The one downside to Harry Potter is that my vocabulary is getting very deep in magical terminology, but I'll take what I can get.
Chris is reading his favorite mysteries in French (continuing his binge of Ruth Rendell novels) and they're having the same effect. Today he was able to explain to our class that porter atteinte means to put a black mark on someone's reputation, something he had figured out from the current Rendell book. I gnashed my teeth like Hermione Granger at being shown up so dreadfully, but was secretly impressed.
There's general agreement that it takes children about six months to get a language when they're immersed in it -- they can do it so quickly because they absorb the structures of the new language instead of learning it by thinking it through and translating, the way adults do. The first indication of this was that after about six weeks here, the children started using double negatives in English for the first time. "I don't want none of that," Julian would say, and Nellie would add, "I don't never want any!" We were a little choqué. But all they were doing was imitating the French structure of negatives, which requires two words to complete, such as "Je n'en veux pas!" (I don't want any) or "Je n'en veux jamais!" (I don't ever want any).
Nellie went through a phase of saying French words and phrases out loud, randomly, with no particular meaning intended. So she'd walk through the living room and say, "C'est interdit!" but not because she was telling us something is forbidden -- she was only practicing making the sounds, getting the connection made between her ear and her mouth. Now she's begun speaking in French sentences, can understand Astérix if I read it aloud, and is reading short, easy-reader type books in French herself.
Needless to say, she is very pleased that for once, the youngest person in the family has the advantage.
Julian has always disliked any kind of learning curve. When he does something, he wants it to be correct the first time. At home, when he forgets to say he doesn't understand, he understands nearly all the French Chris and I are capable of speaking. At school, my spies tell me he has begun saying words and phrases in French -- but to us he denies all.
Nellie and I have begun an ongoing debate over pronunciation -- she corrects mine all the time, because she is learning with the accent of the Southwest, which often stresses the last syllable like Italian does. The effect has carried over into her English, so she says things like, "Stop-pah! I'm coming-ah!"I wish I knew what the accent equivalents would be in the US...when she speaks in Paris, will it be the same as someone from Mississippi going to New York City?
I find all of it -- the accents, the weird way our brains accumulate vocabulary (or not), the way sometimes it feels like jumping into a canoe and whooshing effortlessly downstream on the river of French, and on other days, inexplicably, I'm unable to find words in any language -- all of it is deeply interesting and entertaining to me. Even though I'm finding the experience not simple to describe.
