Two 8-year-old students and a 23-year-old student learned a bit about the world from each other this morning.
8-year-old: "Guess what... in France, people don't say £1.64 as 'one pound sixty-four', they say 'one EURO sixty-four'!"
Me: "Cool! Do you know what they say in America?"
8-year-old: "I don't know America yet."
I love the expectancy- "yet". Like, ask me tomorrow, I might know then. No hurry. I've figured out France, so America will come soon enough.
Knowledge, one country at a time.
*********************
8-year-old: "What language do you speak?"
Me: "Uh, English."
8-year-old: "But I thought you were American!"
That is the most confusing thing... even as I assured her that Americans speak English, I realized what a crazy idea that is. Why don't we speak American? She was clearly baffled and tried to say something about me not talking like her, and I said something about how I have an accent but I speak the same language, but THAT'S totally baffling too, since lots of people around her speak English with accents because they speak other languages at home. Why wouldn't she assume that the lack of a Cambridge accent implied multilingualism? Who would guess that my German friends who speak perfect British English learned it as teenagers, and that my New Zealander friends speak incredibly thickly accented English as their mother tongue?
We just can't rely on anything these days- not money, not language, not logic! Thank goodness we can still learn from each other, right?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Look at those asterisks! Look at those vignettes (or small moments, as we call them in first grade)! You are really getting this blog thing down! I LOVE that "yet"! What do they feed British children that they have that kind of learning confidence?!?! Amazing.
Your linguist Mom would have a whole article worth of discussion points on accents, dialects, and language barriers for kids. All I will say is yeah for people with entertaining accents and boo for our boring-lack of excitement midwestern drawl.
Post a Comment