(Hard to photograph this, but see the colombage on the top half of the building? In Bergerac.)One of the best moments in France so far was last week, when Nellie invited a French girl over to play, the bespectacled gangly Pauline, and the two of them were in her room playing with stuffed animals and Playmobil, chattering away in French. I was eavesdropping from my room, and honestly could not tell which voice was which. As far as learning the language goes, the seven year old has the rest of us beat by a mile.
Chris and I have been reading French books and French newspapers. We try, with varying success, to speak mostly French to each other and the children. But even after seven months, we are unable to follow a conversation in which French people are talking to each other, which is kind of depressing.
A few days ago, Nellie and I snuggled in to watch Astérix Chez Les Bretons, in which our heroes go to England to help an English cousin. One of the best parts of the movie is that the English characters speak French with a hilarious English accent. I was chuckling away until Nellie asked me to translate what they were saying, and I saw that we had opposite problems -- she could understand the French fine, but the English-accented French threw her. For me, the opposite.
I realized that all the reading has been improving my French quite a lot, and that the thing I am lacking is not grammar, or vocabulary, or even idioms -- it's rhythm and intonation. The English-accented French in Astérix is funny partly because the words are pronounced wrong, but also because the flow of the sentences is utterly non-French. And to my ear, the words become comprehensible because the English rhythm is familiar.
So instead of spending this rainy morning reading more Harry Potter et La Coupe de Feu, I'm going to go watch TV instead, even though I resist it because it is so much more difficult. And Julian? He falls somewhere between Nellie and the tone-deaf adults. His accent is better than ours, his comprehension is much better, but we don't get to hear him speak much. I hope before we leave I'll have a chance to eavesdrop on him too.
