If I could speak Kinyarwanda as well as Baptiste speaks English, I would be proud of myself... This being said, Baptiste’s English is very basic and we can’t really have a conversation together. When we try, we often end up with some puzzling misunderstanding. Two of my favourites recurring mistakes are his confusion between ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken’ and between ‘you’ and ‘ me’ (or ‘your’ and ‘mine’). I show him a picture of Elana and he says: ‘ Oh, my wife?’ , I reply: ‘No, mine!’. In his interlanguage, ‘you’ means ‘me’ and ‘me’ means ‘you’... but not always...
When I ask him about some shopping he is supposed to do, he says: ‘tomorrow, you go to Muganza to shops’. I say: ‘No, not me, you’. He agrees: ‘Yes, you’.
Between you and me, I find this a bit confusing...
I ask him: ‘what’s for dinner’. He answers: ‘kitchen’. ‘No, Baptiste, you eat in the kitchen. Repeat after me:
I eat chicken in the kitchen’
‘I eat kictchen in the chicken’
No. Repeat...
Bloody teachers! Oh, by the way the Kinyarwanda name for chicken is ‘inkoko’. Cute! I have no idea how to say ‘kitchen’! Baptiste is still ahead of me in his language acquisition process...
No comments:
Post a Comment