Both books are pretty well used!
It's Harry Potter, en français!
My fascination with foreign languages started during a Girl Scout field trip to the local library in second grade. The children's librarian was giving us a tour of the library, pointing out where the fiction was shelved (something I already knew, since I was already an avid reader and frequent library patron), where the music was kept, etc... And then we headed for the nonfiction. "This is where we keep the foreign language books," she said, gesturing toward the north wall. "These are books you can use to learn another language." Wait a minute, you can learn another language???
Growing up in a culturally homogeneous Midwestern town, this was absolutely news to my seven year-old ears. I picked up a French book and was completely tickled to learn my very first sentence: Où sont les toilettes? (Seven year-old me thought this was hilarious, of course.) And from there, my fascination grew.
French didn't quite stick at first. The first language I ever really got into was Japanese, which happened solely because the library got a new "Learn Japanese for your trip!" book that summer. I must've checked that thing out upwards of thirty times. While I've long since forgotten everything other than how to count to ten, my love of languages remained. In high school, I started out with Spanish, and thanks to a change in scheduling systems, I was able to take all four years of Spanish, all four years of French, and a year's worth of German in those four years. Yeah, I was a little obsessed, but at that point, French was the one that stuck. During a brief foray at college, I lived on the foreign language residence floor (which is where I met my husband) and I was beyond thrilled to attend our nightly you-must-only-speak-in-the-language-you're-learning dinners. Which is where a very good-looking young man taught me that the French word for 'seal' sounds eerily like the king of all swear words in English.
Reader, I married him.
I've always tried to keep my French up to a decent level, and it's come in handy. Husband is a native speaker and we're raising our daughter with both French and English, so it's something I use every day. I listen to French radio, we watch French cartoons and videos (Frozen? Does NOT sound right to me in English, to the point where I cringe when I hear it!), I enjoy hearing my husband's family chat in French, and recently, I began reading again in French. This happened, again, when I moved that little bookshelf into my living room. With all those French books staring at me, I realized they weren't doing me any good if I wasn't using them. And so I grabbed my copy of Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers and dove right in.
Since I'd already read a few chapters before my daughter was born (she's, uh, four now), I started where I'd left off, Chapter 6, and I'm happy to say that I've got one chapter left! As I'm reading, I write down the vocabulary I don't know and then enter it all into Anki, an online/app-based spaced repetition flashcard program. And then I study the cards until I get to a certain grade, and that's when I move on to the next chapter. It's proved enormously helpful in learning new vocab; I've already used some of what I learned. But I already knew how helpful it was, because I also used Anki when I learned some...
Norwegian!
Told you I was language obsessed.
Why Norwegian? Family history, for starters. My great-great grandparents came to the US from an area north of Bergen somewhere around 1890, so I've always been a big fan of all things Norwegian. And when my daughter was young and not letting me sleep for more than 3-4 hours a night (and those were not even continuous hours, sigh), I coped with my near mental breakdown (I wish I were exaggerating here) by learning Norwegian. There are worse coping skills, I suppose.
I learned enough to be able to watch three seasons of the Norwegian TV show Skam (I never did get to that fourth season, although I wanted to), along with plenty of episodes of Karl Johan (this show is seriously pee-your-pants funny. I'd wager that it's worth learning the language solely to watch it). I'm pretty proud that my language abilities progressed that quickly, especially during a time of my life that was pretty difficult.
But for now, even though I utterly adore Norwegian, I'm focusing on French. My daughter is going through a phase, completely normal for kids raised in bilingual households, where she doesn't want anything to do with the minority language. When we speak to her in French, she answers in English; she prefers watching TV in English; she wrinkles her nose when prompted to use a French word instead of an English one. She understands it perfectly well; she's just incredibly stubborn, and this is something a lot of families like ours encounter. So we're trying to incorporate as much French into our days as possible, because we're not letting her get out of this family as a monolingual. ;)
And what that means is that Mama needs to be continually working on her French, because she didn't grow up speaking it. So that means reading, listening, and studying...here with the help of Harry Potter. We own all but the last book, and I'll search that out when the time comes. After I finish with this book, I'm going to work with a grammar book until that's completed, and then move back to fiction, followed by another grammar book. I'm actually looking forward to doing more grammar work; maybe it's weird, but I've always found grammar enjoyable.
This book has been a good lesson in follow-through. One sentence, one page, one chapter at a time, it's been fun learning new words and phrases, and re-reading the story. There were parts I'd forgotten, since it's been like 16 years since I read the first Harry Potter book (in English). I'm so glad I've gotten back into studying French, and I'm really looking forward to continuing on with my studies.
Are you a language learner? I'd love to hear about your experiences, what's been successful for you, what materials you use. We language lovers have to stick together!
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