French in Limbo à la rapscallion

Well if you think this blog is just jumping around all over the place with a new project every week, you wouldn't be wrong. That's why I started the blog, to try to keep track of myself. In fact, my life is about a whole lot of projects in different directions with different collaborations at the same time, and what I'm doing is trying out some distinctions from LK's books to see whether approaching from that direction makes a difference. 

The Battle of the Books/ Readers' Circle project is on hold as everything is in a state of suspension in HK this month. The emergence of Corona Virus next door, at first WuFlu, now Covid-19, has led to borders closing, many government facilities closing, and schools closing.

Some students are studying from home. Others aren't. 

So Kalamata (pen name) and I have decided to start learning/teaching French because why not? And we are trying out Lynne Kelly's rapscallions approach and my mum's 1950s French teacher's advice to always use a particular side of the vocab book page for each gender. 

Kalamata has chosen two friends to become French Gender Deities. And assigned a page side and a colour of pen for the vocab book. She's particularly fond of the colours magenta and cyan. We have browsed through google translate for names, and come up with la grande coccinelle and le petit ours. 

Earlier, we created a dialogue about drinking coffee, as that is something Mamma is always happy to discuss in the mornings. Top-down language acquisition is more fun, and that's how I plan to continue. But it's good to get some structure in for when we'll need to write things down. And while I am ostensibly fluent in spoken French, I don't know un nom masculin from a handbasket. I'm keen to save Ms K from la honte of a wobbly foundation, while I have the opportunity to go all the way back to the start to get it locked in the second time around.  

We don't know when regular programming will return. Not before 16 March. So we have at least a month of freestyle schooling. 

In other language news, I had a look at a friend's kid's Mandarin homework which was to learn a set of phrases about hobbies (watch TV, sing pop songs) from a powerpoint. We had a conversation about finding mnemonics in the characters. It was interesting to see that no one had had that conversation with him before. It's possible he dislikes and sees no value in that class and just didn't notice. But maybe he's had characters dumped on him with no way in. He didn't know which part was the verb and which part was the noun. Hmmm. In the local Chinese system, my kids were taught the pictograph origins of the character radicals and components in the first year of Primary school. And a bit in Kindy. 

He was delighted to note that the character for electricity was clearly Ben Franklin's kite with the key sticking out the top [电]. (In HK Canto there's a rain cloud up there instead of a key [電]). And the character for watch/read [看] is a hand [手] over an eye [目]. I said, "You know some people will say that it's not TRUE that that's a kite but that should not bother you. Your mnemonics are for you, and you pick stories that work for you". I hope we can have another whack at it when I see him again, as after that all the kids jumped into Minecraft. 

看電視

看电视

玩電腦

玩电脑

我的世界