It begins...

As it turns out, there are a lot of words in the French language. And, as you may or may not be aware, they are often different from the words in English, which makes the learning process that much more difficult. If other languages would simply use the same words with a slightly different accent, learning another language would be so much simpler. Plus, it would certainly cut down on the misunderstandings that crop up from time to time in international relations.

I have spent some time with several books, podcasts, and websites in my attempt to learn French, and each of these things is helpful in its own way. For some reason though, the thing that works the best for me is listening to music. Maybe it is the beat in the background, the voice of the singer, or the fact that music tends to get lodged in my brain and won’t go away for days at a time so I end up with phrases repeating over and over again until I forget it, replace it with a new phrase, or go gradually insane. I can’t tell you how many times I have had “Hot Potato” by the damn Wiggles, the theme song for Thomas the Tank Engine, or something by Laurie Berkner running through my head all the live long day. Thankfully Ryan is getting away from “kids” music and moving into other genres.

As I mentioned in previous posts, he has been groomed to enjoy Metallica (“Enter Sandman” is still one of his favorite requests), and he, with the help of his dad, is now a fan of French pop music (although to be more accurate, he is a fan of French pop music circa 2001, with a few newer tunes thrown in). His personal favorite (and for the time being mine as well) is one called “Mademoiselle Juliette” by Alizee. You can catch him singing it from time to time. It's adorable.

We often have dance parties in the basement in which we play music loudly and “dance” around, (basically jumping and running and flopping on the couch), while “singing” at the top of our lungs. I know the words to the song because I have looked them up and translated them for practice, but he has no real idea what he is saying so it comes out something like this:

“MADEMOISELLE JULIETTE-AH, la, la la la TÊTE-AH, la, la, la, la, la, something - CAPULET!”

All things considered, this isn’t bad for a 4 year old. He has the rhythm of the song and he apparently can hear the main emphasis words, so I’d say he is doing fairly well. With Uncle Justin speaking Spanish with him and dad attempting French around him, he might well turn out to understand a little of both languages, which would be fairly cool.

The other day we were hanging out during his resting time (i.e. naptime on days when he simply WON’T nap) watching The Incredibles and Toy Story videos on the Disney site when Ryan asked to hear his favorite song. Since we were in a video state of mind, I asked if he would rather watch the video that goes along with it and he readily agreed. So we went to a website with music videos on it and in a few moments we were watching. He sang along and enjoyed it, asking questions about what the boy is doing, what she said, and why she didn’t like the girl in black. When it was over, he asked if there were more music videos he could see.

So I made a deal with him in which we would put the videos on the TV while we played baseball. It wasn’t terribly difficult to get him to agree to this since both were things he wanted to do, and I set up a little queue to play a few videos and we found his squishy ball and bat.

He wanted to be the pitcher first and I totally cranked his first offering into the far wall. I am unbelievably good at basement baseball when he pitches the ball exactly where my bat happens to be. He glanced at the TV for a few seconds and tossed the ball again. The next pitch didn’t go as well, and I hit the ball off the end of the bat causing it to spin erratically off and hit the TV. My boy has a different feeling regarding my abilities. “You are terrible at this, Dad,” he said.

He pitched it again and I hit this one off the top of the bat which gave the ball a little spin. This caused it to whiz toward the ceiling where it ricocheted off an exposed beam and smacked into a picture frame on the wall. The picture frame wobbled for a second and then righted itself without falling off the shelf. The ball then fell through the net of his basketball hoop and came to rest right at his feet. Surprised at what just happened, I looked at Ryan and said, “Wow! That was rather exotic, don’t you think?”

He looked at me with confusion all over his face. “Dad?”

“Yeah.”

“What does ‘exotic’ mean?”

Nuts. While I feel like I have a decent vocabulary, I am not often very good at actually defining words. I gave it a shot anyway. “Well, it means different or unusual,” I said.

“Oh. Like when Ethan poops and it gets out of his diaper and into his pants. That is exotic?”

“No, that’s gross," I said, making a face. "But it’s a start. Most of the time ‘exotic’ is used to refer to something that is out of the ordinary. Often we use it to mean far away, or interesting, or something that we haven’t really had much experience with.”

“Like the island where Dash runs on water in the Incredibles! It’s far away and very pretty.” Everything comes back to the Incredibles.

“Yeah. Just like the island in the Incredibles.”

He smiled. “Dad?” he said, eyes moving between me and the TV.

“Yep?”

He pointed at the TV which is still showing Alizee music videos. “She’s exotic.”

There wasn’t much to say after that.