French grammar. I loved it in junior high school. While I always hated memorizing vocabulary words (believe it or not I wrote masculine words on blue index cards and feminine ones on pink), I thought that grammar was fun. Group 1 verbs, group 2 verbs, certainly group 3 verbs—it was like a big puzzle Do you use être or avoir for the passé composé? Mme Bober taught us to sing être verbs to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandee and for years I would hum under my breathe as a mnemonic device when writing French exams.
And my personal favorite, also taught by Mme Bober in Murphy Junior High School:
S.N.O.V.P.
It stands for the order you need to remember for French sentences, or:
- Subject
- Negative
- Object
- Verb
- Pas
And how I loved using the subjunctive. When I was first in France in 1994, I remember thinking how sophisticated I was each time I could squeeze out a “je ne pense pas qu’on puisse…” or an “il faut qu’on fasse…” French people wouldn’t notice, because to them I was just speaking French. But my American schoolmates sure would…
Yet somehow throughout my youth, I thought that learning French grammar was something that we Americans did since we were artificially learning a new language. I saw that my French friends just knew that a table was la and not le.
And even after moving to France, and becoming the mother of a little French person, I continued in this belief. Imagine my pride/shame when my four-year-old daughter would correct my French. “It’s le dentifrice mummy” she’d chide me. “That makes no sense,” I’d think, “Otherwise it would be le dentifreur.” But Chiara was always correct.
But this year things changed. Because Chiara is now in CE2 (that’s 3rd grade in the USA) and this year she has Mme Guena, who is the 30-years-younger French doppelgänger of Mme Bober. Two things are different from when I learned French grammar. First, Chiara is younger… I was already 13 when the torture began and she is 8. But the other difference is one of youthful arrogance. Because for me, French was ALWAYS hard. I had to work at it, every single day. For Chiara, until now, French was easy… it is after all her mother tongue. So she doesn’t want to put in the effort to learn conjugation and grammar. And she gets frustrated when her father corrects her, let alone her American mother… And she doesn’t like to make mistakes.
The good news is that the family is working on this as a project together. my husband François is now doing a regular dictée for Chiara AND her mother. And he is more than happy to yell at me in front of my child when I make a mistake. In the end, both Chiara and I should be better at writing in French by the end of the school year. And sometime very, very soon she will far surpass her mum in writing with a belle plume.
Ayme Communications 