'jour' and 'giorno' both start with a soft sound. The Latin word they both came from, 'diurnum', starts with a hard 'd'. Nothing was borrowed and nothing was swapped - the 'd' itself went soft, and it went soft for a reason a learner can follow in about five minutes.
• Nine illustrated black-and-white panels, one idea to a page, taking the change from Latin 'diurnum' through to French 'jour' and Italian 'giorno'
• Approximate pronunciation respellings on every form, Latin included, so the change can be heard as well as read
• The stressed-versus-unstressed rule set out on a single panel, with Spanish 'día' and Italian 'lunedì' as the contrast
• A panel on 'buongiorno' and 'bonjour', where the same change turns up inside a greeting the learner already uses
• A second worked example - Latin 'radius' to Italian 'raggio' - showing the change isn't a one-off
• A single reference sheet holding all nine panels on one page
• A sources page
• A short how-to-use guide for the adult
How it prints
The PDF prints two ways. Print the large cards single-sided, laminate them, trim, punch the top-left corner and hold them on one binder ring, and you have a deck a child can pick up, turn over and lay out in order - which matters more than usual here, because the whole thing is a sequence. The cards are numbered so a loose deck goes back the right way round. It fits in a bag and works at the dinner table; it isn't a pencil-case object. You'll need a printer, a laminator and a ring, and you assemble the deck yourself - there's no ready-made version.
The single sheet at the end needs none of that. Print it and the whole change is in front of you at once, start to finish, which is the version for the middle of a lesson or the front of the fridge.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Who it's for
Made first for a curious ten-year-old, but it suits a wider range:
• Learners in KS3 and KS4 studying French, Italian or Spanish
• Anyone taking two Romance languages at once who keeps meeting words that nearly match
• Home-educated children working through a modern language
• Specialist tuition students, including dyslexic learners and those with weak working memory
• Parents and adults picking a language back up alongside a child
• Anyone who likes knowing why a word looks the way it does
This isn't an introduction to French. It assumes the learner already recognises 'jour' and can read a word like 'aujourd'hui' aloud, even if they couldn't say what's inside it. A child in their first few weeks of French will get more from a single word than from a sound change running across three languages.
Why this exists
Learners meet 'jour', 'giorno' and 'día' as three separate things to remember. They're one thing, changed by one rule, and the rule is short enough to hold on to. Once a learner has watched it happen, the same pattern turns up again - in 'raggio', in 'lunedì', in the gap between 'bonjour' and 'buongiorno' - and each of those stops being a fresh item to memorise. The panels carry the explanations, so the adult doesn't have to hold the whole account in their head to talk it through.
I first made this because one of my sons wanted to know how 'jour' and 'giorno' were related.
Related resources
More time and daily-routine words in L'atelier des mots: 'jour', 'aujourd'hui' and 'toujours'.
All three are built on the same Latin day-word. 'Toujours' is 'tous les jours' worn down to one word, and 'aujourd'hui' has a day inside it twice - 'au jour d'hui', where 'hui' is itself the old French word for today, from Latin 'hodie'.
Because the comic follows Italian and Spanish alongside French, the matching words are stocked in the other shops too: 'giorno', 'buongiorno', 'mezzogiorno' and 'oggi' in L'Officina Radice, and 'día', 'buenos días', 'jornada' and 'hoy' in El Taller Raíz.
There are free English word cards on the same family in The Wordhord, and a Compendium article on why word origins help with modern languages.
Available now as a free PDF download.
'jour' and 'giorno' both start with a soft sound. The Latin word they both came from, 'diurnum', starts with a hard 'd'. Nothing was borrowed and nothing was swapped - the 'd' itself went soft, and it went soft for a reason a learner can follow in about five minutes.
• Nine illustrated black-and-white panels, one idea to a page, taking the change from Latin 'diurnum' through to French 'jour' and Italian 'giorno'
• Approximate pronunciation respellings on every form, Latin included, so the change can be heard as well as read
• The stressed-versus-unstressed rule set out on a single panel, with Spanish 'día' and Italian 'lunedì' as the contrast
• A panel on 'buongiorno' and 'bonjour', where the same change turns up inside a greeting the learner already uses
• A second worked example - Latin 'radius' to Italian 'raggio' - showing the change isn't a one-off
• A single reference sheet holding all nine panels on one page
• A sources page
• A short how-to-use guide for the adult
How it prints
The PDF prints two ways. Print the large cards single-sided, laminate them, trim, punch the top-left corner and hold them on one binder ring, and you have a deck a child can pick up, turn over and lay out in order - which matters more than usual here, because the whole thing is a sequence. The cards are numbered so a loose deck goes back the right way round. It fits in a bag and works at the dinner table; it isn't a pencil-case object. You'll need a printer, a laminator and a ring, and you assemble the deck yourself - there's no ready-made version.
The single sheet at the end needs none of that. Print it and the whole change is in front of you at once, start to finish, which is the version for the middle of a lesson or the front of the fridge.
For personal use in home education and tutoring only.
Who it's for
Made first for a curious ten-year-old, but it suits a wider range:
• Learners in KS3 and KS4 studying French, Italian or Spanish
• Anyone taking two Romance languages at once who keeps meeting words that nearly match
• Home-educated children working through a modern language
• Specialist tuition students, including dyslexic learners and those with weak working memory
• Parents and adults picking a language back up alongside a child
• Anyone who likes knowing why a word looks the way it does
This isn't an introduction to French. It assumes the learner already recognises 'jour' and can read a word like 'aujourd'hui' aloud, even if they couldn't say what's inside it. A child in their first few weeks of French will get more from a single word than from a sound change running across three languages.
Why this exists
Learners meet 'jour', 'giorno' and 'día' as three separate things to remember. They're one thing, changed by one rule, and the rule is short enough to hold on to. Once a learner has watched it happen, the same pattern turns up again - in 'raggio', in 'lunedì', in the gap between 'bonjour' and 'buongiorno' - and each of those stops being a fresh item to memorise. The panels carry the explanations, so the adult doesn't have to hold the whole account in their head to talk it through.
I first made this because one of my sons wanted to know how 'jour' and 'giorno' were related.
Related resources
More time and daily-routine words in L'atelier des mots: 'jour', 'aujourd'hui' and 'toujours'.
All three are built on the same Latin day-word. 'Toujours' is 'tous les jours' worn down to one word, and 'aujourd'hui' has a day inside it twice - 'au jour d'hui', where 'hui' is itself the old French word for today, from Latin 'hodie'.
Because the comic follows Italian and Spanish alongside French, the matching words are stocked in the other shops too: 'giorno', 'buongiorno', 'mezzogiorno' and 'oggi' in L'Officina Radice, and 'día', 'buenos días', 'jornada' and 'hoy' in El Taller Raíz.
There are free English word cards on the same family in The Wordhord, and a Compendium article on why word origins help with modern languages.
Available now as a free PDF download.
