Overregularisation chuckles

Yesterday, Bee made us chuckle: Dragonfly was telling us about something that she couldn't do 'я не могла ...' (a ya ne mogla) and Bee, ever competitive, retorted that he could: 'а я могол' (a ya mogol). The correct form would have been 'а я мог' (a ya mog) but he was applying the rule that verbs in the past tense end in -ла (-la) in the feminine but in  -ел (-el) or  -ал (-al) in the masculine, so 'to see' (видеть - videt') becomes 'видела' (videla) in the feminine and 'видел' (videl) in the masculine. So могол was a fair attempt although it did sound funny. 

Last year, when I was reading up on language acquisition, I read that this phenomenon of children's language acquisition follows a U-shaped curve: First, children learn a few words and phrases wholesale so might correctly say something like 'I went to the shops' or 'I ate my dinner'. But then they start acquiring rules (e.g. that one adds -ed to a verb to create a past tense, as in 'jump - I jumped'). So then they apply this rule too widely, treating irregular words as if they are regular ('overregularising'), so might say the familiar child forms of 'I goed to the shops' and 'I eated my dinner'. And then they come out at the other end of the curve by working out that some verbs don't follow the rule they have acquired and learning how they function. 

So apart from making us chuckle, Bee's могол is encouraging: perhaps he is beginning to internalise the grammatical rules of Russian rather than simply repeating phrases. It will be interesting to see if these overregularisations increase as we progress to the bottom of the U.

Elka

It's Elka / Елка season in this house. A elka is a Christmas (or New Year) tree, but it also refers to a New Year show for kids with дед мороз (Grandfather Frost) and so on. 

Last weekend, Dragonfly and Bee took part in their Russian club's elka, and had to learn their lines, steps and songs. A bit like the school nativity play but with no nativity story - all on a wintry theme of snow, ice, Grandfather frost and his helper/ daughter Snegurochka ... so when we announced that they were going to a big one yesterday with their Babushka (grandma), they were worried that they hadn't rehearsed! 

But yesterday's one (kremlinelka.co.uk) was just a show (phew!), so no performing was needed. However, despite their nerves, last week's was much more fun, in particular for Dragonfly, who found the Kremlin Elka boooring. Bee was more positive. Judging by Bee's rather dodgy photography, seems to have involved people dressed up as animals. Perhaps 9-year-olds are too old for this sort of thing?

Christmas date challenges

Does anyone have any good vegan Christmas recipes? How about vegan + wheat-free, potato-free, tomato-free, aubergine-free and pepper-free?

Christmastime can be full of challenges (as well as fun, food and happy times!), and this year we're wrestling with a little Christmas date-food challenge.

This stems from the fact that, in the Orthodox Church (the main religion in Russia), Christmas is celebrated on 7th January. To complicate matters, 7th January is only really a religious feast day, not a gift-giving and tree-decorating occasion. The main gift-giving and tree-decorating occasion in Russia has traditionally (at least fairly recently) been New Year. This may be because in atheist Soviet times, no one celebrated Christmas at all, so all the tree and gift stuff was done at New Year (I don't know what happened before 1917). So 'Christmas trees' are called 'New Year trees' and 'Father Christmas' is 'Grandfather Frost' and so on.

In modern Russia, these date issues mainly seem to mean an excuse for extra celebrations: Christmas 25th December? Why not have a few drinks? New Year? Bring it on! Orthodox Christmas? More food and drink. And this continues until 'old New Year' (13th January) after which everything settles back down a little.

Now, we are celebrating Christmas (the 25th December one) with my Russian mother-in-law and sister-in-law this year. Mother-in-law is still firmly atheist despite being anti-Soviet in all other respects, but has nonetheless transferred all the tree decorating and gift giving to 25th December since emigrating (while still paying a little more attention to New Year celebrations than might otherwise be the case).

Sister-in-law, on the other hand, has converted to Orthodoxy and follows all the rules and rituals very closely. This includes a strict vegan fast in the weeks leading up to Christmas (7th January). However, she still loves tree-decorating and gifts, so the other days can't be ignored.

Thus, we have a temporary vegan to cater for over Christmas... combined with the fact that mother-in-law currently doesn't eat wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines or peppers. As we are spending around 5 days together around Christmas, this could make for some interesting cooking! Any ideas?

The influence of gendered language

Dragonfly and Bee go to Russian club every Friday after school. The festive season is upon us, so they are busy preparing their Christmas / New Year show (Новогодная елка). As usual, there are songs and mini plays to be learned and, this year, this has led to Dragonfly insisting that she didn't want to be a blizzard with the girls, she wanted to be ice with the boys.

Now this is something I notice quite often at this Russian club: in shows and songs etc. the children take on more overtly gendered roles than they would at English schools. So, for instance, last summer, her group danced a rock 'n' roll style routine in boy-girl pairs, and for one dance, when there were too many girls, they made a couple of girls sit out rather than have a girl take on the 'boy' part.

This year, Dragonfly is long past her pink girly phase, so she objects to these overtly feminine roles. Looking at the play with ice and blizzards, language is clearly guiding the role decisions: лед (ice) is a masculine word, while метель (blizzard) is feminine. So if a girl plays the role of ice, she will be 'speaking like a boy' (grammatically). Grammar influences choreography and the routine designed ends up gendered visually too: the blizzards are doing some feminine twirling around while ice is stomping about in masculine way.

Anyway, after the blizzard and ice grump last week, Dragonfly has come to terms with the twirling (and has learnt her part) so we'll be sticking with it and I don't have to discuss grammatical choreography with the teachers. Phew!

Is trilingualism all about language?

On Sunday, we went to visit our good friends who are also trilingual. He is Brazilian and she is Russian. They speak English to each other. When their first child was born, dad took the decision to speak English to him as he was worried that he wouldn't speak English well otherwise, and in order to avoid confusing him. Mum, on the other hand, spoke Russian.

This arrangement is still in place 10 years and two other children down the line, except that, progressively, Russian seems to be decreasing. During our visit, over 95% of the family conversation we heard was in English, with only a few small comments from mum in Russian. So, on first impressions, the family's trilingualism seems to be declining.

However, interestingly, nowadays mum speaks pretty good Portuguese (though dad's Russian has never really taken off!), so she is becoming trilingual although her children may not be at the moment. And they generally travel once a year to both Brazil and Russia and the children love these holidays. So they function well in those environments despite their lack of fluency and they have positive associations with these countries, which could provide a foundation for developing a later interest in the languages.

In addition, we were interested to see that, while our children may speak better Russian than theirs, in some respects their children have a far greater Russian influence in their lives: for instance, their Russian grandmother had just visited for a week from Russia and so their kitchen was full of traditional Russian foods (although the children didn't particularly want to eat them!). On the other hand, all our grandparents are here in London and are therefore fairly 'anglified' or, more accurately, internationalised when it comes to food: I can't remember the last time my mother-in-law cooked a Russian dish.

They have also recently moved house and have chosen a sparkling new-build. This is definitely a Brazilian influence: no cravings for period features in this family!

'Triculturalism' can take so many different forms - it will be interesting to see how this family continues to evolve: will language suddenly spring out of these influences at some point?

Work - the enemy of trilingualism?

On Saturday, I met an Italian lady who lives in London. She and her German husband speak their respective languages to their children but the children (well, the older one, as the younger one is only 18 months old) only answer back in English, though they do understand.

Although her son has a certain degree of trilingualism (he understands 3 languages so could be called a 'passive trilingual'), she sees this situation as a 'lack of success' in getting her son to be trilingual. This is especially the case as she knows of children who speak their three languages beautifully. So we discussed possible reasons for this (relative) failure. She felt these were mainly due to work and her child's personality.

1. Work
The fact that both she and her husband work full-time in demanding jobs could have an impact. They are not around much to pass on their languages and certainly this must make things harder. However, they do employ Italian-speaking nannies ... so, theoretically at least, the son should be exposed to the language as much as he would be if she were at home. Perhaps the nannies don't actually speak Italian to the child? Or perhaps nannies are not as important as parental input?

2. Personality
Perhaps it's something to do with the child's personality. There may well be children who are more easily coaxed than others into speaking troublesome foreign languages ... I wonder if her second child will be more likely to speak the other languages?

Solutions?
She feels that the only way for her kids to learn their other languages is to send them to an Italian or German school, but which to choose? And that would mean lots of upheaval as they'd have to move  her son away from the school where he is settled and probably move house.

We thought that perhaps an after school or Saturday language club could help. But obviously, fitting these all in is a challenge as you'd have to find a club for each language, and they'd have to be at different times. And then weekend clubs eat into the already limited family time that they have. Not an easy task!

Penpals

We're having a bit of follow up success on the 'finding French children to interact with' front.

This summer, Dragonfly went to a kids' day camp while we were on holiday in France. One of the aims (other than giving her the opportunity to do cool stuff like white water rafting and donkey riding!) was to increase her exposure to French, and in particular to enable her to interact with French kids.

And it seemed to work! Dragonfly came home each afternoon chatting away in a higher pitched voice than usual and using new phrases like 'hyper' ('j'avais hyper peur'). I was expecting the new vocabulary, but was intrigued about the new girly voice. Is it the case that French girls use a higher pitch generally than English girls? Does anyone have this experience with other languages? Something to investigate.

Anyway, to 'return to our sheep' (as the French would say), not only did Dragonfly chat away to French kids, she also made a new friend and we managed to arrange a few playdates. We swapped addresses and returned home ... and this is where the follow up success comes in: Dragonfly liked my suggestion that she might send her new friend a postcard (in French!), so we did that, and a few weeks later got a response! Dragonfly is so excited to be getting her own letters in the post she's already started drafting another letter. There's nothing like making language 'real' to increase motivation!