I have probably mentioned that I'm the only person in my immediate family who doesn't speak French fairly fluently - my stepfather is French, and my mother and brother can both hold their own. I can read simple things like magazines and Agatha Christie novels (don't laugh), and I can understand much of the dialogue in French movies, but I certainly don't ever try to speak.
Sod's law, then, that two weeks ago a little French boy turned up at school. Mum is here on a student visa, and speaks passable English. I don't know about Dad. M, who is six, could count 1-10 in English and that's all. It's my job to teach him.
The lovely thing is that he is just dying to learn. He regards me as his own personal dictionary and likes to rapid fire French words at me to get the English equivalent. It is amazing how much vocab - verbs even - I am managing to trawl up, decades since I last studied French. Of course, I'm not sure being able to discuss dinosaurs, crocodiles and pirate hats will be particularly useful to me in the future ...
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2 comments:
What fun to watch the language acquisition in a motivated child, and you get to refresh your own French while you're at it!
and btw, I would NEVER laugh at the idea of reading Agatha Christie. When I'm retired, I think I'd like to browse through again to see what they're like, decades after I first read them.
I re-read an Agatha Christie novel a few years ago, and she was right about her own work. Her prose was nothing special; but her plots were fiendish!
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