Parlez-vous Quebecois?

We have an impromptu French tutor staying with us for the month of July. Raphaelle is the 14-year old daughter of some friends from Montreal. When her mother found out we were going to be spending some time in France, she offered to have Raph come down to TCI for a few weeks to help the girls get used to the language (and to get Raphaelle away from home for a bit!). She's a great kid who has really taken to the girls and her job...and Chico.  And, she has not only been helpful with French tutoring and generally hanging out with the girls, she is preparing us for what life with a teen age daughter is like (these days that means lots of Facebook and IM, plus the time honored teenage tradition of sleeping in til noon). I hope ours are as well mannered as Raphaelle when they get to be her age.

Actually Raphaelle has been here before, five years ago when we did a home exchange with her family. Ironically we have never met her parents live (only through email) but we feel like we know them and now that we have met Raphaelle we can tell she comes from good stock.

Most days she puts Lindsey and Savannah through the paces of an informal French lesson, using an array of books she brought down, and engaging them in conversation. Part of the whole idea was to help Raphaelle get more comfortable with English, too, but she is much more fluent in that language than we are in French so I am not sure how much help we are in that regard. She seems to enjoy hanging out with the girls and their friends and there doesn't appear to be much of language barrier at all. They have gone to the beach, the movies and even Beaches for a day so Raphaelle would seem to be having a fun summer (she keep her Facebook page very up to date with her latest photos, which are quite creative and artistic).

Being from Montreal, Raphaelle speaks a slightly different version of the French language than we'll have to deal with (I am sure some Parisians might call it a foreign language altogether). The Quebecois dialect can be challenging even for the most fluent of French speakers, and there are actually entire words and phrases that are unique to that version of the language. We're using French flashcards with the girls (plus experimenting with Rosetta Stone), which are based on Parisian French, and it's interesting to hear Raphaelle offer up the Quebecois version of some of the terms. But she speaks kid which is the most important language this summer.

It's been fun having Raphaelle around this summer as part of our family. I just wish we could take her to France as our personal translator