The five year old, I think I’ve mentioned, is in a French immersion program at school. The teacher does not speak English to the children at all, and all the signage, and lessons, and what not are in French. Their specials are in English, but otherwise it’s full immersion. It’s been really interesting to see what bits of language he comes home with. They have learned numbers and and letters and colours. “Red” is “rouge”, as it should be, but “blue” is … “blue”, the difference between “blue” and “bleu” subtle enough not to register with him, especially when spoken. Interesting too, is when he comes home and asks me what certain phrases mean. Of course, to him, they are not separate words, but just a long string of syllables.
“What is ‘luvaylama’?” he asked me the other day.
“I’m not quite sure,” I say. And I ask him to say it more slowly. After several times, I finally get it: “Levez la main.” Raise your hand. I’m not a linguistic researcher, but I do find it fascinating that our brains must at some point learn to break down strings of syllables into separate components. When the baby was younger, I enrolled her in all sorts of language studies at the University, and one of them centered around when children started to differentiate forms of speech. They would play videos of various nonsense syllables and at some point, apparently, kids, even though they don’t know what a word specifically means, will recognize if something is an action word or a “thing” word.
And then there is the wonder of seeing how the five year old’s brain comes to understand things based on context.
Last week, he asks me, “Does ‘Pas maintenent’ mean ‘I don’t want to answer that question?'”
“Pas maintenant“, literally means “not now“, but in a way, the five year old’s understanding, if not literally correct, probably captured the spirit of the way he heard it. And in his interpretation, I could suddenly see clearly how the teacher might have used that phrase – I could picture her trying to get twenty-five kindergarteners to line up for lunch and one child trying doggedly to ask something, and the teacher telling that child, “Pas maintenant!”
Seeing the little guy grapple with language and puzzle it out in his brain really hits home the idea that language doesn’t operate in a vacuum.
Switching gears – Four Haikus for Thursday:
Chaotic morning
Multitasking results in
Scraping off burnt toast.
The hours are long
from 4pm til lights out,
Interminable.
This sick day, restful.
The invalid now restless
Clearly recovered.
The view was lovely
And briefly seen. Shivering.
Should have worn more clothes.
Love the haikus – and what interesting observations about language. There has been a lot of discussion in blogging this month about language (idioms, fluency etc). I think it’s wonderful when people can speak more than one language. What an advantage that is – and one of my biggest regrets in life is not doing more work on my French skills. It’s not a priority for me now, but I think I would like to invest some time down the road to honing my abilities.
I also think people who speak two languages are really cool. There is a director i work with who speaks, French, Italian, German, and Russian – certainly very helpful when we work with international singers! I speak a little bit of Mandarin, and I have mixed feelings on it – I would love to be fluent like a lot of my cousins, but they went to weekend language school when they were younger and often went back to Taiwan, and we didn’t really have that option when I was growing up. Right now I’m trying to work on reading – I feel like my Mandarin would be okay to get around with in Taiwan, but it would be nice to be able to read it too.