Franco-German Cooperation Illustrated

After a week of being pampered by our German auntie, we are now back to me shouting at everyone to pick their clothes up and eat at the table. Remember, I am still hobbling on crutches and unable to use our uber-heavy Dyson.

This week has been an intense German immersion for the girls and me.
At bedtime, two hours after the beloved auntie's departure, BK1 was choosing a book to read. Now you would expect her to pick a book in English or German, particularly after the intense exposure to German.

She chose "La Soupe au Caillou" by Michel Hindenoch.

It must have been a couple of years since I last read this book to the girls. As she is conscious of her higher reading ability in English, BK1 usually dislikes reading aloud in French or German.
Yesterday though, she spontaneously chose to read in French, aloud.

I think this illustrates that consolidating a minority language has a positive impact on the other minority languages, don't you think?

In advance, apologies for BK3's energetic and noisy antics!

Want your child to learn French? Hire a mature German nanny

BabelDad's German auntie has been visiting for a week. She has been taking care of me and the children, while my sprained ankle gets better.

Our neighbour's son G is 9. His dad is French and his mum is British. G does not speak French. He understands very few words.

He came to play after school today. The auntie offered him some grapes. He replied: "Non merci".
His brain automatically switched to French when faced with someone who did not speak English. How cool is that?

Jubilee, Home and Nostalgia

Today is one of those days. Feeling down and sad, for no particular reason. I miss my parents, I miss home.

We went to the library this morning, in search of inspiration for BK1's poetry "assignment". In the wake of her Mysterios Poem, her teacher has asked her to write a poem on the Queen's Jubilee, and send it to the Queen. Hardly inspirational, less than Roald Dahl in any case...

Anyway, here we are in the library. A mum is telling her friend she is invited to a wedding this evening.
When was the last time I attended a wedding? My neighbour's in Algeria, two years ago.

A realisation dawns on me: My children will probably never take part in adult celebrations in the UK. We have no family here; the only celebrations we get invited to are children's birthdays.

I have vivid memories of weddings, circumcision parties, diploma celebrations and the like in my childhood: games, lamb couscous, baklava and qnidlat, traditional costumes and dresses, gold and silver jewellery, music and zerna, dancing, family crises, gossip, cousins, friendships...

My daughters are missing out on this part of culture, because neither of BabelDad nor me are home.

I wonder how this will impact on their perceptions of fun and sense of belonging somewhere. Where will home be for them?

What if? Part 2- Living in France

We never intended to stay in Britain. We never intended for our girls to be born in England, and become English.

We left southern France on a rainy February morning, as if to prepare us for the gloomy weather in Northern England.
When we packed our car that morning, we were convinced we would be back in two years time.

Here we are, eight years later, still in England, with three children, new friends and a new house. Une nouvelle vie, quoi.

Currently, the girls speak Arabic, French, German and English with varying degrees of fluency.

How would have our linguistic situation differed had we been able to stay in France?

To start with, there would obviously have been no English, whatsoever.
Even though we lived in a highly international area, with some stubbornyl-refusing-to-learn-French British expats, French would have been the majority language.

BabelDad and me speaking French at home would have meant the double presence of French inside and outside the home. This would have ruled out MLAH.









Knowing BabelDad, he would have stuck to OPOL. The girls would probably have had some proficiency in German, albeit less than what they currently exhibit.

As for Arabic, I believe that the girls' proficiency would have been pretty low. The reasons, as I see them, are two-fold.

First, I would have greatly struggled to do OPOL. As a virtually-native French speaker myself, I would have had to rigidly speak Arabic with the exclusion of any French. Mission: Impossible.



Second, Arabic in France is un-glamorous, to say the least.  Arabic is associated with a civilisation that "has less value than France's, a civilisation that enslaves women, disrespects individual and political liberties and allows tyranny".

It would have been difficult to normalise the use of Arabic outside the home in this climate.

I can easily imagine how desperate-to-blend-in children would not want to use a language with such a negative stigma attached to it.

The mysterios poem

higher and higher and higher they flew.
bigger and bigger and bigger the bomb grew.
over the sea and over the hills,
calling their teddys teddy sills.
The centipede said "I want food"
but the others said he was very rude.

The people in the city stared,
and the president of the city glared.
He sent his army to fight,
but they had to do it with all their might.

meanwhile on the bomb they all looked to the floor,
but then they heard a terifing roar.
It sounded like a dragon
roaring and being dragged into a wagon.

Just then came a plane,
which was called a super Jane.
She cut through the seagull string
and sent them tumbling through the wind.

when they actually reached the floor,
they could still hear the terifying roar.

It was the dragon who wanted to be their freind.








ps: BK1, aged 7, wrote this poem at home over two days. She had just finished reading  James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. She said of Roald Dahl: "Yekteb exciting, ma usich bezzef wow words, just a few". (he writes in an exciting way, he does not use many wow words, just a few).
Later on she said writing a rhyming poem had been hard work, next time she will write a non-rhyming one.

This multilingual thing...*

I am struggling to cope with the amount of English that is pouring out of BK2. She now even, sometimes, talks to me in 100% English sentences. Earlier,  she went: "You forgot to do your hood zip". It felt as if my child was  talking to someone else...

She usually, at least, uses Arabic syntax. Not this time. I had to ask her to say it again in our language, to which she replied she does not know how. So, I had to help her figure out the words, before I repeated the complete sentence in Arabic/French.

Later, BK2 saw a bird in the garden:
BK2: "Hawlik a robin" (there's a robin)
Me: "Un rouge-gorge" (lit. a red-throat, robin in French)
BK2, seriously: "Non, un orange-gorge" (No, an orange-throat)

This multilingual thing can be really hard, challenging and frustrating at times.
And so rewarding.

* The title of this post was inspired by Fiona from Living in the Land of Chocolate ;-)

Spring (or not) in t'north

I am sat in the living room, looking out into our lovely garden, even Michael Rosen commented on how beautiful it is, and ... chuck chuck chuck, hailstone. This must be the fifth time in ten days. Why, oh why can spring not simply be warm and sunny? Granted, the people are nice in the north of england, but my, the weather is absolutely awful!

I have been blessed to have spent  most of my life in two of the sunniest places in the world. I do wonder what evil I committed in my past to now be punished, by not seeing natural light for three consecutive weeks, in the middle of spring!

April 2011

April 2012