La porte du garage ne se leve pas, I said as an opener, se lever being a word we only used once some time ago so I raised my hand up and down. “What are you talking about?” she asked the first time I said it. I repeated, with the gesture and her response was, “So it’s broken,” showing she understood the negative plus porte and garage. A good example b/c there was no context for it.
I followed it up with, un homme va arriver a douze heures and she responded, “And what time is that supposed to be?” (we’ve done only a few numbers), showing she understood everything except the number and that is important b/c heures is not a word we’ve used much in time telling or any other context. This and the former show that she always insists on full comprehension, even if she gets “the general idea”. Oh, and homme is not a word we’ve used a whole lot either. And again, this was all pretty context-free.
I gave her a grammar flood, meaning taking time out to do more than pop-up grammar and vocabulary points, on the Little Red Riding Hood story I had scripted out. The first point was “en” in two different contexts, i.e. where an Eng translation would be different. She immediately asked, “When do you use it?” I told her we would find lots of examples of it as we went along.
The next one was funny. I had had to look up the word ‘detaler’, to bolt. I thought she might now know the meaning of bolt so I asked her and she responded with the tool reference and when I said I thought she might not know it and said it means to ‘take off suddenly, she replied indignantly, “Oh, I know that. I didn’t know we were talking about verbs here.” Funny. She often puts me in my place.
I explained briefly that with the video clips we run into grammar and vocabulary we haven’t been exposed to and I just want to make sure she isn’t confused by it. But her questions show she actually sees value in the clarifications (as long as they don’t go on too long – which is always a hazard with a grammar nut like me).
I asked her why ‘je me suis perdue’ has an -e on it and she said b/c LPCR is a girl. That would have been a good pop-up grammar. I went on to an example of mixed gender resulting in a masculine past participle and all along she just kept indicating she understood. When we first started these lessons, I thought maybe she was just jollying me along but she would later demonstrate she had indeed understood.
Next I began a story with very long sentences where I combined the characters in one story with the characters of another story. She complained of that, saying it is easier for her to comprehend if I keep the stories separate.
Then I started a new story to shake that off (I had it all written out and so will probably go back to it later just to aggravate her)
I was rewarded by her participating in the “asking a story” manner, something I’ve had a hard time with. I set her up to hear ‘fromage’ and she did respond with ‘cheese’, a word we haven’t used in some time. Such nudges reinforce, IMHO, the meaning as opposed to cold recall. Then I used “ils font” and she said ‘make’, important b/c we use fait/s mostly.