Language Differentiation by Subject Matter

"Quick! Look at the pony!" - "C'etait pas 'a pony'. C'etait ослик."

I don't think anybody can tell me why most animals speak Russian in my son's world. Or why his dreams about the future are all in English. Or why the naughty words are all in French. The truth is, it is only natural that your multilingual genius will adopt a certain strategy when dividing up his world into logical language areas. Sometimes, it will end up in a Mommy-English, Daddy-Spanish, Gran-French system, whilst at other times it will all be about Bathtime-English, Playtime-French etc. It all depends on the child's individual circumstances and their perception of the world and the relative importance they allocate to certain matters in certain situations.

The Parent-Child War Tactics: You Choose

Attention please! All those parents who think their children will preserve their baby-like state and behaviour forever - beware! Those little cheeky monkeys are picking up on everything we use in our social interactions. Every single one of those tools and tricks: the undertones, sarcasm, double-meaning - the lot!

Just this morning, having gobbled up a breakfast worthy of a XVth century Scotsman, Clément sweetly asked for his "dessert" on top of that: "Mummy, you choose: the other sweets or not the other ones." And I said to myself, this is exactly the tactics I use when trying to persuade him to eat his veggies: giving him a choice, but that containing solely the options I approve of. How on earth does a 4-year-old process this in his tiny head?! Even General Suvorov would have been inspired by such effortless strategising and plotting.

The Beauty of Bureaucracy

I am trying to explain to my naughty 4-year-old that it is just possible that we may not after all be able to go celebrate Halloween in England. All this is owing to a bureaucratic error at a National ID Card Printing Center somewhere near Paris, where they erroneously popped an African lady's face onto my brand new ID whilst the afore-mentioned African lady received my face on her card.

 

All the 4year-old can comprehend is that mommy needs a new picture. "But.. Why?"

 

The beauty of bureaucracy - that larger-than-life machine that in this highly digital age is incapable of undoing what has been done digitally, thus providing us with real life scenarios that are so highly unbelievable that one tends to believe that they were all made up by someone living somewhere near Hollywood, LA, USA.

 

"Trick or Treat?" 

Hide and Seek

According to his French nanny, whilst playing hide-and-seek yesterday, the infamous 4 year old only managed to count to 3 in French, promptly stumbling on "Trois...um... a...". Nanny showed merci, as per usual, and let him count in English. By "Ten!", the kids were all well hidden in their secret nooks around the house. What joy it is to have such understanding and lingua-friendly adults around us.

A trilingual four-year-old. But not quite multicultural...

Well, the summer in England has been most beneficial in terms of Clément's cultural and linguistic immersion into all things British. Very much helped by the Masbro Children's Centre, the Hammersmith&Fulham public libraries and the Olympics in London. Starting off with a sort of a sign language and slowly but surely moving onto constructing full sentences and conducting conversations, such as "In my life, I have a dream... A rally car!" and "You are the best friend I've ever had."   

The new academic year has started off nicely with a welcome from the Russian School in Strasbourg which he now attends regularly. Shame that he cannot put his newly acquired skills to good use in Belarus. Who knows when his next trip to the East will be.

The teachers at his French nursery school are now complaining that he counts to 10 in English better than in French. Obviously, they wouldn't be able to asses his mathematical abilities in Russian as well.