Bilingual Bible

Since we hope to go to Quebec sometime this year, it's time to stop procrastinating on learning French. But the summer is so busy--we needed a way to integrate it into what we've already got going.

One thing we've already got going is our evening reading time with the kids. Each night before bed, Dave reads a chapter of the Bible with them. So I ordered a French Bible through my local Christian bookstore and started reading it aloud as well. My accent and pronunciation are atrocious, I'm sure, but I'm not completely clueless. I had the good fortune to take a conversational course in high school, just for the enjoyment of it. It was a much better learning experience than parsing verbs in the classroom.

We started back in Genesis (Genese), which is nicely repetitive. Spazzerific read the English, verse by verse, and I read the French, verset a verset. We only read eight verses, but by the time we'd done that, they were starting to catch on to a few of the words. We also made some French-English linguistic connections, such as ciel and cieling.

The kids think it's really cool. Spazz loves being the decoder, which is 180 degrees opposite of "I hate French," spoken mostly to irritate. They asked me half a dozen times if we'd do it again next time. We will.