Tuesday 9 April 2013
What a funny world of languages
A Lego programme
‘Frau P,
can I do the Lego programme today?’
That
was the greeting my colleague received every morning last week from the oldest
child in our conductive Kindergarten
group.
He meant
that he wanted to lead the lying programme.
He had
been invited to have a go a few days before so that he could experience what it
was like to have to speak at the same time as a child who just never leaves off
chattering, a child just like he is. My colleague swapped places with him and
she pretended to be the chattering child. He did very well and had been
pleading ever since to lead the ‘Lego programme’!
An explanation is
needed
But I do not know where to begin.
Do I explain first where the word Lego comes
from, or do I describe the variety in the life in our group with its so many
languages and funny accents?
Let me begin with the
languages
Russian, French, Arabic, Turkish, German,
Spanish, Greek, English and Hungarian. Take your pick – there is at least one
person in the group who will converse with you no matter which of these
languages you choose.
Even if you decide to speak German with a strange accent,
like I do, the children won’t mind, in fact most of them will have one too and
the others will have great fun copying you.
When these children began Kindergarten those
with no native German speaker as a parent would probably have had little to no
exposure to the German language. Those with one German parent are usually
fluent in German and perhaps also in a second language.
Most of those children whose first language
could be Russian, French, Arabic, Turkish, German, Spanish, Greek or Hungarian,
pick up German very quickly while playing with their friends all day long in Kindergarten.
Even so, as they get older
they all attend German-language classes during their pre-school year to get
them up to scratch so that reading-, writing-, and arithmetic-learning does not
come any harder than to their German peers.
This is just what the little Turkish boy who
wanted to lead the Lego/lying programme has been doing for over a year now. He
has blossomed since his language classes began. He has developed such good
skills with the German language that we are at last able to experience his
wonderful sense of humour at last. We are also able to experience his never-ending
chatter.
That brings us back to why he was offered the opportunity to try to
lead the lying programme while a conductor pretending to be a child was
chattering continuously.
He loved leading the
Lego Programme
The lying programme in German is the Liegeprogramm. The German word Liege sounds like ‘Lee-ge’.
Lego in German is pronounced ‘Ley go’.
These two different words sound very similar
to a seven-year-old Turkish boy whose bedroom floor is cover with Lego bricks!
So, just as I swapped csipő (hips)
for cipő (shoes) throughout my first
Hungarian lying programme exam, this child replaced Liege for Lego, and I doubt, just like for a while in that spina
bifida group in the Pető Institute long ago, it will ever be the quite same
again!
I think that these children with different
mother tongues do amazingly well. There is also a Columbian, an Iraqi and
another Hungarian in the larger Kindergarten group but the rest of the fifteen
children there are German and there are native German-speaking staff-members.
All the children have ample opportunities to
hear Germans speak German in our integrated Kindergarten.
I often wonder whether we are an integrated Kindergarten because we have children
with and without motor disorders or because we have so many different languages
and cultures amongst us.
When these children come to the three-week
long Pető sessions it is more difficult for them to develop their language
skills and we have a lot of fun while discovering about the different foods
that children bring with them for breakfast, and from learning new words and
from teasing each other about our strange pronunciations.
Parlez vous Français?
We all now sing Frère Jacques in four different languages. I learnt this song as a
child in French not English and this is always my first choice of language when
I sing it. Later I learnt it at the Pető Institute in Hungarian and at the same
time, also from the Hungarians, I learnt it in English. Now we all sing it
together in German.
One day while working in this same group I
was singing along in my Norfolk-accented French when I heard someone singing
along with me. It was a four-year-old boy, the newest member of the group,
whose father from Cameroon speaks French at home.
But just wait a minute!
That was not French that I was hearing, it
was German, but it sounded just like the words that I was singing. The rhythm
was the same the melody of the voice was the same but something was not quite
right.
We all eagerly requested a solo performance
and we discovered that this is how it went in French-German –
‘Schwere Sache, Schwere
Sache, dorme du?’
That is just about German and means —
‘Difficult things, difficult things, do you
sleep?’
The child who sang this solo speaks German
almost exclusively but his father speaks to him in French. He understands his
Dad but responds in German. It is almost that he refuses to speak in French, as
was the case in this song.
Tuning in our ears
So in our multi-cultural Pető group we take
part in Lego programmes, usually without the bricks and sing about Difficult
Things instead of Brother John. We also have a great deal of fun and what
outsiders think when they first hear us all, goodness knows! I hope that it is
as funny for their ears as it is for our own.
Conductors who have moved from other
countries to train to be conductors or to work in their trade will know and
understand the problems that the children in this particular integrated
conductive Kindergarten are up
against.
Most clients outside of Hungary who are
receiving a conductive education and upbringing from conductors will have
experienced their mother tongue being spoken in a foreign accent. It always
amazes me how well these children do. They seem to understand almost through
osmosis what to do, just as I am convinced that this is how I first functioned
when I began my training at the PAI.
How foreign is
foreign?
I often tell the story about one of my very
few early experiences of working conductively in English. It was with twin
four-year-old Polish boys in Canada who had, in their short lives, mostly
experienced the English language as spoken by Hungarian conductors. It was
quite obvious at the start of our work that they did not understand my Norfolk-English.
They thought that I was really foreign although I had actually felt so at home
over there in that part of the British Commonwealth.
Conductive terminology
in foreign!
What to call what? That is something that
crops up less often these days as a theme for discussion. As conductive work
becomes established in different countries words for what we do, what we use
and what we wish to describe become established within the conductive
community. We often forget that they are not understood outside our conductive
worlds.
Recently I was spontaneously asked to speak
in English about the up and coming World Congress for Conductive Education, for
a voice-over on a film. This happened in Germany. No problem one might assume
for an English native speaker. My Hungarian colleagues all thought so too, but
it was a huge problem for me. I had no idea where to begin I did not know what
people say in English. Yes, perhaps I am a native English-speaker, but not one
who has spoken about conductive upbringing using the English terminology that I
required now. I declined that spontaneous request!
The different
languages and cultures in my life
I would really miss the multi-culture in my
conductive lifestyle if I only worked and lived only in my native Englishness.
I know that my work would be very different if
I were not English but it would also be very different again if I was not
influenced by so many other cultures and languages. I hope that the lives of
our littlies in Kindergarten are
enriched from the integration of cultures just as they are enriched by their
integration with children with, and without, motor disorders.
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