Free Elodie and Heloise by Cecilee Linke Page A

imagined that taking French classes for someone who’d never taken French before was a completely different experience. As a child, she wasn’t given long lists of vocabulary words to memorize. At least, that’s how it looked to her from having rifled through Kyle’s French textbook. She just heard it all the time and it sunk in. Everything with French was like second nature to her and she couldn’t think of how to explain it. “Well, the ‘r’ in French is.... français, la France, regarder, it’s more down in the throat, so.”
    “Yes I know, because it sounds like my cats coughing up hairballs every time Madame Weston speaks to us in French,” Kyle joked. “I mean..... not to sound naive or anything, but how do you just learn the language? I feel like after three years of Spanish, I can barely hold a conversation with someone in Spanish. If I were in Mexico, I’d probably get into more trouble than not because of how horrible my Spanish is.”
    “I haven’t heard you speak Spanish, but again, I’ll believe you.” 
    “Anyway, so Heloise, did you hear it all the time as a kid and that’s how you picked it up? I mean, maybe that’s what I really need. Maybe I just need to hear it all the time instead of for only forty-five minutes once a day, and then I’ll pick it up.”
    “Pretty much yeah. That’s how I learned it. Mom and Papa both spoke to us in French, though Papa did most of it. Mom speaks some French but not as much as Papa. Well, I mean, Papa is French. But see, we played games, sang songs, read stories, watched television....” She stopped before she got too carried away. She didn’t want to give away too much about herself just yet. “It’s no different than how you learned English. I just got two languages instead of just one.”
    “Have you actually been over to France to speak it?” Kyle inquired. His attention was purely focused on Heloise in front of him, his tone of voice indicating that he seemed genuinely interested in what she’d have to say.
    Heloise shook her head. “We were going to go a few summers ago, but then Papa got called in to work at the last possible moment and we couldn’t go. So we haven’t been yet to France. Mémé and Pépé, Papa’s parents, have come here to visit us, but I don’t even really remember their visit. And there’s Aunt Marie but she lives in Richmond so we visit her every so often. Someday I’ll go to France though. I’ve seen all the pictures of Mom and Papa’s trip to France when they met and those pictures always struck me.... Anyway.” She stopped herself short again and chuckled nervously.
    “No no it’s fine, Heloise. Really. I really enjoy hearing about these things. Where I come from, no one has done much traveling or anything foreign for that matter. Like I told you the other night, I’m from Wytheville, which is a really small town. Larger than this town, but it’s not huge like Paris or anything. So I’ve been fascinated with foreign cultures because they’re so different from what I know. This of course coming from someone who has never traveled outside of the US,” Kyle responded. “I’ve never even been out of the state, now that I think of it. But oh man, I’d love to see some of Europe. Someday.”
    Heloise smiled and nodded, as did Kyle. Both of them giggled before Heloise resorted to her usual serious tone. They hadn’t done much in the way of tutoring yet, but neither of them seemed to mind. 
    She cleared her throat and opened his French textbook again. “So you’re in French One, I’m assuming?” She continued looking through his textbook, occasionally stopping at the beginning of chapters and looking at the awkward poses of some of the people in the textbook, not to mention the listening activities included in each lesson.
    “Sure am. Starting at the very beginning. It’s weird for me to start all over with a foreign language. And a lot of these things in French are similar to Spanish. You know,