After a fortnight’s sulk, our writer is spurred into action when he watches an American actor being interviewed – in French.
Learning a new language might leave you feeling a little red in the face at times, but persevere. Photograph: Alamy.
It probably doesn’t pay to dwell on the past but last week’s blogpost effort would have received, at best, a D+, not least because of the mistakes in tense and grammar that found their way into my copy between reading them on screen and typing them on to the page. There was even a spelling mistake in English. Ouch. It’s quite an experience, submitting your French homework to the nation, but a valuable one, nonetheless. And while my mistakes could have been solved by paying closer attention to the screen in front of me, it does highlight one of the problems inherent in learning a new language: making a tit of yourself in public.
The British tendency to shout a bit louder in order to be understood is well documented, as is the French (and indeed most nations’) willingness to meet us halfway, smile comfortingly, and then launch into English that’s often better than our own. It saves everyone time and embarrassment. Except that, really, we shouldn’t rely on the kindness of strangers or the quality of European education. What we should do is be prepared to put the effort in, to make mistakes.
According to the European Commission, 38% of British people speak at least one foreign language. That’s compared with the European average of 56%. It’s higher than I had imagined, but still lower than it probably should be. That might be because people are lazy. Especially when they grow older, get jobs, and are far more concerned with the upkeep of their social life than learning a language. I know I am.
It’s been nagging at me since the last blog: that horrible, guilty feeling that you’re supposed to be doing something and you’re not. Funny how quickly what should be a brilliant, enjoyable task turns into a chore to be avoided. What a bad, bad biff I am to think of this opportunity as a burden.
Incidentally, if that last sentence made no sense it’s because it’s got a brilliant bit of Scouse slang in it that I learned recently. A biff can be roughly translated as an idiot, a dolt, a bit of a div. I’ve been speaking English for 29 years and had never heard that. I look forward to learning similar regional French insults.
But I digress. Having sulked for a fortnight and avoided all French, I then saw this. It’s Bradley Cooper, giving an interview about The Hangover Two, in French. And not the sort of broken, bonnet de douche rubbish that I’ve been specialising in these past two weeks, but that proper, rude, throaty, tasty looking stuff that I was on about in my first blog. Chill out, Brad, no one likes a show-off, yeah?
Spurred into action, I put in some hard graft, chipping away at the coal face that is Rosetta Stone’s website: I did a solid hour and a half on a Tuesday night after work. I retraced my steps from last time, naturally, and moved on from simply naming things to learning how to ask what things were, how to express the difference between someone who was drinking milk and someone who wasn’t. Unfortunately, the microphone on my computer is broken so it’s difficult for me to grade my pronunciation but my grip on the ils and elles has improved, as has (God willing) my ability to say Le garçon n’a pas de lait. Which I hope means, “The boy has no milk.”
One thing I would say is that because Rosetta Stone base its learning on comparing pictures rather than English words to French, it’s difficult to be exactly sure what each picture means. The picture used to illustrate this phrase could easily represent “The boy without milk” or “He has no milk” and at this stage I’d have no way of checking.
And after all that, I am still on level one, part one. There are five levels to go, each with a further four parts. Bonne chance, as they say.
lab4free 