Our faithful former childminder, T, is coming round on Friday nights to play games with the boys and talk to them in French. They are moderately open to this and are still very fond of T who is a lovely man. Usually I leave them to it but last Friday they had a game that needed a fourth so I played too. In fairness to the boys, their comprehension is still pretty good and they both made a reasonable effort to speak some French as well. However, I noticed that Michael is getting a bit of interference from Irish. For him, it’s all about communicating and where his brother and sister would rather be silent than be wrong, he will always give it a lash and is usually broadly comprehensible. So he would say a sentence in French and often the noun would come to him in Irish so, for example, speaking about the other side of a card, instead of saying “l’autre côté” he said “l’autre taobh”. It took me a while to work out what he was getting at as he gave “taobh” the full welly in terms of French pronunciation. Poor T was, of course, utterly baffled. I trust it may all work itself out.
