Chanterai, chanterais, aurais chanté?

The girls are having a bath, after a lovely sunny day that they spent playing in the garden.

They have their usual plastic boats and bowls to play with in the water. I start singing:

Maman les p'tits bateaux

Qui vont sur l'eau

Ont-ils des jambes?

Mais oui mon grand bêta

S'ils n'en avaient pas

Ils ne marcheraient pas

BK1 then comes up with her own version:

Maman les p'tits bateaux

Qui vont sur l'eau

Ont-ils des jambes?

Mais non mon grand bêta

S'ils en avaient

Ils tricheraient

And that, my friends, is how you learn le conditionnel présent!

Helwa ya baladi

Sitting on the window sill, looking out the window, la grisaille, la pluie battante, le froid, écoutant Dalida chanter:

املي دائما كان يا بلدي

اني ارجع ليك يا بلدي

و افضل دائما جنبك على طول

My hope has always been, my country

That I come back to you, my country

And always remain by your side, forever

et les larmes coulent d'elles-mêmes. The tears roll down, I can't help it.

Spring (or lack of) in Northern England

I feel silly. I feel a fool. I left of my own accord, I was eager to discover what lay out there, my destiny.

What's stopping me from going back? Nothing and everything. What's drawing me back? What's tying me to my country? Everything, primarily my parents; they spent their lives raising us. They are now left by themselves, facing old age without the daily joys that grandchildren bring. Guilt.

I am nostalgic, I guess as much as any 30 or 40 something parent. I long to replicate what made me happy when I was a child myself. The difference is my childhood memories are inextricably linked to the sun, the heat, the noise, the smells, the conversations, the white veils, the music. And none of it is here, neither in place nor in time. Double whammy.

When will I be content with my destiny, that of an exile? Probably never, according to Dalida, Enrico Macias, and Dahmane El Harrachi. It is a slight consolation that my feelings have been sung and shared for such a long time.

The thing is because I know where I come from, I feel I know who I am. What about my children? A question I did not ask myself when I fell for a foreigner in a third country, then moved to a fourth.

Now, I am acutely aware of these identity questions. My children are not; they are busy being children. Will they have trouble later figuring out who they are, not sure where they came from?

Whether I like it or not, the identity question is catching up with me, and will certainly creep up on the girls.

In the meantime, BK3 keeps pressing replay on Salma Ya Salama. A song by an Italian by blood, Egyptian by birth and French by adoption. Still Egypt, the place of her childhood, remained her bilad, to the end. I wonder how much of her troubles in adult life were linked to any feelings of being cut from a tree, uprooted...

It's not Them, it's You!

"With all those languages, aren't you afraid your children won't learn any language properly?"

Heard that before, haven't we?

The latest incarnation came from a French au-pair girl who works for our neighbours. She reported that often, our children wouldn't understand her.

Turns out she based that on the fact that they didn't answer her, giving her the impression she had not reached through.

In reality, they almost certainly did understand everything she said.

But they know that she is monolingual. They knew exactly what they wanted to say, and usually would have said it easily using their vintage Arabic-French mix with some English thrown in, but of course she wouldn't have understood them, and they knew it.

So instead, they decided to just not say anything. Easier.

In essence, the problem here is not that the Babelkids don't understand French. The problem is, in fact, that the au-pair doesn't understand Arabic.

Ha.

My Childhood TV

BabelDad was surprised to learn I watched Sesame Street when I was a child, in Arabic. I am sure every 30-something Algerian can still hum along the opening score of  "إفتح يا سمسم " (Open Sesame).

Ernie and Bert were of course Anis and Badr. Same stories, but in Classical Arabic.
Even though the girls are familiar with the German version, SesamStraße, they were not that impressed by the Arabic one.

Remember when you were a child, looking up a word in the dictionary, only to realise 10 minutes later you had forgotten what you were looking for? Same thing happens to me on Youtube. The memories flooded in.

While looking up episodes of Sesame Street, I stumbled upon
سنان (Sinan). It follows the adventures of Sinan, a  beaver who is well-endowed in the teeth department, and his animal friends, in the green forest.

This on the other hand caught the girls' attention big time. They have been snuggling on the sofa for the last two hours, watching episodes of Sinan on the ipad, in classical Arabic. BK1 says she understands a bit, while BK2 does not understand much. BK3 is just mesmerized by the screen, as usual.

I find it bizarre to understand a language that my daughters don't. What a funny feeling. It makes me more determined to redress the balance.

This is why we are about to shell out on a satellite dish and a decoder. Not to watch the latest blockbuster or football game, but to have a preschool  TV channel, in Arabic.

On Good Books and Difficult Translations

"We're Going on a Bear Hunt" by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury is on of my favourite books for the babelkids. (I might have mentioned it before.) All three of them like it and BK3 (now 2.5yo) wants to see and hear it pretty much every night currently.

We managed to get three versions of the book: English, French and German.

Now I fully get that translating is a difficult job. Especially for a book that comes with a rythm and all.

(Btw: BK3 has seen this video a couple of times a lot and demands that I do the same routine.)

So how do the French and German version fare? Honestly: sub-par.

The French translation tries to stay close to the text. That works in a sense, because if you know the original, you can read from the French version in English, i.e. translate on the fly. I'm sorry, but the French just doesn't work.

The German version, though, is absolutely abysmal. The translation is trying to stay closer to the pattern, but it does so in a stupidly funny way that I think really doesn't do the book any justice. At all. As in: do NOT buy that.

Yes, I do understand that translating is difficult. Maybe for some really good books it just shouldn't be done at all.

Nochmal auf Deutsch, weil es wichtig ist: Die Deutsche Version ist wirklich schlecht. Lieber die Englische kaufen und ein paar Wörter lernen.

Official: Daughters not really German

We had friends over from Germany this week end. We handn't seen them for years and it was great to spend time. They also have two kids who are a bit older than BK1 and BK2, respectively.

BK1 and the older boy were a perfect fit while the younger girl mostly wussed around BK3. Overall they were all playing together really well. Happy days.

At some point we had a discussion about language and it was the first time that someone clearly expresses that my girls do not speak proper German. Unfortunately they are right, too, especially when it comes to BK2. Her grammar is particularly English.

My theory is that because BK2 grew up listening to all the same sources as BK1, except that she also had BK1 to listen to, she was exposed to more English than BK1. Also, we had to share our time between BK1 and BK2, while BK1 was alone for 2.5 years and had our full attention and thus language.

I am not concerned, because BK2 is perfectly able to express herself in German. I am also sure she'll be able to pick it up properly in no time should she ever want or need to. I'm just a bit sad.

After our friends had disappeared, I asked BK1 whether she got used to speaking German in the three days. For my ears she had definitely improved. Her response, though, was: "it's still difficult".

*Sigh*

We'll see where this all goes.
 

Musings on Spoken and Written Arabic

I borrowed a couple of dual-language books from our library, in Arabic/English and French/English.

So, at bedtime, BK2 and BK1 asked me to read them التيوس الثلاثة الاخوة جروف , better known as The Three Billy Goats Gruff. 

The girls already know the story in English and French. While I was reading the Arabic version, they kept asking what words and sentences meant, particularly BK2. I found myself translating into colloquial Arabic as I went along.

After a while, BK1 asked:
"Is this book written in Qbailia? (Berber language common in Algeria)"
Me: "No! It's Arabic, can you not tell?"
BK1: "Yes, but why is it different from the Arabic we speak?"
Me:  "I agree, it sounds similar yet different. This is classical Arabic, whereas we speak Algerian Arabic, a colloquial form of the first".

At one point, I read طار في الهواء (tara fil hawaa) and I remarked: "Surely you understand this? We say the same thing: طار فلهوى (tar flahwa)" only to be met with a quizzical look: it's totally different!
Thinking about it, it's akin to similarities and differences between English and German (earth vs Erde) or between French and Spanish (terre vs terra). Being able to map words from one idiom to another does not necessarily mean understanding and mastering both languages.

BK1 reads French and German quite fluently, with no effort from our part other than providing her with books that elicit her interest.
It turns out that achieving literacy in Arabic is going to require quite a lot of input from me. The alphabet is the easy bit. Because of the pronounced differences between the Arabic we speak at home and classical Arabic, it is like learning a whole new language almost from scratch...

ps: BK2 is turning 5 this month, and BK1 will be 8 next month.