Reading Magic (Audio!)

Audio recording of me reading this post is included as an attachment at the bottom of the page! I figger this is too many words to actually read on a screen, but it only takes five minutes to listen to ;)

That warm, tingling buzz rolled over me the first time I read aloud the words in my book. Maybe it wasn't the first time I'd ever read, but it's the first time I remember that magic-feeling happening. It happened with my favorite book, which I loved because it was full of cartoon-y illustrations of cats trying on hats (My favorite one was a floral straw hat with a big blue ribbon). There's a mishmash of moments I remember as one event, though I think it's an amalgamation of many. Sitting in my mom's lap with the book open before us. Her finger dragging underneath each word as she read aloud. Me sounding out each individual letter and building them into a stuttered word. Looking up to my mom for confirmation. The magic buzz running down my body when I got it correct. Reading aloud with my mom. Reading aloud by myself. Reading. Magic.

Magic. Magic. Magic.

In my junior year of college, I spent a semester and one month in France. Other countries begin teaching their students how to speak a foreign language as small children, but in the USA we typically don't start learning until high school, when we're already teenagers and that elastic-y part of your brain that naturally absorbs language has already started to harden. Despite my genuine desire to learn French, I was an extremely average student and embarrassed by how poorly I communicated, first in the classroom and then, as a 21-year-old, in the country itself. "Caveman French" is how I described my level of fluency. All the improvement I gained during my seven months immersed in the language quickly evaporated once I returned back to the USA to graduate school and start working. One thing I did keep from my trip, however, was that cute British boy I met, and by default his French mother who periodically offered to help me practice when Matt and I came to visit her in England, but I was always too embarrassed to really take her up on it.

Matt's sister got married just under two years ago, so Matt's very internationally-scattered family convened in one place for the first time in the nearly two decades I have been a part of it. Which meant I finally got to meet The French Contingent! My Mother-in-Law's sister and her adult children were there and gabbing away a million miles per minute in their native tongue and oh my heart. My heart felt like it had been physically struck by how powerfully I wanted to understand and speak French with them.

When I returned home, I dove head first into my library's audiobooks for learning French and listened to them religiously while riding my bike (Learn French with Paul Noble and the Pimsleur series are by far my top recommendations). Progressively, I began subscribing to beginner French podcasts, re-watching familiar movies in the French soundtracks, downloaded some learning apps (Again, let me sing the praises of Pimsleur's app. I am not affiliated with any of these links in any way! I am a genuine fan!), started meeting a tutor for an hour once a month, wrecked Matt's and my shared YouTube account's recommendation feature by getting it cluttered up with history videos in French, and, finally, at long last, took my Mother-in-Law up on her offer to practice with me.

If it's wrong to FaceTime in Caveman French with your Mother-in-Law for an hour in the morning (her evening) every Thursday, then I don't want to be right.

After our first couple calls, it became clear that we'd benefit from having a topic to focus on, beyond the general "How are you? What are you up to? How's the garden?" We started with a generic beginner book for students and then graduated to Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

During my semester abroad as a 21-year-old, I had bought a copy and attempted to read it, but my handwritten notes in the margins taper off after the first couple chapters so I suspect I didn't finish it. Now a 41-year-old, I began reading this same book again, but this time with my husband's mother.

First I would read it on my own, underlining words to translate and jotting down notes with my questions. Then we would have our Thursday morning conversation over video calls (It's so cool to live in the future) where I would read aloud from my book while she followed along in hers, stopping me when my pronunciation was too egregious to let it pass. Then she'd ask me for my questions and we'd talk about what actually happened in the chapter and what the meaning of the chapter was (Ol' Saint-Exupéry was real into metaphors, my friends) and I secretly basked in the glow of that old reading magic.

Pronouncing a word correctly the first time? Magic. 

Stumbling on a word so Matt's mom gently states it correctly and then I repeat her pronunciation back and then I get it right? Magic. 

Tripping over a word, realizing myself that I fucked it up and correcting it before she has the time to do so? Magic. 

Reading in French with my Mother-in-Law? Magic.

Reading French? Magic.

Magic. Magic. Magic.

It's paid off. In these last not-quite two years my French is now better than it was when I lived abroad. Grammar rules and conjugations that I simply could not wrap my head around at the time are now coming to me, even actively making sense. At this point, I'd say I speak Sophisticated Caveman French (About a B1 on the CERF). Speaking French really does feel like magic, it makes my whole body hum. But in addition to that... there's the magic of reading together with someone else, of reading with a mom. It's something special. It's love. It's magic.