We’re at only lesson 9, 10 meetings total, of my granddaughter’s French lessons. She has total comprehension of sentences like Le pirate dirige le bateau a l’allemagne avec la jeune fille et son amie pour voir l’amie du serpent blanc. Comment s’appelle l’amie du serpent? And so on. I have built in comprehension checks via hand signals on her part, answering questions I give her, and adding to the story. My only concern now is that we have lots of new words I need to work into the discourse without leaving out her personal responses. Tough, b/c those responses create a need for new words. I don’t want to overrun myself aka get out over my skis (1st world reference).
Today for the first time I introduced liaison via chez elle. The only English analogy I could think of was “it is > ’tis” and in some dialects, “i tisz.” I also introduced the usual pronunciation of ‘il’ as ‘i’. I checked Rodney Ball’s Colloquial French to verify the frequency and distribution of both phenomena.
P.S. Correct any French I put in here. My weaknesses are idiomaticity and current vocabulary. (I asked a professor of French recently about ‘demeurer’ for ‘habiter’ and he said it’s fine, but other sources indicate it is bookish. Reading two French review grammars of considerable age, I see they use ‘demeurer’ as well, so that’s where I got it from. It must be a fairly recent change in French or the books are hopelessly literary in tone.)