Franglais

My biggest surprises on this trip have been how bad my French is and how little Cooper is learning. 

I thought I had a good grasp of French after studying it all of those years (I should not admit this, but I minored in Foreign Languages at UM). Putting it all together on the fly is challenging. I change tenses all of the time when I speak and I get so confused! And the worst offender— passé compose with etre— still screws me up! And I was convinced it was intuitive! Nothing French is intuitive!!!! This language is friggin HARD!

When I need to do something important, I try to use email or write it out in advance because my written grammar is so much better than conversational. And the French do not speak French very well! At least down here- good lord— much of it is jumbled and they have a lazy accent. I know — that is terrible to say. I met a girl at yoga who said her French is much better than her Brit husband’s, but he mangles it all together and speaks very fast, so everyone says his is better than hers. It maddens her! Oui is “wai” and je suis is “zjwe” and they use “on” as a subject for everything! Who knew? I’ve barely scraped the tip of the lingua iceberg! 

I am so surprised that my youngest isn’t picking it up like I thought. Maybe it’s all sinking in and it’ll come out later. Everyone said the youngest pick it up the quickest, but so far… rien. And yet— he. understands. everything! Will not speak it.

Samuel has gotten so used to people here speaking English to him that he’s started speaking English to people first instead of French, which is considered incredibly rude. When we first got here, he would address everyone in French- very confidently and very LOUDLY. Now, he’s especially bad in touristy areas because he correctly assumes that everyone is from somewhere else. Nevertheless, I keep reminding him that he needs to speak French.

Bennett would never try to speak French in the US, but now he is a natural. He knows a million words and it’s so charming to hear him put them all together. Although, as Samuel likes to pick on him, he puts things together as you would in English, which is quite amusing to us. But his vocab is correct. He has made a lot of progress; I’m going to have to figure out some way for him to keep it up at home.

Together, we speak English during homeschool and then in the afternoons, we tend to speak Franglish, especially out in town. The week the boys were in French language school, everyone’s French improved. Yesterday at the park a woman was sitting on the bench with us and then she got up and left. I assumed she was leaving the park, but I think she was just getting away from our bad French!

Alors, tomorrow is our last full day of homeschool and I told Samuel that he will work on essential Italian phrases instead of French— that should keep him busy. There were a lot of Italians at the language school the week we were there and I have to say, with all of the cultural sensitivity in my heart, those people were crazy! We are going to fit in beautifully in Italy. And we’ll be tourists, so if we don’t speak the language, it won’t be a problem! But we are going to have a blast trying. Andiamo!

Our trip map, for review purposes (and in case you've lost us already!).
 Taylor arrives in two days, then off to Italy!
More on our itinerary in my post "Short Map from Crazy," February 15.