Food, Culture, French!

The food alone in France has its own glossary of words, never mind music, festivals and nature. What is left for you to discover in this great world?

You have within you, possibilities yet unexplored. The languages you do not speak have a power to express parts of you in ways you have yet to discover. Look at French, for example and the expression; "Bon appetit." You have had the pleasure of chopping, sautéing, seasoning, mixing and baking for hours to prepare a magnificent small feast you are proud of. If only there was more to be said than; "Dig in!" The French have a way of appreciating fine cuisine that is not better, but perhaps more refined than what exists in English. Food is culture, tradition and made and served with love, not with a splat to the plastic plate. The produce has been lovingly picked out and maybe haggled over. A baguette is agreed upon according to degree of baking; "not too done", "nice and brown", or "just so." The wine is chosen according to the course, one's palette and what happens to be in the cellar this month, but always with care. The only possible phrase to celebrate a meal of this caliber must be; "bon appetit!"

Discover "le mot juste" to communicate what you want to say, what you must say, in French. The words are waiting, the adventure as well.

I will be sharing more on language learning, France and French this month. Stay tuned. 

Feathers of Frost and a Polar Vortex Kind of Day: Survival Guide and Celebration

                     The Coldest Day of the Year is Here

I went to bed anticipating exactly the sort of day I awoke to, fabulous works of art on my windows, painted in the night by Jack Frost; to the north we have a delightful new feather pattern I have never seen before covering the entire outer windowpane, the inner one left with merely a fancy slope of icing along the bottom edge, just to let me know this is serious stuff. To the west there is a beautiful decor of tiny star bursts dotting the entire field of vision, more thickly bunched to each side. 

Nothing gives me more of a cozy thrill than a day at home when the temperature will not reach 0 degrees. To the poor people who miss this each year when they flee south for three months...my heart goes out to you. 

"It's just not as cold as it used to be," can be heard around here, here being deep in the Midwest. Well, today it is, and we seem to be down to about one week of this each year now, which is just sufficient to put one in the right frame of mind for looking forward to the springtime again. I love these days, and this one is even better, because there is no reason for me to go back out in it. 

How cold is it? Well, let's see...I have been traveling around the state for work since Sunday. Sunday felt cold, but it was 16 degrees F., I believe. Saturday's snow dump had just barely been cleared away as I was departing. An hour before, on the road conditions website, parts of the highway were still marked "covered by snow and/or ice" and "towing not advised per state mandate." My red nose and cheeks can be seen in a quick video I shot to show the pretty, white Iowa landscape. I had been out of the car for all of 30 seconds and I looked like a 17th-century washerwoman at the end of a long week. 

If French is Your New Year Thing to Do

Relax, pour yourself something nice; green tea, fizzy water or a sparkling glass of champagne to celebrate this new chapter in your life. You have waited a long time to conquer this task of French language fluency.

You are about to invite a language, a culture or more than one; (Canada, Africa, France, exotic islands...like Tahiti) and all of the insight, joy, food and love that goes with it, right into your own home. Chouette!

I will be right here by your side, Thierry too, as you renew with the French speaker who lingers within you. Over the course of four weeks, in just 10 minutes a day, your ear will be adapting, remembering that long-ago French once learned, and you will speak, exchange, grow.

Let us look at just what enables one to incorporate another language into mind and ears, and back out of the vocal cords.

This has been ruminating about for some time; since I was 19 and noticed that many of the exchange students went back home after a year abroad fluent in French, yet others were still woefully inadequate as speakers of anything other than their native tongue. Why? I had no special skills or gifts in learning, I was certainly not the kid who finished my year with no accent. I did, however, end the year fluent in French. Were we not all immersed and thus in the most favorable conditions for acquiring a new language? It was not the old disadvantage of age; we were all between 16 and 19 that year. In the following years, patterns would emerge, some involved method, some the company one kept.

I went on to teach English to the Spanish and later to the French, then French to Americans. The running joke between my students and myself was;

"How did you learn French so well?"

"I live with my teacher. Don't suppose your partner would object to you moving out for six months, would they? Get a local fellow/gal."

Right, how about we go back to that bit of French we were working on again?

The idea of learning with a partner stuck with me, and grew into a plan to make it easy to do. Speak each day with the one you're with? Oui. Sure, you can wake up and say; "Let's speak in French today," and: good for you, if you do. But having a method: a meaningful dialog in the form of a script makes it easy to implement. I wrote one especially for last year, for the Great Staying Home for two adults to share; at home, across the world via video, anywhere; French at Home; A Conversation. More followed; French a Debut for beginners, French Abroad for travel and French with Kids, for the whole family.

As to method, when I first started teaching, I began in a strictly prescribed trio of lesson plus workbook plus group exercise used by the language schools of the 90's. True, that worked sometimes for some students. What worked every time, though, was a student interested in learning, engaged in their own progress and conversations on topics relevant to their life.

A friend of mine hit on the prime impetus for language and for the dialogs we use today; "a statement should elicit a response. If you ask your beloved; "do you have the keys?" The response will be spoken, "Of course I do/I have no idea where they are" or physical; holds up key chain and shakes keys. You both see a direct correlation between what is being said and the answer; spoken or acted upon. In other words, use language for communication.Talk to someone you like, or maybe love.

News! Book to be Published Soon

It seems the most precious things are also the most fragile and closest to our hearts, so we protect them and keep them hidden away. What have you not told the world? What do you think you don't know about anyone else that might be absolutely phenomenal? Why are we keeping all of these mysteries and closeted skeletons which are truly harmful to none?

 

Mine is the book. 

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of a Foreign Language

If you grew up with the feeling that you ought to be beguiling princes of foreign lands in their own tongue, climbing mountains while conversing in Tibetan or German, or weaving with the sisters of an island encircled by sky-blue water while speaking fluent Greek, you will connect with this feeling. We make the daunting, vast world smaller and more real by speaking each other's languages. Language is the last frontier we get to conquer. Desire for connection is a basic human value, and even anglophones feel its lack at times. 

 

When Love Meets Art: Lana March Interview on French Please

I just spent the day with an extraordinary human. I feel more likely to be loving, to appreciate beauty, to honor the true in each person in my life, to explore art in new ways, listen to more music and...to work on my French grammar. 

This is a feat, and I want you to have the opportunity to hear her in the interview we just completed as well; Lana March, poet, artist, photographer who has chosen the light in all aspects of her life. The podcast will be out this week. Bring some joy to your day, your life, and listen in. 

PODCAST Creation...French Please!

Introducing...French Please, the Podcast! 

Find my favorite episode here: Lost Found and How do I Say That Again?

Is French in your dream curriculum this year? As homeschoolers? As a couple? We made something for you! How better to share this language I love than through the spoken word? 

Language Learning and FRENCH

Since the very first time I heard someone speak in Spanish, I was probably six or seven, and it was on a train in Chicago, all three of these events being rare enough occurrences that it has stuck with me. I was enthralled. I only think it was Spanish because I had heard it on Sesame Street. I have no memory of the people who were speaking nor of where my family might have been headed on a train in Chicago (a zoo, a museum, a ball game?), but the exotic sound of the words rolled off in another language stayed with me, as did the tiny knot of passion for languages that would later unfurl into linguistic enamor, joy and becoming bilingual.

Another language is another opportunity to connect, another set of eyes that open upon the world. It can be a pathway to another destiny; travel, sure, but scholarships and employment offers also present themselves, attracted to the fact that most Americans do not have that toolset in their backpacks or purses. 

The first of such bits of luck presented themselves in the humble form of Pig Latin in Mrs. Miller's 6th grade classroom. I was in a reading group in the back, and I was supposed to be reading Chapter 2 of our assignment. As I perused the boringest reading selection in the world, my ears caught the lesson of how to form words in Pig Latin; "remove the first consonants, put them at the end of the word and add a long "a". If the first letter is a vowel, add the sound "way". " An avid fan of Trixie Belden and secret codes, I wrote it down and listened intently to their practice session. I went straight home and taught it to my little sister. We suddenly had a language all our own that we could use in front of our brothers and say whatever we wanted to say. Then we discovered that our parents did not understand it either when we spoke in our rapid other language. Sweet victory.

I was heart-broken when I was not allowed to join the after-school French classes offered by Madame Kopp in 7th grade. It was not in our family's budget. However, as soon as class selection rolled around for high school, I was dying to get in. Would it be German, for my heritage, French for the romance or Spanish like everyone else? I really hated doing things like everyone else, so I told my great-grandma that I had decided to take German. Her name, after all, was Kleinschmidt, with a maiden name of Schwartz. I thought she would be thrilled and that maybe she would have some remnants of German and we could discuss life in our own language, during the commercials while watching game shows. NO DICE! Twerpie, as we called my great-granny, said that if it were her, she would take French. 'But why?' I had to inquire. She had always dreamed of visiting Switzerland, and French was the language to speak when one visits that part of the world. 'The lakes are beautiful and there are mountains on the lakes,' said Twerpie. I adored my great-grandmother as no one else on this earth, so I took French. 

In college, I would go on to major first in Spanish, and then in French. Along the way, I took three years of Chinese, one each of Italian, German and Basque. I had a Latin class taught in Spanish, not to learn Latin, but to study the roots of Spanish. Latin had to be self-taught, which did not turn out to be the best way for me to learn a language. My children and I learned together, me always just a few lessons ahead of them. 

The past 23 years, I have dedicated myself to raising my children in a bilingual environment with the goal of fluency in both languages, and the acquisition of one or more others. I have done everything in my power to make this a natural and joyful part of life, helped along by many small things. During what the French have aptly named "confinement" or "Corona times" while sheltering at home, I turned my French skills from the closed courtrooms where I was not working, toward developing a way to share French with others who might want to take the leap. More on the programs and a new website: free lesson here dedicated to "foreign" languages to come. Although, in passing, they are only foreign until the moment you have not begun to discover how to say "Have a marvelous day," in French: Je vous souhaite une journée merveilleuse!