Mini-Elbeno is taking weekly French classes, and has a CD of French children’s songs, which we have been listening to for the past several weeks. I now know almost all of them and find myself humming them through the day. Some of them have catchy tunes…
In addition to the well-known ISO standard skylark with all its pluckable parts*, there are also several others. Being children’s songs, they contain a hefty dose of nonsense (or at least non sequitur) and not a little violence:
- A green mouse (une souris verte, qui courait dans l’herbe…).
- Something like the French version of the okey cokey (je fais un pas en avant etc).
- A sort of French version of “one of these things is not like the other” (pomme, peche, poire, abricot, il y en a une de trop).
- Pomme de reinette et pomme d’api which contains the scary warning cachez un poing derrière votre dos ou vous aurez un coup de marteau!
- Fish being eaten by steadily bigger sea creatures culminating in grosse baleine.
- A pizza being made, delivered, then dropped on the ground.
- Something I haven’t completely deciphered yet concerning a peanut, a paper house, and the end of someone’s nose breaking off, flying away, and being retrieved by a jet plane. Seriously.
*Mini-Elbeno loves this one because, of course, of the body parts that we indicate to go with the song. This particular alouette has une tête, un bec (although I’m not sure how one would pluck that), deux ailes, un ventre and un dos but curiously no queue.