  Kind, patient woman.

 

As I reclaim my chatterbox, the woman reveals that she, too, has a little talker.  But yours, she wonders, which is her first language?  Is it French or English?

 

Ah, if only someone would ask such a question of me.  Just once.  Ce n’est pas juste.

Comments

[Sprachreisen England]

two language can be the first language of any person , but the mean & final is one if decide what actual is . . speaking . . all about learning skills . .