I come from the officially bilingual province of New Brunswick. When I was in school we started learning French in Grade 2. Back then they had more of a "natural" approach to teaching it: I recall that we used the same textbook year after year in the middle grades. (The first dialogue started with the words "To connais Marcel Martin?") It wasn't till Grade 8 that we seriously started learning to conjugate verbs.
I remember the CBC show Chez Helene, a 15-minute show that came on just before--or was it after?--The Friendly Giant. (It seemed to be a female counterpart to that all-male show.) There was a mouse puppet called Susie, and they sang songs like "Il eat un petit navire." I don't think I learned much French from it.
When I was young, I read some French comic books. (You could find a lot of that in New Brunswick libraries.) My favourite was the series about Asterix, a short Gaul who drank a magic potion like Popeye's spinach, and beat up Roman soldiers. In one adventure he saw an aqueduct being built and said, "The Romans are ruining the countryside with their new construction!" I also came across Tintin, and Petzi, a little bear cub who sailed a boat around the world with his friends: the original was in Danish.
When I was in London, England, twenty years ago, I was making small talk with a Frenchman and mentioned that Canada had bilingual food labels so I knew that the French for bran flakes is "flocons de son." He said that in France they're called "les bran flakes"!
No comments:
Post a Comment