French

People often ask me if Sam speaks French. She does not. We’re an English-language household, with some French peppered in. I plan to formally teach Sam French when she’s a little older, but right now her main exposure is through songs and books. So she has some French in her lexicon, like “doudou” (best translation I can think of would be “lovie” as for a stuffed animal) and “taper” for “clap.” Whenever she claps her hands, she says “Tah peu!”

This evening before dinner, however, she picked up one of her French books and started to read it to herself. Actually, it’s a bilingual book that tells its story in both French and English. The book is called Je suis trop gros [I am too big] and it’s about an elephant and a giraffe who long to swap their physical characteristics, until suddenly– surprise! They decide that they are fine the way they are. (You didn’t see that one coming, eh?)

Anyway, Sammy was “reading” a very different story to herself while looking at the pictures. She kept saying “Go to sleep. Fais dodo.” Now “fais dodo” means exactly that– “go to sleep.”

“Wow!” I said to AC, “How does she know that expression?” He looked at me and then it dawned. Every night when we put Sammy in her crib, we sing two rounds of “Frère Jacques” except that we sing our own words: “Samantha, fais dodo” (in blatant imitation of our bilingual friends over at lowercase marcus). So that explains “fais dodo.” But still it was cool that she has managed to figure out the corresponding English expression and pair them. And that she decided to do that while reading a bilingual book. This is the first indication that Sam knows on some level that these are two different languages or lexicons.

Perhaps it’s getting near time for the French lessons to begin!