Foreign Language Clubs - Advanced Level Discussion Topics by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Foreign-Language Clubs – Advanced Level Discussion Topics by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once you have secured a place for your foreign-language discussion club, I think the following topics are good ones to discuss at the intermediate level:

All these topics must be discussed in the target language:

1-Self-introduction.  Tell why you want to improve your language skills.  How much of the target language have you studied already and where did you study.  Do you have any tips that would be helpful to you.

2-Do a sales presentation for your business or school in the target language.

3-Give a summary and evaluation of a film you have seen.  Answer questions.

4-Give a summary and evaluation  of a book you have read.  Answer questions.

5-Talk about a recipe you have made.  Go through it step by step.  Give tips to make it successfully.

6-Talk about a trip you have taken and give tips.  Answer questions.

7-Talk about a museum, aquarium, or historical site you have visited.  Give some tips for visiting it.  Answer questions.

8-Talk about a play or documentary you have seen and evaluate it.  Answer questions.

9-Talk about a specific region in the country whose language you are studying.  Answer questions.

10-Talk about and analyze a biography of a famous person, who spoke the language you are studying.

11-Talk about the major industries of the country whose language you are studying.  Answer questions.

12-Talk about agriculture in the country whose language you are studying.  Analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats affecting industry in these countries.  Answer questions.

13-Talk about the political parties in the country whose language you are studying.  Analyze their political standpoints and talk about the current balance of power in these countries.

You can find information about foreign political parties in the CIA Factbook.  It is available online.

14-Discuss what American products could be sold in the country whose language you are studying.  Answer questions.  The foreign-language clubs sponsored by foreign governments tend to focus on bringing their products and services into the US only and not bringing American business into their countries.

15-Discuss the products that the country whose language you are studying is famous for.  Examine packaging on products from the country you are studying.  Study meanings associated with the color.  Color associations are not the same in every culture.

16-Tell someone how to set up a computer over the telephone in the language you are studying.

17-Troubleshoot what could be wrong with wi-fi that is not working over the telephone.  Try to find solutions.

18-Tell a nurse symptoms of illness you have in the language you are studying.  Answer questions.

19-Arrange to have a tow truck come for your stalled vehicle in the foreign language you are studying.

20-Ask a hotel concierge for information on eco-tourism outings in your area.

These questions will get you to a pretty good level in the language.  You can form a club with your university alumni group, National Guard group, religious organizations, or athletic clubs. 

Private rooms in ethnic restaurants and pizzarias might let you rent a room, if you purchase food and drink. 

You only need 5 or 6 people in a club to have a good 1-hour discussion group.

Once you have reached a good level, you might consider watching foreign news broadcasts

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 5 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 5 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Once in Wisconsin, the Sawles bought a dairy farm, set up a mill on a stream on their property, set up chicken coops, and made friends with the pig farmers down the road.  They had blackberry bushes on their property for pie and grew strawberries and cantaloupe.  They added nasturtium leaves to lettuce for salads.

Aunt Winnie also picked a white wildflower and deep fried it for lunches with salads.  I think this flower is a wild black locust flower.  The center is black, but the flowers around it are white.  Before deep-frying it, the wildflower is dunked in a batter made with egg, flour, and cream.  It crunches like a French fry, but has a sweet flavor.  I loved these as a kid.

The Sawles supplemented their basic goods at home with market goods like cheese, coffee, and oysters for New Year’s oyster stew.  I remember Aunt Winnie showing me Chinese bok choy cabbage and saying that she and Uncle Sam chopped it up to go with a vinegar-and-oil salad.  I think she alternated bok chou with baked beets dressed in vinegar-and-oil dressing as a salad.  Both are anti-oxidants.

They also bought watermelons in town and made watermelon rind pickles for winter after the cores had been eaten.

Aunt Winnie had a sense of humor.  She once made me Christmas Mincemeat pie and said you had to have beef suet in it to give the chopped fruit the right texture.  She told me that younger girls in families tended to eat a lot of it.

The farm was very self-sufficient, because bacon was eaten everyday.  Roast beef with potatoes, salad, and pie was Sunday lunch.  This farm was English and New England through heritage.  I love what my female ancestors set up after arriving here on a boat.

On the Wisconsin farm, morning glories and gladiolus flowers were permanently on the dining tables in the summer to liven up meals.

I found recipes for the cookies Aunt Winnie made in British Cookery, including saffron ones.

My great-great grandmother probably learned recipes from her female ancestors in Cornwall.  Our official family genealogists David and Frances located birth certificates and gravestones for Margaret’s ancestors including her mother with the same name – Margaret Dunn, Elizabeth Curgenven, Eliza Wakel, Frances Collett, Marry Andrew, Barbara Wills, and Jane Dorrington.

Margaret Dunn Rowe no doubt learned to make Cornish pasties filled with beef and vegetables from her mother.  Pasties resemble meat pies called empanadas from Galicia, Spain originally.

My great-great grandmother, Charlotte Sawle, live in a sea captain’s row house in Porscatho, England.  As a child, I stayed in her quayside home, which had become a bread and breakfast and collected snails on the quay stairs like my ancestors. 

Now I imagine Charlotte Sawle entertaining guests with rum-based English drinks like Cornish punch, rumstafian, and Samson.

Our family’s genealogists have documented a mother line that extends back to 1688 when one Rebecca Hay married Pasco Collins in that year.

I wonder if the chocolate fudge, brown sugar penuché fudge, and confectioner’s sugar divinity fudge that my family eats and makes comes from Pasco’s mother?

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 4 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 4 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Then, Aunt Winnie confided to me what I think may have been the real reason for my mother’s family’s immigration to the U.S.”

Grandma Rowe did not like her mother-in-law; she drank too much beer.

For a woman who disapproved of drinking alcohol, being part of the Sawle clan must have been particularly onerous.

A quote from Laurence O’Tool’s The Roseland Between River and Sea perfectly illustrates Margaret’s source of consternation:

Typical is the farm outside of Gerrans called Parton Vrane…It was for long, home of a family called Sawle, and said to be a notorious haunt of smugglers.  Their practice was to land the contraband near Rosteague, and hurry across to the farm before daylight.  Here it was hidden, until it could be carried inland by bridle paths, or taken to the nearby lane to the creek.  There was always a ready market for cheap spirits among the tinners across the Fal.

Given this family background, great-great grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe convinced her husband Stephen to sell his ship, the Naiad, and go settle in the United States.

The Sawles entered the United States at Philadelphia and set out for Wisconsin with 21 covered wagons of goods after taking a side trip to Niagra Falls.

End Part 4.

To be continued..

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The buckwheat pancakes Aunt Winnie served may have been an Americanization of the oatcakes made in Scotland.  Buckwheat pancakes taste like sour flour to me, but are supposed to be good for you.

I never cared for buckwheat pancakes, but I always ate two or three of them with maple syrup to please Aunt Winnie.

One Scottish food my family seems to have dropped once they settled in the U.S. was haggis.  Plenty of my ancestors must have eaten it though.  According to British Cookery, haggis has been around since the 15^th century.

Haggis is a boiled sheep’s stomach stuffed with entrails and cooked.  Dare I say, “Thank goodness, there are not too many sheep in Wisconsin.”  However, I have eaten a Mexican version of this dish and liked it, so maybe I would like haggis.

British Cookery helped me understand what I thought was an anomaly in Aunt Winnie’s kitchen – using potato water in her homemade bread.  The cookbook said that the cooks in the north countries of England used potatoes more in their cookery, since it was one of the few crops that grows well in its colder climate.  I felt like I had discovered an heirloom ring when I read that.

Aunt Winnie baked bread daily.  She told me as she would toast a few slices, “You should always make as many foods as you can yourself.  It’s better for your health.”  She taught me how to make bread by hand and recognize the elastic feel of properly kneaded and twice risen and punched down yeast bread.

Following this philosophy of life, she managed to eat a diet rich in cream, butter, and salt till she was 106.

British dishes using alcohol did not make it on family menus in the Americas thanks to my maternal great-great grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe.  Both she and my great-great grandfather Captain Stephen Sawle came from Cornwall, England in Great Britain’s southwestern peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Cornwall is famous for shipwrecks and tin mines.  Aunt Winnie told me that her grandmother Margaret Dunn Rowe “wanted to come to America, so her husband would not go down with his ship.”  She was from a farming family in England.  She wanted to be landed gentry and there was plenty of land to buy in Wisconsin.

The Sawle Family did regain access to fish, though, when my grandfather Frank Sawle purchased a cabin on the Wisconsin River.  Pan fried fish is great fresh out of the water and freezes well.

End of part 3.

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Mother Lines Genealogy - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Mother Lines Genealogy – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Lard was part of the crust recipes for pie that Aunt Winnie gave me, too.  Even though blackberries grew on the farm, Aunt Winnie only wanted rhubarb and lemon meringue pie to be part of her recipe list.  Both have a tangy, sweet taste that I love.

“Mother made her fruit pie crusts with butter,” Aunt Winnie remarked about my great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson.

“She filled the crust with sugared peaches or strawberries and would top them off with ice cream or whipped cream,” Aunt Winnie continued.

The crusts required no baking, which made me think I could even master them.

“And how many cups of fruit would she use?” I methodically asked.

“Three or four,” she answered as I thought of how good blackberries would taste in this recipe.

My great-grandmother Jeanette Hodgson taught Aunt Winnie how to cook as my great-great grandmother Elizabeth McFarland taught Jeanette Hodgson how to cook.  The foods Aunt Winnie cooked were both English and Scottish.  (Elisabeth McFarland was a schoolteacher, too.)

Cooking tends to pass down through mothers.  The English Sawles ate a lot of roast beef like the English with potatoes substituted for Yorkshire pudding in the New World, but there were some Scottish items on the dairy farm menus, too, as I discovered later when I read through the cookbook British Cookery.

This particular cookbook represents a real gift to anyone interested in finding out what their British ancestors ate.  The book was compiled “Based on research undertaken for the British Information Service of Food from Britain and the British Tourist Authority by the University of Strathclyde.”

British Cookery gives a brief history of British food since 1066, including sample menus for country parsons as well as the poor, the development of meals, and the effects of foreign trade on foodstuffs.  Most importantly, British Cookery gives a regional breakdown of characteristic dishes with their recipes.

I looked up Scotland and discovered that oatmeal and pancakes were considered regional breakfast foods.  When there were groups of us staying at the dairy farm, oatmeal and buckwheat pancakes would always stream out of the kitchen in addition to eggs and bacon.

End of Part 2

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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