I am in France trying to speak French, a language I have never spoken before beyond the few desultory touristic attempts so bad that the French counterpart felt forced into using their English, itself usually limited to a few isolated words badly pronounced, but still superior to my grasp of their language in their country.
In the past I studied Japanese primarily but also a little German. I passed the highest level of the state run Japanese proficiency exam, but never felt comfortable that I could speak the language with wit or a level of competence sufficient for everyday conversation.
I subsequently moved to China and started climbing that language learning hill again – textbooks, exams, conversation classes – the standard route to the top. But I never felt I was moving in the direction of the peak; at best, I was climbing an adjacent lower peak, the one with great signage and more tended paths, the tourist route. Too much time learning numbers and days and verb tenses and useful expressions and not enough learning the language, or so I felt, so I started my own study process which consisted simply of taking Chinese sentences, the bundle of language where is found all grammar and vocabulary, and learning them by heart. I understood enough about the structure of language, its subjects, objects, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and less confidently adverbs, which for whatever reason have always troubled me, to, I felt, bypass all that along the way signage of progress, and just focus on two things: listening and speaking.
And that’s how I have in the last couple of years, more or less, prepared for my arrival in France. I downloaded an app which implements the Anki flashcard system, and on the associated website found an upload from some good soul of 30,000 French sentences graded by difficulty with English translations and audio. I started on the easiest tranche with the first sentence I remember being ‘ca y’est’ and over the next two years every morning, or most mornings, listened and repeated those sentences while walking the dogs along the banks of the Barrow river. At first I heard and understood nothing and only grasped the meaning from reading the English translation. I had a wee bit of grammar from the 3 years of French I did at school 45 years earlier. I probably spent almost a year just repeating those simple sentences over and over again… ‘C’est tout a moi’. Sometime later I started to work on the listening side by downloading a daily news journal in simplified French, ‘le journal en francais facile’ from RFI, Radio France International. My study efforts now moved from their formative phases into their mature phase, and pretty much continued that way with some important tweaks until I left Ireland one week and two days ago. I jogged on the outward leg of the dog walk listening to the new podcast, and on the way back, I walked and repeated French sentences. I graduated along the way to the second tranche of sentences which comprised more complex forms with liberal use of the subjunctive, simple past tense and object pronouns.
One of the disconcerting aspects of trying to study French are words that look like English words, that spell like English words, that have meaning approximate to their English equivalents, but have a very different pronunciation and feel. Take my nemesis, télévision, a word that I’ve struggled to pronounce for as long as I’ve been studying French. Barring a couple of accents, it has identical spelling to its English counterpart. The challenge is to take the word, télévision in this case, and create a separate mental construct for it in our memory. It needs to become its own thing, not a varietal of television, not as the Thai were won’t to say – ‘same, same but different’, not as we see French press coffee and Espresso, as two types of the same thing, but, instead, how we see, coffee and tea, two different things entirely. This process of carving out a mental construct for télévision happens for all new words; it is just more complicated and jarring for those words that have adjacent English equivalents. This takes time, it is one of the long lead time areas of language acquisition, thus the sooner you start the better. And the work happens through the twin engines of exposure and usage. Listening and speaking, listening and speaking…It is thus the same process as that of forming a habit, habit forming, word forming in our minds. When you meet people living overseas, in a country with a different language, even the ones who never studied a jot, even the least intellectually curious one among them, will have picked up, if not perfectly certainly adequately the pronunciation of numbers and other everyday words, what my foreign acquaintances in Korea called ‘taxi Korean’. Yogi yo. With due exposure a form of competence will alight upon us all