School in other languages

In my areas I know several Japanese authors who write in English, and so their work is decently well-known in the USA and Europe...but the French in my area are pretty much ignored b/c it's too much work to read them. Also there are publishing houses here that the French are proud of, but their books aren't readily available outside of France, or even Paris sometimes. So I have French colleagues who get butthurt when I don't cite their paper but it's simply a matter of my ignorance that such a paper existed. The internet obviously helps, as does living here and being in the middle of all the interesting tension.

Interesting.

Maybe this thing I have about the Japanese doesn't apply in academia. In fact now that I think of it, the great mathematician Shizuo Kakutani (father of Michiko) was forced to retire my freshman in college, so I never got to take any classes with him, but the few times I watched him give some other kind of lecture he may have had a little bit of an accent but was very well-spoken, mesmerizing really. On the other hand, now that I think about it, Ronald Coifman, who I think was French or Francophone Swiss, was a terrible teacher! Anyway, never mind my personal beefs, back to the topic at hand.

Naw, Coifman was born in Israel, but he was educated in Switzerland, and spoke English with a French accent, saying "substract" instead of "subtract."

You're certainly right to compare those two groups of nationals re. their national inwardness. It's just that, given how many more scholars in my area there are in France than there are in the USA (like at least 10 to 1 more here than in the USA), I'm more conscious how out of the mainstream French scholarship in my area remains. This isn't true, I gather, in lit and history, but it's certainly true in history and philosophy of mathematics.

Is that what you do, philosophy of math? Do you know Hilary Putnam?

When in France, do you change your screenname to Cauchy? No, I guess not.

I don't know Putnam personally, no. He's pretty old at this point and I'm just getting established. I have good friends who are good friends with him, though...and some who are kinda enemies of his too (philosophy is bloodsport).

xp haha I regret this dorky user name all the time...though at least it's true to my particular dorkiness.

I suppose he is pretty old. What about Ned Block? He's not quite so long in the tooth.

No, I don't know Block either, but you're right, it's less age than area of specialization, and the fact that I rarely travel to the northeast (like for maybe two weeks total for everything northeast of Pittsburgh). Once again, though, I have good friends who are friends, at any rate, with him. It's a small world in analytic philosophy.

OK.

Next naive question, if I may. You are an analytic philosopher and you are in France with some colleagues. But in France, don't they do Continental philosophy? Are the analytic philosophers there some kind of persecuted minority over there like the Huguenots?

haha no that's a good question. The people I spend most of my time aren't analytic philosophers in quite the same sense as in the USA; here they're more historically-oriented, more likely to ask questions like "what is the constitution of objects in geometry" etc, which sounds odd to an American-trained ear. But they're by no means post-modernists (I think I flirt with post-modernism more than my colleagues here do). There are continental philosophers here, of course, but I think they mostly work with people in literature, with whom I have no contact. I don't know the exact numbers, though---partly because are just sooooo many philosophers here (both in Paris and in the provinces).

Thanks Euler that's v interesting stuff! I've spent the last couple of months trying to improve my mainly present-tense conversational French since a move to France may be in my future. My son is going to know French come hell or high water and that's probably the only real way to do it. I'm not an academic but I do computer stuff, which has a whole lot of English involved with it so maybe I'd be OK.

Tracer, just to get you started, the French call the computer "l'ordinateur" and the computer science "l'informatique."

Sweet, nothing can stop me now!

Allez, Tracer! Du courage!

Now that I think of it, I had some friends who were Americans who moved to France as kids, but all I can remember them telling me is some stories about corporal punishment (this was back in the 70s) and something about a different way of structuring essays, an "hourglass" or "reverse hourglass" structure particular-to-general-back-to-particular or vice versa.

Christmas break ends this weekend, so it's a good time to assess how things are going. In brief: my kids have been going to school in France, just outside of Paris, this academic year. They knew only a little French before the year started. My 8 year old and 6 year old have been in a French-as-a-second-language class, while my 3 year old is in half-day preschool. The 3 year old hasn't made lots of verbal progress, though I suspect her brain has been, and will continue to be, seeded to be receptive to French should we return for school here later. But my 8 and 6 year olds have come along tremendously. As I write my 8 year old is playing with a friend from our apartment complex, and they are speaking only French together and it's going just fine. About a month ago my 8 year old told me a story in French---it took her about 15 minutes to tell it, and she didn't drop into English at all. Plus it was no struggle, and she was animated and clearly adding flourishes to it, in French, the whole time. So in 3 months she went from no spontaneous French ability, to very good ability. My 6 year old has done just as well---in some ways, better, as his accent is better than hers (oh, to make the French "r" sound as well as he does)---in fact, his English is taking on a bit of a French accent! And now he's walking around the flat singing some song in French. It's quite remarkable!

Over the break the two of them have had lots of conversations together in French: they're typically silly, but then again, so is much of what they say in English. So far, then, I'd say this has been extremely successfully. I'd hoped in this year they'd reach this point of development, and they reached it in only 3 months. In the next 6 months I'm starting to think they'll reach pretty much full fluency. They're in school so they also do math and reading and so on, and that's all going well too. I'm proud of them: none of this experience has phased them at all; if anything, it's made them kinda cocky (they know they're kicking ass).

I want to add: they're in a French-as-a-second-language class in a normal public school, and they attend math class each day with the regular students in their grades. We have friends here who are paying for fancy private bilingual schools, to ease the transition for their kids, and they're not making anything like the progress my kids are making.

Well done.

One last report for now, as our kids begin school in the USA again tomorrow. As a recap, my kids went to school in France last year, in an ordinary French public school. They didn't know much French going in---they'd done some computer exercises for learning French, but nothing rigorous. After a year of ordinary French public schooling, in a French as a second language program that the schools offer for new immigrants to France, my two oldest kids (now ten & seven) are conversationally fluent in French (speaking & listening), read excellently, and write French well also. They were cleared to enter the ordinary French classes in the next school year, which sadly they won't do as we had to go back to the USA. But we hope to be back in France again very soon, so now the challenge is to work on preserving their linguistic competency.

My littlest one (now four) spent the year in half-days in French public preschool (that is, not a class for immigrants only). She seems to understand French as well as English, & has taken to singing in French. But it's hard to know how much exactly she learned. I suspect a lot, but I think it will only come out when she's immersed in French next time.

I think this was an astonishingly successful thing for our children to have done: in addition to the sheer practical value of speaking two languages at native levels, they have the confidence of navigating a foreign culture from scratch. They've gained a great deal of self-confidence, & awareness of possibilities. It was a wonderful

I suggest you find some american cartoon dvds w/ foreign language options and have them watch the french versions. I used to do this w/ the simpsons - I imagine they're too young for that, but in 2010 it's pretty easy to get french content in america. (esp via the internet)

one nice thing is learning the language at that age, even if they have to relearn stuff, they're gonna have fantastic accents.

Yeah, we should get on that---we have a bunch of Disney dvds we were given as gifts that have French tracks in addition to English. I need to talk to the schools here to see if there's anything they can do. I have colleagues in other places in the USA who've persuaded their school districts to let their kids enroll in high school or even university French courses, despite their being in elementary school. Since I work at the university I can probably arrange the university part w/o the participation of the school district but I'm wondering if there's some way they can do this as part of their ordinary schooling (since they're in school here in the USA a ridiculous amount of time each day, without breaks, daily time is scarce).

xp yeah their accents make me weep, they're so good; my two younger kids actually say their English "R"s like French "R"s sometimes. Relatedly, my oldest was talking to me about muscular "bras" the other day, & I recognized that she was blurring French & English rather than talking about lingerie, but I didn't say anything b/c she'd be self-conscious & b/c I like seeing that she's thinking in French un-self-consciously.

ehh I dunno if I were 10 or 7 I would be intimidated as hell in a hs or college class. maybe find some tutor for an hour or something? my college french classes pretty regularly hit on subject matter that wouldn't be appropriate for a 10 year old.

That's a good point---at this point I just want to sort out what's possible, which might be nothing more than a tutor. I would like to find a "native" tutor rather than just a college major, if possible---since it's a university town there might be exchange students---anyway I'm just thinking out loud as it were.

Have you got an Alliance Francaise near you? They do kids' clubs, film screenings, summer activities etc.