Thursday, May 10, 2007

Night time reading

Tonight I read the girls some books at bed time. They chose a mix of English and French. One was just a small French activity book that had illustrations and questions. One of them had a picture of a girl at a computer and the question was something like "What is the girl typing on?" I read it out in French, and Maddie said she was typing, clearly not understanding the question. I translated the question to English and she said, "On Skype." Kids are so modern these days. I was expecting her to say 'keyboard' or 'computer'.

Yesterday was the town annual tag sale (brocante). Maddie was allowed to spend 2 euros and she came back with a few things. One of them was a book, Cendrillon, aka Cinderella. I read it to her in French first, and then later that night had to read it again in English. These on the fly translations are tough - I've found that I can't go word by word as I end up sounding too choppy - what with the word order being different and my French vocab not being that great. It's best to read sentence by sentence or even by paragraph to get the main ideas across. It's easier with a story like Cinderella when I already know what happens. But sometimes there are keywords that snag me like "les trois harpies". I ended up just saying Cinderella never had to see the 3 mean women again (referring to her step mother and 2 step sisters). I didn't realize it was the same word in English. Later Brianne informed me that harpies are demonic, winged, female monsters. Whoah.

The other frustrating book to translate is a Smurf book they have. In French, it's Les Schtroumpfs, and as in the American version, 'schtroumpf' is used as a base for different verbs and nouns in regular conversation amongst the little blue creatures. For some reason I find this incredibly difficult - possibly because there isn't a lot of context, it just forces me to conjugate my verbs correctly, and because it ends up making little sense to me.

Another challenging but fun one to read is Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein (Sel Shilverstein?). This one's in English but because of the swapping of word beginnings and the desire for 3 year olds to hear it correctly means you have to be one quick flipper.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Lin!
I enjoy reading your blog! It's great that you spend so much time doing this... great for your friends to read and great for you probably too. It gives me something to do when Natalie insists on being held while sleeping!
I look forward to seeing you again when you make your way back to Seattle!
Sonja