LINES IN THE SAND, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I recently spent a ten-day vacation with Susan’s family in Maine. It was my first time seeing the Sius since 2009, so it was a welcome chance to catch up and spend quality time together. Spending all that time with three children under the age of five was a fantastic opportunity for me to prepare for the arrival of my own first child later this summer.

Naturally, I had been tracking the younger Sius’ progress in French since I last saw them, occasionally mailing a short note in French to Sebastian to add a little encouragement. Before arriving, Susan and I discussed the possibility of my speaking with them exclusively in French during my visit. I was curious as to how that might go down, especially given that Sebastian already knew from previous visits that my native language was English, and that I would no doubt be speaking English to their father in front of them.

We did not get off to the start I had envisioned. When I pulled into the Sius’ driveway, Sebastian and Serena were hanging out their upstairs bedroom window. They were the first to speak, in English, describing the antics of a cat that had just left their garden. My kneejerk reaction was to respond in English.

I tried to salvage the situation when I walked into the house, asking Sebastian in French how he was. He wasted no time in drawing a line in the sand: “I don’t understand French—only English!” Susan assured me that his comprehension was excellent, but that he had lately been more resistant to communicating in that language, possibly because many of his classmates did not speak French and he did not think it cool to be different.

He seemed pretty stubborn, so I didn’t insist, but soon I came to understand that his line in the sand was not quite as firm as I had initially believed.

Anyone who reads Susan’s posts knows that her house is overflowing with wonderful children’s books. I adore reading to children and rarely get to do so, so every time one of the three walked or toddled over to the couch with a book—and this happened many times a day—I obliged without hesitation. To my great surprise, but not Susan’s, about half of the selections that Sebastian brought over to the couch were in French, and he wanted to hear them again and again!

I gradually began to get a sense of Sebastian’s true level of understanding, which made me hesitate less and less about addressing him in French for short spans throughout the day. He sometimes pulled his trick of faking incomprehension (generally showing he had understood perfectly), and sometimes indicated that he understood but preferred to respond in English. Sometimes my efforts were even rewarded with a bit of French production.

One day he brought me a French chapter book. Susan said she was surprised, as the book was clearly too advanced for him and he had not spontaneously chosen it before, but suggested that I go ahead. Worried that not knowing what was going on would make him lose interest, I would add the occasional gloss in English. I later learned from Susan that she generally didn’t bother to do that, even if they did not understand everything. This made perfect sense to me at one level, as it matched the philosophy of our shared French immersion schooling background. However, I was finding it surprisingly hard to implement in practice.

Then a new experience changed that for me. On and off, I have been teaching myself basic Spanish. Susan’s Spanish is more advanced than mine, and among her children’s books are several selections in that language. She loaned me an illustrated story collection that she herself had been using to practise, so that I could keep up my own learning.

One day while I was reading it to myself, Serena crawled up on my lap and asked to hear it. I obliged. The nice thing about Spanish pronunciation is that once you figure out the basics, you can read anything out loud accurately, whether you yourself understand it or not. There were plenty of verbs and nouns with which I was not familiar, but the context and the illustrations helped me piece together enough of the story to keep it interesting.

Suddenly I was hearing the story in Spanish much as Sebastian might have been hearing that other story in French. It really clicked that full comprehension was not necessary for a good listening experience. Serena must have been following even less than I was, yet she seemed to take equal pleasure from the flow of the words. In fact, the experience may even have been heightened; because I was not sure exactly what I was saying all the time, I compensated by putting more expression than usual into my reading, making the flow almost musical. As a bonus, we were both learning bits and pieces of the language along the way.

Although I drove to Maine hoping the children might learn from me, I drove back to Montreal ten days later understanding that I had learned from them. (I hear parenting is often like that.) My own son-to-be will pick up French and English easily, as his father will speak to him in the former and I in the latter, but this experience has given me hope that I will be able to pass on some of my limited Dutch as well, despite the Dutch family being far away. Even if he pretends to resist from time to time, now I know for sure he’ll be listening… 

Learning Languages Through Translations

Reading through Harry Potter E La Camera Dei Segreti (Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone) gave me enough vocabulary to skip the first two semesters of Italian at Penn State and ace the intermediate-level course when I was a college student.  Similarly, Harry Potter Y El Prisionero de Azkaban replaced my first two semesters of college Spanish.


I should qualify that a bit--I speak French fluently, which makes other Romance languages relatively easy for me, and I'd had a few after-school Spanish tutoring sessions as an elementary-school student and listened to my parents' set of Italian-language records sometime during middle school or high school--but the principle holds true: reading English literature in translation and and classics in other languages that one has first read in English translation can be a cheap, enjoyable, and effective immersion experience.  It won't make you a fluent speaker of a language by itself, but it will expand your vocabulary and give you a feel for the grammar quickly and painlessly.


This obviously works best for languages that are related to English (or to whatever other languages you can speak or read).  With other languages a lot of tedious dictionary work will be needed, and that will be off-putting to all but the most patient and motivated language learners.


I also use literature in translation to help my children learn French and Spanish.  Many popular English-language picture books have been translated into these languages, and kids often find it easier to pick up vocabulary from a book whose story they already know than from an unfamiliar book.  My three-and-a-half year-old son will often bring me two versions of a story at bedtime and ask me to read them back-to-back.  Some even come with a CD, which may be particularly helpful to parents who don't know the target language or don't pronounce it well.


For very young children or those just beginning to learn a language, I recommend translations of Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrated by Clement Hurd) and Bill Martin Jr.'s books Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? (illustrated by Eric Carle).  Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar is available in French in many public libraries' foreign-language collections, although so far I haven't found a translation that I like; they tend to make the text long and awkward, destroying the charming simplicity of the original.


For somewhat older children, favorites include Ludwig Bemelmans's Madeline books (as good in French as in the original English) and Jean de Brunhoff's Babar stories (which were originally written in French and contain some more or less offensive references to French colonialism and scenes that may be frightening to some children--use with caution), and the original Curious George books by H. A. & Margret Rey.


My son particularly enjoyed Deborah Guarino's more recent book Is Your Mama a Llama (illustrated by Steven Kellogg) in a Spanish translation by Aida E. Marcuse; our library copy also came with a delightfully-narrated audio tape, which Sebastian listened to at bedtime and in the car for several weeks before we had to return it.


There are many other children's classics and recent bestsellers available in French, Spanish, and other languages.  There are also what I call "corporate" books that are terrible as literature but may be useful for the purpose of learning a new language; these include English and Spanish versions of the Dora the Explorer books, based on the wildly-popular TV show of the same name.


Teenagers and other more advanced students may enjoy reading The Adventures of Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi's original Italian, and the truly ambitious fantasy fan may even want to tackle J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books in Russian or in his/her choice of dozens of other languages.