Multitasking and finding my home!

I'm killing two birds with one stone!

Yeah, I know, it's a terrible metaphor (the French version d'une pierre deux coups -- literally "from one stone two hits" -- at least has the advantage of increased vagueness on what you might be hitting with rocks), but however you say it, I've had a bit of success lately doing it.

One of my chronic problems is that I have way more projects that I want to do than I have time to do them, and it doesn't help that I keep taking up additional homey hobbies like balcony gardening, homemade sushi, and organizing my basement.  (Actually that last one is finally pretty much done, yay!!)  So I have to multi-task!

One successful example is the French yoga class that I've been taking for more than three years now.  We actually speak a lot of French at home (and we've increased it recently to keep the kids in practice), but, still, it's helpful to have a weekly opportunity to converse with a group of native-French-speaking ladies my own age.  (And I do mean ladies -- even though the class is not intended to be gender-specific, I've never seen a man attend, not even once...)  And with this side of conversation practice comes, obviously, all of the benefits of an excellent yoga course!

And what's that other language I need conversation practice in?  Oh yeah, German!

I tried taking a German-language yoga class for a while, but, really, how much yoga do I need?  Plus, I constantly felt self-conscious because the teacher explained to the whole class that she was holding the class in High German instead of Swiss German for my sake, and even then I could barely understand what she was saying. This interfered with my ability to focus on doing yoga.

So I hit upon the idea of taking a German conversation practice!  I got the idea from the German camp I attended two summers ago with my family.  The daily intensive course I took there kind of put me off wanting to take any more German language courses (it was the first time the teacher had taught German to adults -- I don't want to go into too many details, but the course left something to be desired).  But the conversation practice at the beginning of each course was excellent.  Extremely helpful.  The teacher gave us just enough topic-finder games to get the conversation ball rolling and then sat back and took notes on all of the mistakes we made.  Afterwards we would go over the various errors and discuss how we could and should have said things better.

The multi-tasking idea I had was that a conversation class in Zürich might double as a kind of group therapy.  As I've complained before, nobody understands my peculiar relationship with my various countries.  Not even fellow expats, really.  But maybe in a group of other people living in Zürich and struggling to get some German practice, some people would feel the same strange sense of being at home with always being a foreigner.

To clarify the problem a bit, it drives me nuts when acquaintances blithely refer to the US as my "home." Here's an actual conversation I once had:

Swiss guy I know: (catching me in the hall, to another guy) Yeah, Carol's American...

New Swiss guy: (to me) Ah, and where's your home?

me: (after thinking about it for a bit)  Here.  In Zürich.

(Swiss people all laugh!)

New Swiss guy: No, I mean in the US!

me: (thinking: WTF?  *sigh*)  I'm from Minneapolis.  It's North-central.

That's how I generally answer when people ask me where I'm from and clearly want to hear a location in the US as an answer.  This happens to me all the time.

When people ask me a more open-ended "Where are you from?" I generally answer "It's a long story..." -- which is a lot more accurate that simply saying "Minneapolis."

The thing is that -- while my family has settled pretty permanently in Minnesota -- we didn't even move to Minnesota until I was ten years old.  I was born in the Chicago area (and I have family roots there), but I have never lived there past babyhood.  I've also lived in New York, Ohio, Utah, and -- adding it all up -- I've actually lived in New Jersey for almost as long as I ever lived in Minnesota (and have family roots there too).  And that's not to mention the fact that I've lived the most recent quarter of my life in Europe, including seven years in France, and I am currently raising my little French family.  Yet I still get people asking me "How often do you go home?" -- when in context they clearly mean "How often do you visit your family in Minnesota?"

Just a few weeks ago, a colleague of my husband mentioned that he'd heard something about Los Angeles and had immediately thought of me.  The conversation topic changed before he could finish his story and explain if there was any reason to actually connect it with me, but I doubt there was.  Behind my polite smile I was thinking, "I have never been to Los Angeles.  I've only visited California at all a handful of times.  Surely you must know someone else who would be a more relevant association when you hear something about LA..."

The weirdest one was this one time in the train, though.  It started because my kids were chattering to each other in English, as they always do.  (Damn kids, always talking to each other in their perfectly American accents -- they keep blowing my cover!)  Anyway, some lady overhead them and asked me where they were from.  I answered "France."  Totally true, BTW, but that's not what the lady wanted to hear.  So after a bit of exchange, I admitted that I'm from the US.  The lady then launched into the longest story you can imagine about how she'd once been an au pair in Texas, and all about the kids she'd taken care of and what they're up to today and all of her attempts to reconnect with them on Facebook, and what she's doing herself these days (she mentioned several times that she's a lawyer), and all the places she'd visited when she was an au pair, etc.  It went on for literally twenty minutes with me making the most minimal polite responses of the "that's nice" variety.  My husband, who had his back to her, was making when-is-this-going-to-wrap-up? kinda faces, and my kids were clearly wondering the same thing.  I was busy wondering: Do all of the Americans you meet get treated to this story?  We're not exactly rare, you know...

I don't have a problem with telling people I'm American.  The problem is that that's not the whole answer to the question "Where are you from?" -- and the people asking the question aren't even interested in hearing the whole answer.  It would be so much more pleasant for everyone involved if people would stop expecting that the question should have a simple answer for me.  That's why it's my dream to one day speak German so well that people won't be struck by the impression "Isn't it cute that she's trying to speak German!" and immediately ask me where I'm from.  Like it was in France.

Of course I expect that I will always be more foreign here than I was in France because the Swiss don't really have the same idea that one can become Swiss -- unlike the French and the Americans where (for the most part) if you adopt the language and culture, you're in.  (Note:  I actually have dual citizenship with France.  I also have a great-great-grandmother from Switzerland, if that counts for anything...)

But that's OK.  And after 12+ years in Europe, I'm practically as much a foreigner in the US when I go back there as I am a foreigner here in Switzerland, and that's OK too.  I now have three cultures where I'm both an insider and an outsider, and my kids are in the same boat.  That's just our life.

And that's the second task I was kind of hoping to get out of my conversation practice -- to connect with fellow insider-outsiders about all of that.  Kind of a tall order, I know.

Mostly I've had to accept that my expectation was unrealistic.  The conversation practice course has been extremely helpful to me, especially in terms of motivating me to formulate my thoughts in German on a daily basis and practice communicating in German in real time.  (I'm now at the point where I can carry on an elaborate conversation in German for more than an hour without any serious difficulty (as long as the other person would rather speak to me German than English or French), as I discovered in a random daily situation earlier today.)

Still, I think the course is a little too structured for my taste.  The teacher asks the students a fixed set of questions, and -- while the questions are fairly open-ended -- each student is only allowed to respond for a short time, in order to ensure that everyone gets enough opportunity to speak.  We're also not really encouraged to respond to what other students say or to ask them follow-up questions, for the same reason -- not to cut into another student's time interacting with the teacher.

But now that I think about it, I think I liked the style of the conversation practice back at German camp better, where the teacher gave us free reign to chat with the other students and discussed the corrections with us after the fact.  I'm attending a top German language school in the area, and it's clear that they put some serious effort into constructing plenty of questions and vocabulary lists and role-playing scenarios.  Yet sometimes less is more.  It's great to have all this stuff on hand for when the conversation is at a lull.  But it would be more interesting if they would give us the vocabulary list and let us try to have a normal conversation.  We're all grown-ups and can be reasonably expected to give others a turn to speak.  It makes sense for the teacher to intervene when someone is having difficulty getting to speak and/or when the conversation dies, but otherwise set it in motion and don't fix it until it's broken.  It's not necessary to have the teacher initiate every exchange.

For a recent class, I thought of a funny anecdote on that session's topic, and I imagined how to recount the whole story in German.  As you can see, the motivation itself was helpful even though I knew I almost certainly wouldn't have the opportunity to recount my anecdote in class (and I was right).

Due to scheduling constraints, I have to take a few weeks off from my conversation training, and yet -- crazily enough -- during my last session I almost got what I was hoping for.  Our group that week had a good rapport, and the teacher mostly let the conversation wander.  It wasn't as free-form as I would have liked, but more fun than usual.

After that class it hit me that I'm simply signed up for the wrong class.  There are probably plenty of people who like to have such a structured conversation practice, but that's not what I'm looking for.  Fortunately there are loads of German language groups in classes and groups in Zürich.  Maybe I can find one in my neighborhood and kill three birds with one stone by also making friends with neighbors and connecting better with my community...

Wish me luck!!

Paris, it's good to be home!

A few weeks ago, I went to Paris to meet some friends. As I expected, as soon as I stepped into the streets of Paris -- and especially as soon as I got into the Metro -- I had an immediate sense of the familiar; like going home.

Now I've read a lot of people say that Paris is overrated, that the Métro smells, etc. The thing is that Paris can't help but get overrated -- it's one of the top tourist destinations in the world. Naturally, it must have a whole lot of people recommending it, yet, like all cities, Paris has its particular character and advantages, which won't appeal to everyone. And, voilà, you have a recipe for a lot of people wondering what all the hype is about. Then, once you visit a few more European cities, perhaps you'll find one whose flavor suits you better, and you can show your sophistication as a traveler by picking a less obvious city to recommend to your friends back home.

It's a little like the Eiffel Tower itself. I remember, as a kid, wondering why the Eiffel Tower is so famous. It's not impressively tall compared to modern buildings, and it's just a steel framework like some sort of antenna. I figured (correctly) that you must just have to be there. It turns out that it's actually kid of pretty for an antenna -- and it's cool that you can see it from all over Paris, and it's fun to go up and see it towering over a huge plaza and park.

Personally -- as a kid and young adult -- I was skeptical about all the francophile hype. I don't know much about art history (or European history in general), so a trip to Europe was never really high on my priority list until I started learning to speak French (as an adult, in grad school). Then, when I first got to Paris, I was pleasantly surprised by how convenient the public transportation was. I could wander on foot or by Métro in any direction and always stumble upon something interesting. I was also surprised to learn how different a city can look from the way all the cities look in the US. Plus, the culture just exotic enough to be charmingly fun without being truly disorienting.

My first trip to Paris was magical -- I wished I didn't have to leave. And, since then, I've been back there so many times, with family and friends. So what if the Métro smells? It's a familiar smell now, and all of the crazy corridors with their shiny white bricks and their ad-posters all in French are like home.

Naturally, it has become increasingly obvious that a big part of the magic of France for me has to do with the amount of effort I put into learning French. It affects how I feel about the place, about the people there, and about myself. So I've recently started listening to some German recordings that are a translation of a series I used when learning French so many years ago. No matter how silly the story or how cheesy the music, I like listening to it at night -- it relaxes me -- because (for me) it's the sounds of success.

During this past visit to Paris, I loved hanging out with my friends, and I always love visiting art museums with people who know a thing or two about art.



Yet, perversely, I didn't love how all of this English-speaking made me feel like an outsider, not really part of the city. (It's a little crazy, I know, but back at my hotel -- if anyone asked -- I was from Switzerland, and I was ready to make it convincing with a few phrases of German, if necessary.) Two of the friends I was visiting, though, speak good German, and they were very polite about letting me subject them to some of my terrible German. And, while wandering around, I was occasionally reminded of Zürich, and stuff I like there.

At the end, I got back on the train and settled into a good book. And as soon as the train pulled into Zürich Hauptbahnhof, I had an immediate sense of the familiar. There's the big clock whose design matches my watch, the familiar poster-ads in German, the kinetic light sculpture and the giant flying lady hanging from the ceiling of the great hall of the train station. Then I got on the tram and sat back and enjoyed the sights as it squeaked and squealed its way to my apartment. There, I hugged my husband and sons, and thought: It's good to be home!

Blog Retrospective: Clash of Cultures!

Being an expat, I'm always interested in that mysterious space where cultures interact! How do we perceive each other? This question has been one of the main themes of my blog from the beginning. Here's a little taste of how my ideas on the subject have evolved over the past few years:


Have you ever wondered what the French think of peanut butter and Vegemite? Or what they think of "freedom fries"? Or what's my least favorite thing about France? (Hint: it's the merde). Well, wonder no more -- just follow the links!

Of course, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this blog knows that my favorite thing about Europe is the transportation!!! I loved it when I was Living Downtown and Car-Free in Bordeaux, I've loved le metro ever since I first visited Paris, and I absolutely adore it here in Zurich: Transportation Paradise!! (Even if the Swiss rules of etiquette are a little mysterious...)

(Other great benefits, of course, are the education and health care.)

One of the most interesting things about moving to a new country is learning a new language! It's fun for the kids to test the linguistic boundaries. As for the grown-ups...? I contend that A foreign language is best learned in the bedroom . But that's not to say that good ol' English is uninteresting! Au contraire ! What with its million tenses and grammar rules that are made to be, like, broken. ;^)


And how's that culture shock? After a certain time abroad, my original country starts looking like a parallel universe, where the same laws of physics do not apply. After learning the richness of a new culture, it's frustrating to see your old compatriots reducing your new compatriots to cartoon characters! And don't forget the further-culture-shock adventure of moving from France to Switzerland -- It seems like it shouldn't be that big a deal, but it is! (Lucky thing I have my fellow weirdos to keep me company.)


And how do I fit into all of this? Well, you can start with my misadventures at a couple of big Catholic weddings. Or have a look at my time capsule: Baby's day in Bordeaux. Or have a look at some of my photos of the things you see in Bordeaux, of my life in Bordeaux, of the scale model of the solar system in Zurich, of Europride Zurich, and -- as a bonus -- of Lago Maggiore.

And do I miss my old traditions? Being a "cultural Mormon" in Europe? Stay tuned for next week's blog retrospective to find out!

A foreign language is best learned in the bedroom

Herr Doktor, seit einem Monat schlafe ich nicht. Eine schlaflose Nacht is für mich ein Qual. Welches Schlafmittel soll ich nehmen?

I always chuckle a little when this dialog comes up in my German lessons. For me, it's self-referential. The lady is asking her doctor what to take for insomnia. I say take some German lessons. Seriously.

Here's why learning a foreign language is the best cure for insomnia:

When you learn a foreign language as an adult, you have to learn the grammar rules. But, you don't become fluent by working out a little grammar algorithm in your head to compose each sentence before you speak. It has to become automatic. And that comes from (rather mindless) drills and memorization. You can train your brain by listening to your recorded dialogs so many times that you can recite them.

Insomnia, for me, is almost always a question of having some idea or problem stuck in my mind that I just can't stop obsessing about. Then, as the hours tick by, the thought that I'll be too tired to work the next day just compounds the problem with further stress and worry.

Language recordings to the rescue! As I focus on the dialogs in the recording, it pushes the other thoughts and obsessions out of my mind. Since I've heard these dialogs already (no surprises!) it's easy for my conscious mind to wander off to dreamland. And best of all, when it doesn't work, there's no compounding stress/worry about having wasted so many precious hours just lying there. No time was wasted at all -- I was improving my German, which I'm supposed to set aside time to do anyway!

I used this trick when learning French, and later Italian. I stopped doing it when my babies were born, though, because I didn't want any danger from the ear-bud cords where my babies and I were sleeping. Now that they're six and eight years old (and have been in their own big-boy beds for a number of years) I have no further excuses. Well, no good ones anyway.

I've only got a handful of lessons left in Allemand Pratique de Base, and if I finish them up by the end of the year, I'll have succeeded in one of my (very modest) goals. With interruptions, this beginner German course has taken me approximately two years. That's not so impressive when you consider that twelve years ago I completed the comparable course "Teach Yourself French" in the space of two weeks.

Of course things were a little different back when I decided to learn French. For one thing, it was Summer, and I had two weeks by myself. I had no kids to take care of. The only task on my agenda was procrastinating my PhD research, so I had 24 hours a day to devote to teaching myself to speak French. (Now, if you're thinking "Chanson, don't you have a Java book that you're procrastinating right now?" -- keep in mind that today, we have more advanced technology for procrastination: the Internet.)

Note that my motivation back then was a little different: there was a certain highly desirable Frenchman I wanted to impress. Motivation is the other reason the bedroom is the best place to learn a new language. Usually it's an annoyance for native speakers to help you practice while you blunder your way through their language. But the magic of romance turns it cute. Plus it makes you want to figure out how to say all sorts of different things to your foreign sweetheart. The trouble with this trick is that -- when successful -- it works only once. Now that I'm happily married to an adorable Frenchman, well, let's just say it limits the possibility of learning German in the same way.

And -- bringing this discussion full circle -- some of you may be noting that sex is also a good cure for insomnia. It is, but it's not as effective as listening to language lessons. Insomnia, language, and romance: three bedroom activities that go great together! ;^)

What languages are "easy to learn"? and why?

"Hmm, they've changed the menu," said my husband the other day, as we were preparing to order at one of our favorite local restaurants.

After a second, we discovered that, no, in fact they hadn't changed anything -- it was just that they'd given us the real menu (in German) for the first time, instead of the special English or French menu. The hostess was new, and we'd actually managed to get through the opening info (four for dinner; no, we don't have a reservation) without saying "What? Sorry, we don't speak German -- English or French, please." So we'd passed for people who speak German!

Then -- to live up to the expectation placed on us -- we ordered in German and spoke to the waitress only in German all evening! And I don't mean just pointing at items on the menu (though that helped). We used whole sentences. Relevant sentences, even.

After a year and a half living in a German-speaking country, finally being able to order in a restaurant is a pretty pathetic milestone. And note that this doesn't mean I can carry on a normal conversation in German, it just means that ordering in a restaurant is a pretty standard and structured type of dialog that is covered extensively in my "Teach Yourself German" recordings. (Actually, I wish I knew how to say "I'd like the same thing as that guy" -- it would really help out when ordering at cafeteria-style places...)

But I'm learning new words every day. As predicted, as soon as I learned of the existence of the word "Entschuldigung" I started hearing it everywhere. And the same thing keeps happening with other words. Every day I make a little more progress at deciphering the newspapers and billboards. It shouldn't be so hard, right?

Whenever it's time to make small-talk in a professional or business context, this topic (learning German) is golden!! Everybody has an opinion on High German vs. Swiss German or on the Swiss version of High German (which people think is the same as how people speak in Germany, but *haha* it isn't!). I always end up giving some variant of my usual story about how it's hard to get any exercise in German since everybody immediately switches to English as soon as they notice that I don't speak much German. I can count on one hand the few times people have insisted on continuing to speak to me in German after it became clear that I was stumbling over the simplest things. (Actually on one finger, now that I think about it.) And on that one occasion, I was surprised by how much I really did understand. But it's like with physical exercise -- it's easier to go out waking if you need to in order to get somewhere, but if you have to get out of your easy chair and force yourself onto the treadmill, too often you think "I'm tired, I'm busy, I'll do it tomorrow." Then there's the added complication that everybody's speaking in Swiss German but everything is written in High German, and they're not the same, and I don't understand either one of them.

"Well, German is a very hard language to learn," remarked one Swiss German guy at a business-social I was attending. Is it? I think he was just being nice, giving me an excuse for my pathetic level of progress. Learning German shouldn't be so hard for an English-speaker -- the two languages are related! The real problem is just that the call of reading blogs is so much stronger than my desire to listen to "Teach Yourself German" recordings. On the other hand, languages do vary in difficulty, and German has its drawbacks.

Here's my list of "what's wrong with German as a foreign language":

Too many verb forms (per verb) to memorize, and especially too many irregulars. And if that weren't bad enough, the nouns have different forms too, and they have three genders. For most words, the genders are distributed pretty randomly, and, notably, they don't align with the French genders of the same words. (What's with the neuter "das bier"? Everybody knows beer is feminine! "la bière," aah, perfect!) Continuing in the tradition of Mark Twain, I should now make fun of the word order in the sentence (all the verbs at the end...?), but at least the word order seems pretty consistent once you've learned a short list of amusing rules about it. Not like the forms of the word "the": If you say "der X", then X must be masculine... unless we're in the dative case, then saying "der X" means that X is feminine. Becuase the whole genders-and-cases thing wasn't challenging enough on it's own, they've decided to make your brain play Twister.

On the other hand, the common wisdom says that with English, it's easy to learn enough to get by, and then -- on top of that -- you can keep learning more and improving indefinitely. This may well be true. Unlike many languages, English words really don't have a lot of grammatical forms to memorize. Instead, English does a lot with helping words. A surprising thing I've found when comparing languages is that English has more verb tenses than the average language, but forms them in regular ways using helping words. As a fun little exercise, try and explain the different nuances expressed by the following:

1. I waited.


2. I've waited.


3. I'd waited.


4. I was waiting.


5. I used to wait.


6. I used to be waiting.


7. I've been waiting.


8. I'd been waiting.

Then tell me if there are any other standard past forms I've missed...

English has a few strikes against it for newbies, though. For one thing, the spelling is completely insane. I used to think that all languages have wildly irregular spelling, but, in fact, no. Try explaining a "spelling bee" to a Brazilian. In Brazil, it wouldn't make sense to try to compete over who can guess a word's spelling because in Portuguese, words are spelled exactly as they sound. French is also a big offender in the crazy spelling department ("beaux" = "bô"???), but I think even French is more regular in terms of limiting the number of ways a given phonetic syllable can possibly be spelled. And it's not just the common, little words in English that have bizarro spelling. When reading the word "apostrophe," could you guess the pronunciation if you didn't happen to speek English (or Greek)? In English, not only are archaic forms preserved in the amber of spelling rules, but multitudes of foreign words are welcomed in without being wholly assimilated.

So, how do your language experiences stack up?

Est-ce que it pokes?

Now that he's four years old, my little Léo has figured out the trick for speaking both French and English: The overlap in vocabulary is huge, so if you don't know the French word, just say the English word with a French accent (and vice-versa), and you'd be surprised at how often that works. (For his early language development, see bilingual babies).

Léo's English doesn't seem to be affecting his French very much, but he's definitely enriching his English by translating stuff literally from French, with some funny results.

The first one is "Est-ce que...?" That may look daunting to non-francophones (it means "Is it that...?"), but it's two simple syllables (pronounced "Eska") and it's just a trick for turning any statement into a yes/no question. We don't have any such convenience in English (we have to do that whole messy inverting the subject and verb thingy), so Léo just carries it over wholesale, producing questions like "Est-ce que it pokes?" That question was meant to be something like "Does it sting?" but was clearly influenced by the French version of the question: Est-ce que ça pique ?

Another funny one is the redundant pronouns. Instead of just using stress for emphasis (as in "I saw him" vs. "I saw him"), the French like to throw in redundant pronouns (as in "Moi, je l'ai vu"). Léo likes to do this in English too, so rather than saying "I did it" he'll say "Me, I did it."

But I think my favorite Léo-ism is "But sure!"

In English, it's tricky to contradict a negative. If someone says "He's not here," you could say "Yes, he is," or "Yes, you're right" -- so "yes" alone can have two opposite meanings in response to a negative. French gives you three choices: oui and non (corresponding to the usual "yes" and "no"), plus a third option si -- just for contradicting negative statements! Cool huh?

Once you've gotten used to using si, it's hard to go back to not having it (you'd be surprised how useful it is!), so Léo has decided to equip the English language with its own version of this useful word: "sure!"

And since why say oui, non, or si when you can say mais oui !, mais non !, or mais si !, Léo translates the mais as well.

So the correct response to a statement like "You can't have any" in Léo's language is "But sure!" :D

potty mouth: caca boudin pipi !

Kids can be so resourceful when it comes to inventing surprising new types of naughtiness!!

Since I taught them some naughty words myself -- and since the lack of corresponding negative attention made the naughty words boring from day one -- I assumed that would be the end of it. * Sigh *, another parenting theory shot all to hell...

My little Leo was clever enough to figure out that while swearing in English would get him nowhere, he could get plenty of laughs (from other kids) and plenty of hilarious scolding (from authority figures) by using potty-words in French. I say hilarious because he's not really punished: he does enough things that are plenty worse, and we're kind of a laissez-faire, choose-your-battles kind of family. So he just gets lots of earnest suggestions (from his daddy) of funnier and more appropriate nonsense words he might use, and he follows these suggestions occasionally.

For my part, I mostly try to ignore the potty-words -- so as not to encourage him -- but it's tricky because they don't teach you these sorts of things French language textbooks. How can I help but be curious about this amusing facet of child language development?

Leo's favorite naughty phrase is "caca boudin pipi" (followed by hysterical laughter, possibly rolling on the floor, etc.). At first I wasn't sure what he was saying and I thought it was "caca Buddha pipi" (since he's learned about Buddha I figured he was a precocious blasphemer). Then listening more closely and looking at some relevant children's books I realized it was "caca boudin pipi" which led to the obvious question: What does that mean???

Here we enter the realm of pure speculation:

As you may know, "caca" is a French baby-word for feces, and pipi is pee-pee (or pee), same as English. Boudin is blood-sausage (in France it is anyway, not in Louisiana), so in shape and color it bears a mild resemblance to caca. Thus I assume the joke is the idea of people eating crap? And the "pipi" on the end is perhaps just thrown in for good measure? If anyone else has any info on the etymology of this intriguing phrase, please feel free to comment...

While I'm telling kid language stories, I have a follow up to Nico correcting me at bedtime story-time. We were again reading Rafara (hey this is a tricky little book!), and we were at the part where the monster was fattening up Rafara to eat her. I said he pinched her cheek to see if she was sufficiently doudou, which sent Nico into a fit of laughter since a "doudou" is a stuffed animal (it's not even an adjective!).

Nico corrected me: dodue (which means chubby). This was a new word for me, but rather than look it up, it was quicker to get the definition from Nico. He didn't know the word "chubby" though (we're the blind leading the blind at my house...), so after thinking about it a minute he resorted to an example:

"You see, Mommy, Buddha is dodu..."

How I got my name

The first Internet forum I ever got involved in was RfM.

I hardly knew what an Internet forum was in those days, but I read a bunch of the archived threads and wanted to join in the conversation. To do that, I needed a handle.

For a couple of seconds I thought about picking something Mormon-related. But that was the one constant shared by everyone on the board, and I figured it would be better to go with a name that highlighted something unique about me. So I decided to take my first name (Carol) and translate it into French. Thus chanson was born.

Over the next couple of years I as used this same handle on a bunch of different forums (fora?), I discovered a couple of amusing things: (1) not everyone speaks French, and (2) "chanson" -- as a username -- looks a lot like C. Hanson. I thought it was kind of funny that people made that assumption, so I figured "Hell, let's roll with it!"

In a lot of ways my novel grew out of my online adventures, so I decided to use my new identity as my pen-name. (Or nom de plume if I'm sticking with my snooty French-isms.) I threw in "L" as a middle initial partially because my real initials are C.L.H. and partially in honor of Lynn, the main character of my novel. It's fiction -- not autobiography -- but my pen-name is fictional as well, so maybe it's the real autobiography of the fictional author...?

A funny side note is that that means my fictional pen-name in full should be "Carol Lynn Hanson." Of course that immediately calls to mind Carol Lynn Pearson, and you might think I did it on purpose. But you would be wrong: it's pure coincidence. I don't have any connection with Carol Lynn Pearson except the obvious (we're both women who write about Mormons from a Mormon perspective). She's also something of a mother-figure to the LDS gay community -- see Connell's fabulous story for a bit of what I'm talking about -- and sometimes I like to imagine myself in a similar role. (I don't know if any actual gay people think of me that way, but perhaps I'm sending them a subtle motherly vibe.)

My real name isn't much of a secret -- if you follow this blog, you've probably figured it out already. I don't post my real name here though because I use my real name professionally. I have a new Java book coming out in a little more than a month, and when my professional contacts google my name, I want my Java books and other professional writings to come up, not this... ;^)

Then there's the other part of my Internet name: my blog title "Letters from a Broad..." Peter Walters (who I met through exmo-social) came up with the name. For the first six months of this blog's life, it was a column in the (now-defunct) student paper the Utah Valley Monitor (which Peter founded).

I liked this name from the beginning because it reminded me of when I was a kid and the same ridiculous pun got me included in a boys' club (they wanted to be the "Traveler Society of America and Abroad" but for that of course they needed a broad...). I can't tell if it's feminist or anti-feminist of me to have decided to go with (and stick with) this blog name. Really, I don't mean anything by it, and it kind of weirdly seems to fit the theme of the blog, so I'm planning to stick with it.

Sometimes the names people use on the Internet seem more real than people's actual names. Your Internet handle is something you've made up for yourself, and it usually means something -- it's not just something chosen for you by earlier generations. On the other hand, it seems like most serious long-term internauts end up just using their real names eventually.

And you -- does your name have a story?

The parable of criticism is a compliment

Once upon a time, back when I was in grad school, I decided that I was going to learn to speak a foreign language. I'd enjoyed learning Latin in high school and college, but I felt like I'd missed out never having learned to carry on a real-time conversation with actual non-English-speaking foreigners. And since there were so many foreign students in the math department where I was studying for my Ph.D. (who could help me practice speaking their native tongue) -- it was an opportunity I didn't want to waste!

So I picked French as my new language, and I bought a stack of books and tapes and obsessively studied until I got to the point where I could carry on a rudimentary conversation. Then I scheduled regular conversation outings with various grad students who were from French-speaking countries, and by the time I got the opportunity to travel to France -- to spend a month attending a special semester of Number Theory at a university in Paris -- I was already able to carry on a perfectly reasonable conversation in French, as long as the person I was talking to was fairly patient.

When I arrived in Paris, I had plenty of opportunity to practice my new skill on the people of the math department I was visiting. And it seemed like everybody was complimenting me on how well I spoke French, to which I would respond with a faux-modest "merci" and then launch into the grand epic tale of how I'd taught myself to speak French. That was one of the stories I was really, really good at telling in French. ;^)

Then towards the end of the month, the compliments started to dry up. What's worse, instead of complimenting me, the new people I would meet would actually correct me -- pointing out errors in grammar and pronunciation in the middle of a conversation!

This annoyed me at first (especially since it limited my opportunities to regale people with my favorite grand epic tale), but I felt better after I thought about it a bit. When someone arrives fresh off the plane, obviously enthusiastic about speaking the language and capable of a reasonable conversation, but is making errors in every sentence, what are you going to say? The natural response is something like "Wow, you speak French well; you're learning fast..." Whereas when I'd gotten to the point where people were bothering to correct one lone mistake in the middle of a conversation, it must have meant that the other stuff I'd said was mostly right.

Thus I concluded that criticism is often a compliment. I think this is a general lesson that applies to a lot of life circumstances.

(The humility-restoring post script to my grand epic tale: now my five-year-old son Nicolas corrects my French. He's not even lenient about it either, he's like "Mom, it's not puissant, it's puissante," and he follows up with an exaggerated eye-rolling that says "duh, Mom, where did you learn to speak French?")

The birds and the bees and the whales...

For all you parents (and overgrown kids) out there -- it's time to swap some parenting strategies!!!

What do you tell your kids about "the facts of life"? How much and when?

I suspect it's easier for parents on a farm to cover the subject naturally, given all of the object lessons going on around them. Fortunately we have today's modern equivalent: nature documentaries!!!

One of my kids' favorite films is a documentary following the adventures of a pregnant tiger shark, and another favorite is one about whales. The shark one has made it very clear to my 5-year-old Nicolas that babies start out in mommies' tummies. (He loves to role-play all of his films, and it's super cute when he plays that he's a pregnant shark full of babies!!!) The whale film goes into a little more detail about how the baby got there...

Their whale film is educational for adults as well as children. Without it, I never would have known what it looks like when whales, y'know, do it. My favorite part is the narrator's perfect deadpan delivery as he lists off the dimensions of the whale's naughty bits, nonchalantly explaining that it's the largest genital organ in the animal kingdom.

That part always makes me giggle. I'm not sure why -- they list off the weights of a bunch of other whale body parts and I never think anything of it. I've narrowed it down to either (a) I'm just that immature or (b) documentaries about whale genitalia really are hilarious.

While I was pondering this question, my curious little Nico of course asked me "Mommy, what's that?" (pointing at the gigantic whale schlong on the screen).

Without hesitation -- without even giggling -- I replied "That's the daddy whale's zizi." (I'm getting good at this parenting stuff!!!)

He didn't have any follow-up questions. I guess since whales have a lot of body parts in common with people (eyes, mouths), it seemed perfectly reasonable to him that the daddy whale should have a zizi. (Indeed, a whale of a big zizi...)

Zizi, by the way, is the French baby-word for penis. I'm not sure if maybe I should be teaching them a more proper word, or perhaps a word in English for when we're speaking English or something. But this is working for us so far.

Regarding the differences between girls and boys, all they know at this point is that boys have zizis and girls do not have zizis. I'm kind of thinking that "what girls have instead" falls into the category of "advanced topics" since they're both boys and haven't asked about it. I'm not sure if that's the right strategy or not.

I don't really have a plan or a theory here, I'm just playing it by ear.

Anybody else out there have a theory or an opinion about how such topics should be covered?

Twin language...?

Okay, so my kids aren't actually twins, but they're very close in age, and really they spend more time talking to each other than either one spends talking to anyone else. So they appear to have invented some of their own words:

bramporte: A two-wheeled vehicle such as a bicycle or motorcycle.

cracre-de-paix (or perhaps cracre d'épée?): A heavy construction vehicle.

I can't tell if these are based on real words or wholly invented, but they seem to be pronouncing them as French words, which is why I've spelled them as French words.

You can guess what types of subjects they like to discuss... ;-)


Here I am hindering them from watching the movie "Cars"

A creation myth by Nicolas

My four-year-old son Nicolas was telling me about sharks the other day, and when I said something about sharks living in water, he said "No, sharks don't live in water, they live in the sea."

me: But the sea is made of water, right?

Nico: (after thinking about it a bit) Yes... There was a great big water bottle, and it spilled on the sand and made the sea!

So there you have it. And that's why the sea is made of water. ;^)

Okay, one more cute kid story:

My little Nico usually only speaks to me in English, but every now and then he'll learn something at school or from his French grandma and not know the corresponding words in English to talk about it. When that happens, and Nico wants to tell me about something he can only describe in French, he switches the language of the conversation as follows:

Nico: Maman ? (French for Mommy)

me: Yes?

Nico: Non, tu dis "Oui". [No, you say "Oui".]

me: Oui ?

Then he launches into his story in French.

(He's curious to know how to say the same thing in English, so I generally translate the things he tells me into English for him.)

Okay, one last one:

Recently Nico wanted a particular toy that was at a toystore on the other side of town. So we walked over there, and on the way back, when we were almost home, Nicolas started getting tired. He then made the following observation:

"If the store is far away from home, that means home is far away from the store."

The kid's a genius -- already formulating his own reciprocity theorems!! He's sure to be a great Mathematician one day!!! :D

Questions on parenting boys...

Okay guys, I'd like some opinions and advice on this one.

This past weekend has been really hot, so I got out a bunch of squirt guns for my two boys (ages 4 and 3) to play with.

As soon as he saw the water pistols, my little Nico was all excited to have a "pistolet," and started playing at shooting people, using the French for "bang! bang!"

This was not a big deal, but I found it a little disturbing when he asked "Mommy, what does it mean 'tuer'?" (i.e. "Mommy, how do you say 'kill' in English?")

I explained to him that squirt guns are for getting people wet (and demonstrated by squirting both him and his little brother Leo), and that killing people is bad. That seemed to have the desired effect since he didn't talk about killing people much after that.

On the one hand, I don't want to be messing him up for playing with the other boys at school, but on the other hand, I'm kind of not really thrilled to have him think it's a fun game to pretend he's killing people...

I guess most parents of boys eventually have to deal with the question of toy guns, what's okay and what's not. Any other parents out there have thoughts on this subject or tales of how you've handled this?

On the other end of the spectrum, this very same weekend Nico decided that he wanted to watch The Sound of Music about a hundred million times. He then put on my hat and a pair of my dress shoes and spent the better part of the day telling everyone he was "Fraulein Maria" (and that Leo was "the Captain").

Also, he and Leo were digging around in a toybox and found a couple of dolls. They took one doll each, gave both dolls the same name as our nanny's baby, and each boy decided that he was the mommy of his doll. (Our nanny brings her baby on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the baby's grandmothers take care of him on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays.)

Oh, and they told me I was the daddy of both dolls. So I guess my kids think I'm some sort of incestuous transgender polygamist... (Let's see what google searches that line attracts to my blog!!! Hehe!!!)

None of this bothered me -- it seemed cute and normal for little kids to play with different roles. But maybe he would be teased if he did this at school? Anyway, I didn't discourage him in the slightest...

Then, as of Monday, they've forgotten about all of these games and have taken to playing with toy insects...

Grammar Police: Rules are meant to be, like, broken

We have the Académie Française to thank for the fact that the French say "ordinateur" instead of adopting the word "computer" like every other language popularly spoken today (except possibly Klingon and Esperanto -- and I'm not even sure about Esperanto here).

One reason the English language has such a huge vocabulary is that there's nobody to stop those pesky foreign words from coming into common usage -- and English speakers have collected quite a lot of them from all over the globe. In particular, a whole slew of French words were adopted into the English language in the centuries following William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066 -- so many that my husband and other French people have joked that French is actually a subset of English.

By contrast, since 1634 the French have had the Académie Française to stop alien vocabulary invaders at the border, notably casting out tons of English words that are slightly modified version of words that originally came from French.

If you're American, you probably see this as a great opportunity to mock and ridicule the French, and rightly so! I'm allowed to poke gentle fun at the French now that I'm practically French myself, and you can too since you're reading my column.

One time I was having a pleasant dinner with a grammar-expert friend of mine, and I made the mistake of saying "He's older than me," which my friend immediately corrected as "He's older than I."

Being ornery by nature, I refused to accept this as a correction. In my universe, "He's older than me" is perfectly acceptable usage. I actually have a whole elaborate theory as to why this type of phrase is OK (and it's more than just "because the other sounds snooty and affected"), but I'd rather not go into detail about it here because I'm trying to avoid frightening people and/or putting them to sleep.

The real reason, however -- which I explained to my friend -- is that unlike French, English is not governed by an academy. Sure there are guidebooks like the Chicago Manual of Style, but I don't have to recognize their authority. Free the pronouns, man!

I live by all sorts of controversial theories of language. For one thing, I disagree with the theory that the use of profanity indicates that the speaker necessarily has a small vocabulary. The latent mathematician in me can't keep from pointing out that actively avoiding profanity technically makes your vocabulary smaller, not bigger. Sure it's easy to over-use naughty words, but if you know how to use them well, you can achieve certain effects that you can't create without them.

An even more controversial theory I subscribe to is that it's not always wrong to throw a bunch of redundant uses of the word "like" into a sentence, as teenagers are so fond of doing. (Or at least they were in my day -- I can't speak for modern teenagers since my knowledge of popular culture tragically ends in about 1989 like the poor sap in this one Onion article.)

My theory is that the redundant "likes" are a way of playing with the rhythm of the language. Of course they can be grating if thrown willy-nilly into every sentence. But one or two small ones every now and then won't do you any harm. Plus a humorist can't help but want to play with every toy in the linguistic toybox, so I can't reject the practice out of hand. After all, a redundant "like" affects the cadence of a sentence, and in humor writing, cadence and timing are everything. (I've been a humorist for, like, months now, so I'm qualified to be giving lessons. Hey, at least I don't have low self-esteem or something!)

I also like to make up words, and every now and then I manage to slip one of them past the copy editors (like "sparklitude", hehe!).

Given my inclination for language mischief, it seems natural that I would one day decide that I'm a humorist, where I get to use things like poetic license (as in "is that a mistake, or is it 'poetic license'?"), and if I accidentally offend somebody I get to say "Dude, lighten up -- it was a joke." (Rest assured, gentle reader, that no humorist would ever abuse these powers.)

Even so, it was a bit of a convoluted path to get there.

At first, I'd planned to be a princess/movie star. But that didn't really pan out. So for a while I was a mathematician, and I segued that into computer programming and mommying. Then I thought it would be fun to be a computer tech book writer. That was a dangerous move though because when I got my programming book published, it went straight to my head, and I decided I should be a serious author. Of course it didn't take much of that before I figured out that this literary fiction stuff is, like, super hard.

So here I am.

I haven't decided yet what I want to be next, but I'm always open to suggestions.


Published in the Utah Valley Monitor December 29, 2005

Bilingual Babies: How do you say 'ga-ga' in French?

I almost didn't get a chance to write a column this week because my son Nicolas took my lucky notebook to draw pictures of trains in it. He finally gave it back Sunday night, though I never did find my lucky pen (also commandeered for train-drawing duties). So I had to write this whole column in green colored pencil, and since a grown-up topic would look ridiculous scrawled in smeary green letters, I have no choice but to tell you about my little boys.

In my first column, I told a bunch of stories about weaning my baby. Actually, that pilot column was written more than three years ago when my oldest was seven months old. Now I have not one, but two rowdy, rough-and-tumble boys, ages 4 and 2. For simplicity, let's call them "Nico" and "Leo." (That's what I normally call them at home, so it saves me having to think up pen names for them.) The happy ending to the weaning story is that they've both been weaned for some time now, thank heavens!

The first thing people always ask me about raising kids in France is whether my husband and I speak to our kids in French or English. The answer is that I speak to them in English, my husband uses both, depending on the circumstances, he and I speak to each other in English, and they get pure French at school and from their babysitter.

The second canonical question is what language the kids speak. The answer is both and neither. That is, both in Nico's case and (almost) neither in Leo's...

Before having kids, I read a whole bunch of books about raising kids in bilingual households, and they all said that typically such kids learn language very late, but that they learn both languages well. Also, everyone knows boys learn language later than girls. So you can imagine how enthusiastiacally we were patting ourselves on the backs as champion brainiac parents when -- despite all that -- Nico was an early talker, saying several words correctly and consistently before he was a year old, and having a big vocabulary of French and English words -- including simple sentences -- at 18 months. Then you can imagine our corresponding surprise when Leo decided it would be more prudent to follow the textbook model of the bilingual child, and is just now starting to say a lot of different words at the age of 2 1/2.

Leo's vocabulary includes words like "airplane," which is his word for all things that fly, such as airplanes, birds, and the dragon in Shrek. He also has his own special use for the phrase "thank you" (i.e., when he sees something he wants, he holds out his little hand and starts yelling "Thank you!" over and over until you give him the desired object). Plus he's learned the French words for "dog" and "cat" ("chien" and "chat"), but since he can't really tell them apart, he just kind of slurs the ending to the word so that it could be either one.

So -- just as it happens with many parents -- our first child taught us all about what kids are like, and then the second one taught us that all that stuff we learned from the first one wasn't really so much info about kids in general, but rather was only relevant to that one kid. I think it was a famous mathematician who once said, "I used to have three theories about child-rearing and no kids; now I have three kids and no theories about child-rearing." I'm kind of like that myself, except that I have only two kids, and I hate to think I was ever presumptuous enough to imagine I had a theory of child-rearing other than "Love 'em lots, and good luck!"

So when they're watching their favorite show (The Wiggles), we have Nico on the one hand who at 4 can read and write the word "Wiggles," and Leo, who has just learned to say "Wiggles" -- in fact pronounces it "Gigo," but he says it often enough that we know what he's talking about. Here I really ought to launch into a few paragraphs making fun of the Wiggles, but I can't bring myself to do it -- it would just be too easy. I assume many of you Utah Valley folks have small kids, so you know what I'm talking about. Just think of your favorite joke at the Wiggles' expense and imagine you read it here.

Now please don't take the above stories as an indication that we're treating the two differently from each other and/or playing favorites. Each one is going at his own pace, and they'll both turn out just fine. Each one is different, and it's not as if one has problems and the other doesn't.

Actually, we ended up having a few parent-teacher conferences at Nico's nursery school last year regarding the fact that little Nico seemed to be off in his own dreamworld instead of being interested in socializing with the other kids. I'm in favor of any sort of special attention his teachers and his daddy think he needs, but on some level I have a hard time seeing this as a very serious problem since all of my own kindergarten teacher's comments -- which my mother saved -- contain exactly the same remark, and I turned out more or less OK, in my opinion, anyway. In fact, now Nico has already found himself a good friend at school, and he's only 4. I'm pretty sure I didn't make any friends until I was at least 6 or 7, so as far as I'm concerned, he's socially precocious.

Now you're probably thinking that, in the interest of full disclosure, before reproducing with my husband I should have warned him about my early childhood development. In my defense, I have to tell you that he and I have been married for five years and we knew each other for five years before that (not to mention that we obviously met in the pre-existence and everything), so if he's just figuring out just now that I have a slightly different definition of "normal" than your average normal person, then he hasn't been paying very close attention.

As well as Nico's social development is going, it turns out that Leo is even more socially precocious than Nico. Just the other day, Leo and I were at a department store and he tossed his stuffed kitty off the escalator. His daddy told him that that wasn't a very clever thing to do, but the result was that two pretty girls rushed to bring him the kitty and took the opportunity to tell him how cute he is. So even if he's a little behind on language, at least he's right on track with respect to those social skills that are so important for a handsome young Frenchman.

So you see that our two little bilingual babies are on their way.


Published in the Utah Valley Monitor November 17, 2005.