Did you take a foreign language in high school? You can't speak it, can you? Only if you learned outside of the classroom.
Were you cheated? Yes. You were not the first. High schools and colleges do not teach foreign languages so that students learn how to speak them. The schools never have.
When she was in high school, I sent my daughter to live with a family in Switzerland. She was there for six months. When she returned, my wife met her at the airport. Two German brothers were visiting us. They both said she spoke flawless German, but with a French accent common to that region of Switzerland. This is the best way to learn a foreign language.
Second best: the Concordia summer schools. I sent three of my children to this program. They all took German. Why German? It is the most common language of scholarship after English.
Leacock took years of foreign languages. This did him no good, other than to pass required written exams.
This was published in his 1939 book, Too Much College, or Education Eating Up Life.
I remember that when I was a student taking German at college, a criticism reached the ears of our good old professor to the effect that the students never spoke German and never heard it. He was hurt at this, and so at the end of that term he put on what was announced as an oral examination. We were directed, four at a time, into a little room, where the professor and two "outside examiners" were sitting in state as a board of examination.
I went in with three other students and we lined up across the room.
"Setzen Sie sich, meine Herren," said the professor, very impressively. This means, "Sit down, gentlemen."
We stood right there.
"Meine Herren," repeated the professor, as casually as he could, "nehmen Sie, bitte, Platz."
No, sir; not us; we never budged.
"Sit down, gentlemen," said the professor curtly.
Down we sat, all together.
After that year there weren't any more oral examinations.
The same thing could have happened in any North American university, and could have been carried out in any of the modern languages—except in French in French Canada. Yet any of us, with the instruction we received, could have translated ordinary German or French into English, and even put English sentences into French or German by a process like working with a hammer and saw.
I have selected French as the main object of discussion in this chapter because I have had over sixty years of dealing with it and enjoy the advantages for observation that go with residence in a bilingual province. But all that is said here about learning French could be said about learning German, Spanish, Russian or Norwegian.
The fault with our teaching of modern languages is not so much that we teach them wrongly as that we don't succeed in teaching them at all. Ask anyone who "took" Freshman French at college, or learnt French in high school. Only don't ask him in French.
Every year in English-speaking North America a vast phalanx of high school and college students, millions of them, gather for a mass attack on French. They come on against a heavy barrage of declensions, conjugations and exceptions; they are beaten back, gather again and re-form each year till their school-days end in defeat—as glorious and as hopeless as Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Twenty-five years later, when the pupils and students have grown up into adult life, there will be practically nothing left of their French except a few fragments and a little wistful regret and wonder. Ask your friend, the father of a family, what French he knows, and he will say that he knows such things as, "Donnez-moi un bock, s'il vous plaît" and "Garçon, encore un bock." But he learned those on a trip to Paris, in the proper way, by eating and drinking them in.
Let me speak here on my own experience, not from vanity over it or egotism in telling it, but because I think it is typical of that of thousands of others. I learned, or mislearned, my French in the English-speaking Province of Ontario; but what I say of Ontario, for which I have nothing but affection, is not directed against it singly. I am certain that its faults are shared by practically all our English-speaking continent. Of England I am not speaking for the moment; over there the proximity of France and the fact that languages were learned for generations before the schools spoiled the process make things a little different. But not altogether so.
Let me then explain about my experience in Ontario. I am not offering here any criticism against the efficiency and the industry of the many hundred people who teach French in the schools of Ontario. They do what they are compelled to do to meet the strange and disastrous kind of test applied to their pupils. They have to prepare their pupils to pass the matriculation examination of the universities; and they do so. Some of their pupils even pass with distinction; others carry away what is called honours, and are so badly damaged thereby for learning French that a residence of ten years in Paris would hardly effect a complete recovery of their native faculties.
And the amazing thing about the situation is that if Anatole France or Victor Hugo had been sent up to write on an Ontario matriculation examination in French there is not the slightest chance that either of them would head the list; they would be beaten right and left by girls from Seaford High School who never saw the red wings of the Moulin Rouge, and by boys from the Hamilton Collegiate Institute who wouldn't know enough real French to buy a boiled egg in the Café de la Paix. Indeed it is doubtful whether Anatole France and Victor Hugo would have passed at all. The whole examination being a test in English, they would probably have been ploughed and have had to be put under the care of an Ontario special teacher for six months to enable them to get through.
The point that I am endeavoring to make and reinforce with all the emphasis of which I am capable is this: the ability to translate French into English in writing is not a knowledge of French. More than this, it is the very opposite of it. It involves, if exercised persistently and industriously, a complete inability ever to have a knowledge of French. The English gets in the way. The French words are forever prevented from acquiring a real meaning in connection with the objects and actions indicated, because the mind has been trained always and for ever and hopelessly to associate them with English words instead of with things. The process is fatal. The whole system is not only worthless but it is a fraud and an imposition practised upon all those who learn French in such a school method; and the schools are driven to use the method because the colleges impose a written examination of translation and grammar as the criterion of a knowledge of French. For the proof of it I appeal to the candid confession of all those who were trained in this machine. I appeal to such people for corroboration of what I say. All that they learned was directed toward nailing the English word so tight to the French one that nothing can ever prize them apart.
I, myself, speak of what I know. When I was a little boy in England I learned to use a few small phrases in French, such as "Bonjour, Monsieur" and "Au revoir," in the proper and real way; not connecting them with any link to English words but letting them spring out of the occasion. Anybody who understands the matter will understand what I mean. Later on I learnt French in Ontario and entered, traversed, and left the Provincial University with all sorts of distinction in it. Part of the teaching, like part of the curate's egg at the Bishop's table, was excellent no doubt, but the base of it was worthless; it had all been undermined and spoiled and forever rendered futile by the unspeakable matriculation examination which preceded it and which was a necessary preliminary to entrance to the French classes.
I mean it literally and absolutely when I say that I knew more French in the real sense of knowing it when I was a child of six years in England than when I was given first-class honours at graduation by the University. In the first case I knew a little; in the second case I knew not a single word that was not damaged by false association and contact. All the energy and industry and determination that I had put into my college work, all the interest and fascination that I felt for the language, all the pride that I could have felt in really knowing and using it—was dashed to pieces against the stone wall of the barrier erected in my path.
When I graduated I could not use a single word of French without thinking of English. I had to begin painfully and wearily all over again at the very bottom. Somehow I had stumbled upon the secret of a true beginning, and I began to try to collate in my mind the French words and the objects and ideas and to exclude the English. But it was hard work. The college had left its fatal mark deep stamped upon my brain. But at last, many years after my graduation, and with advantage of residence in Montreal, the light began to break.
If I live long enough to forget a little more of what I learnt at school I shall soon be able to speak French as well as a Montreal cab-man talks English. More than that I do not ask. But for my academic education I might have spoken French with the easy fluency with which the girls behind the notion counters of the Montreal department stores rip off their alternative languages. For such higher competence I can only have a despairing admiration. It is not for me. Yet let me speak as the cab-man and the car conductor speak, and I am content to depart in peace. For I shall know that if a French angel (such is the kind I should prefer) opens the gate to me and says "D'où venez-vous?" I shall answer "Je viens de Montréal," without first framing the thought in English.
Let us consider a little further the matter under discussion. The whole of the teaching of school French is directed toward passing the matriculation examination of the colleges. This examination is conducted on paper in English. It has therefore absolutely no connection with the use of the ear as a means of hearing language. In fact, the language is regarded as a thing seen but not heard. I am told that people thus taught, when they land at Calais or Dieppe, are often seen to grasp their ears at the first tingling of the new sensation of hearing a language spoken. Moreover, the examination in question consists, entirely, or almost so, of writing out English translations of French words and of translating written English words into French ones.
The typical form of a French examination test is to hand out to the candidate a rapid-fire series of silly-looking little grammatical difficulties involving a queer sequence of pronouns or something of the sort. Some such exercise as this is given:
Translate into French:
Speak to us of it. Do not speak of it to them with me. Let him have some of it for them. Lend it to us, but do not lend it to them. Etc., etc., etc.
I should like to put Victor Hugo and a Montreal cab-man down in front of this and see what utter hash they would make of it. The truth is that ability to do this kind of translation-gymnastics, this leaping in and out in a kind of egg-shell dance among the pronouns, can only be accomplished at a dreadful expense of damage in other directions. The wretched literalism involved is absolutely fatal.
I do not say that a person who really knew French and knew English could not translate these things. He might. But the prospect would make him tired. And probably in about half a page of this stuff he would make a slip or two in whichever language was not his mother tongue. But notice. The highly trained girl from Seaforth High School who has never seen the sails of the Moulin Rouge will make no slip at all. She will translate with absolute accuracy every last one of these rotten-looking sentences. Yet if the examiner said to her in French, "My child, you have answered admirably, come and have lunch with me at the Café Americain," she would blush the ruby red of detected ignorance.
But this juggling with pronouns and idioms is only a part of the idiocy of the school translation system. There is plenty more of it. The pupil is not only taught to translate the ordinary common words that he would really need if he were ever, poor soul, actually going to use French, but he is taught right at the outset of his instruction a string of words, or rather the translation of a string of words, that he is never conceivably going to use at all. Just because these words have a peculiar plural they are dragged in at the very opening of the pupil's acquaintance with the language. Most of them he will never see again, except of course on an Ontario examination paper.
Bal, carnaval, chacal, nopal, regal, cal, have, so it appears, irregular plurals. Who cares if they have? The way to learn an irregular plural is by happening to want to use the word often enough to learn it. That is the way in which an English child learns that the plural of foot is feet, and a French child that the plural of bal is bals. Similarly the words bail, email, corail, soupirail, vantail, vitrail, have irregular plurals. But what of that? Wait till one wants to use them or runs up against them in the course of speaking or reading French. It is awful, and it is futile, to learn them in a list; and it is still more awful to parade the list on an examination paper as if knowledge of it were a real test of the degree of attainment of a person learning French.
But since the examination has to be faced and since the examination is sure to contain some of these specimens as a test, the little books of instruction carry exercises that run:—
Have you the opals of the jackals?
No, but my father has the enamels of the leases.
This kind of thing used to give me the idea that French conversation must be awfully silly. The two Frenchmen who had just asked about opals and jackals would suddenly break off in a terrible flurry to say:
"Where are the stained glass windows? Where are the folding doors?"
Many school-boys must have thought the French a peculiarly unstable people, incapable of fixed attention.
Or turn from nouns to verbs. The school pupil learns these in a list. The Montreal cab-man learns them by their use. When the school pupil proposes to say "We shall see" in French, he starts off from the English "to see"—French voir; future, je verrai, tu verras, il verra—Ha! ha!—he's getting near it now! Nous verrons, "we shall see"! Triumph! Now the cab-man (whether French by birth or English) has learned that group of sounds, nous verrons, in a lump, associated with the idea. Or else he hasn't learned it at all. But if he has, he knows it and uses it in the real true sense of language. The college matriculant, wanting to use it, stands dumb with a perfect fury of rapid conjugation boiling up in his mind till it boils over as nous verrons—half a minute too late for use.
It might of course be claimed that even this defective method of teaching at least opens up the language as literature and leads the way to the study of its history and philology. People who never expect to talk French may still, it is claimed, enjoy the pleasure of reading the great masterpieces of French literature without a translation, and the advantage of reading the French books and journals of the hour for which there is no translation. There is of course something in this argument, but far less than one might suppose. Experience shows that people who have learned French without being able to pronounce it decently, without any power of understanding it by the ear and without the ability to read it without the English words showing through the French print, seldom go on reading it at all. For technical purposes they may puzzle it out; in rare cases—I have known such—they make of the unspoken, unheard language a sort of bridge to the literature of the past; but in the vast majority of cases such French, as far as culture goes, gets nowhere. The appreciation of literature is too dim, when the words are mere mechanical symbols lacking life; even parchments of philology rustle dry when a living language is thus numbered with the dead.
But let me turn from the negative to the positive. Finding fault is one thing, and improvement is another. So far, I admit, I have merely spoken of how not to learn a modern language. But I am prepared to go in the other direction and show how to learn it, with less difficulty, ever so much more reality and far happier results. I will undertake to teach anybody any modern language perfectly in five minutes—not the whole of it, which nobody ever knows, but just a little bit of it; and with that beginning he can go on as far as he likes. For example I would take him out from my house where I write this book and have him meet on the road an Ojibway Indian from the Reserve near by and call out to him "Aneen! b'jou!" After he had said that quite a few times to quite a few Indians it would begin to seem a natural thing to say to an Indian when you met him. After he had said it a year or two he would go on saying it in his sleep. But if he asked what do the words mean, I would not tell him. If he starts breaking them into fractions of English, it's all over with Ojibway; all he needs to know is that that is what you say when you say it.
The little bits of foreign language that we really make our own—such as carte blanche and pâté de foie gras and eau de vie—come to us just that way. English is shut out; we never think of "white card" or of "pastry of fat liver." Still less do we deliberately make blanche feminine to fit with carte. In fact we don't notice that it is feminine. A person fitting the genders together gets left behind in conversation. Gender forms are only things that you notice, and group together perhaps, after you begin to acquire the language. It is of no help whatsoever to learn them in lists; each one must be used with any combination it comes into. There is no royal road and no way of shortening it.
I am not here merely advocating the use of what is often called the "natural" method—the plan of learning languages by talking and hearing them. Few people ever have the opportunity to talk them enough and hear them enough to go very far. Few people can go to France and stay there for ten years, and for people at home "conversation" lessons, unsupported by any other form of effort and instruction, break down of their own weight. They begin in a burst of enthusiasm, gradually turn into something like annoyance. The teacher is so fluent, the pupil so helpless, the sense of progress is soon changed for a sort of expanding horizon of ignorance. There comes a happy moment when the lessons are dropped, and nothing remains but "Bonjour, Monsieur" and "Oh, oui."
Nor am I, for the present, trying to explain how the learning of French, or any other foreign language, can be fitted in as a class exercise in school or college. What I am here talking of is how you get it into your own head. In this, as in the whole scope of education, it is overwhelmingly your own effort, your own initiative that counts. What people learn best is what they teach themselves, what they learn of their own prompting.
One recalls in the Pickwick Papers the statement of Mr. Weller Senior that he had taken a good deal o' pains with the education of his son by letting him run in the streets when he was very young and shift for himself. It is the grain of truth in this that makes it funny, the incongruity between what appears to be utter neglect but is described as calculated foresight. As usual the humour turns on the revelation of truth by incongruous contrast. If the little Weller had had no native gift for seeing and learning, for storing up experience and profiting by it, the whole opportunity of the streets would have been wasted on him. And if little Weller had attended a sociological class on Life in the Street (half course, half term, one credit), he would have been unfitted to live on them.
The beginning of learning is the urge to learn. The teacher and the class exercise are just a supplement and a help, but never can be the motive power. Wisdom cannot be poured into the pupil out of a jug. What I have in mind is a process that supplements any conversation method used, and any reading done—a process, carried on in one's own mind, of excluding one's own native language, of setting up a direct connection between the sound of the words and the things and actions that they stand for. A person trained in this way, if he cannot express himself in the foreign language, can at least be silent in it; what is meant is that his own language, English let us say, will not rise up in his mind and choke him. That is why cab-men, hotel waiters and ticket collectors seem to talk French so easily. Nothing else comes into their minds. If they're stuck for a word or a phrase they must find one; but at least no English will "butt in" as it would with us.
But before developing this idea more fully I want first to indicate how very great, in the learning of languages, are the limitations of what can be accomplished by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. A great deal of misunderstanding and myth and legend surround the acquisition of foreign languages. People of humble minds outside of academic circles imagine that there are various other people who speak half a dozen languages perfectly. As a matter of fact there are none, and never have been except on the plan explained above for the use of the Ojibway language—perfect as far as it goes.
We read in history of the famous Scottish scholar, the "Admirable" Crichton of three centuries ago, that he possessed twelve languages and that once when journeying to Paris he invited "the university" to meet him in disputation at nine o'clock on such and such a morning when he would be ready to dispute in any one of them. We are told by Milton that a man may pick up the Italian tongue in an odd hour. Similar myths run all down our history and are matched by current references to people who can speak three or four languages perfectly, and especially to Russians to whom an extra language is an easier matter than an extra suit of clothes. I remember having been told of an official interpreter in a magistrate's court in Toronto who had to deal with nondescript Europeans of all sorts of languages. He had such a gift for languages that if a man turned up whose language he didn't know he would ask the magistrate for a couple of days' delay and then go home and learn the language. It sounds easy, doesn't it?
Unfortunately the learning of a language is a much more arduous matter than that. It must begin in a humble way with nouns and phrases—never with grammar and sentences. And from the very beginning the learner, and here everything depends on himself and not on the teacher, should try to connect the foreign word (sound and letters) with the thing, the idea, that it stands for and to break it away from what appears to be its English equivalent. As a matter of fact there are probably no two words that are exact equivalents in two different languages. A house is not une maison and a hotel is not always un hôtel. Drinks in America are sometimes said to be "on the house"; they are never "sur la maison." A French duke, no matter how impoverished, always tries to keep a hotel in the city. An English duke, no matter how rich, refuses to.
Words and phrases are the beginning. But they must be carefully divorced from grammar and grammatical rules about changes for the plural and so on. Those things come later on, as they did in learning our own language in infancy. Most of us can remember reading out of a grammar that "oxen, children and brethren make the plural in n," and thinking: "Why, so they do! How interesting!" Tables of verbs will never teach a person to say je viendrai, and je verrai, and je voudrais; you have to know them first, word by word, bit by bit, and afterwards looking over a table of them helps to give them a sort of consistency.
The case is still stronger with phrases. To analyse them out and put English to them spoils them as French. In nearly all phrases there is not one single English equivalent for the French or one single French equivalent for the English. Take the most overworked phrase in the French language, that joy of the conversational tourist, "Ça ne fait rien." This means, word by word, "That doesn't make nothing," and by sense, "That doesn't matter; that makes no difference; it's all the same to me; not at all, my dear chap; that's all right"—and so on for a page. A person who has learned to say "Ça ne fait rien," as arising from circumstances and not from translation, is already talking French.
The most extreme case of the futility of translation methods is found in the use of moods and tenses, as in the employment of the subjunctive. This, for us, is the most difficult thing in the grammar of a foreign language because in English we have almost lost the subjunctive—that is, almost forgotten how to think in the subjunctive. Patriots are often trained to "think imperially." Linguists have to be trained to "think subjunctively." In English we have drifted so far away from the use of the subjunctive that our sense of its value has grown dim. It is like a lost or decaying faculty, as is the sense of smell in the human race. In English we put everything into the indicative mood as if it was a fact. We write, "They say that he is very rich"—whether we mean that he really is, or only that people claim he is. We say, "They charged against Socrates that he was corrupting the youth of Athens." A Greek or a Roman would interject, "Do you mean that that is what they charged, or that that is what he was really doing?"
In French the indicative has to some extent replaced the subjunctive but scarcely at all as compared with English. French people can still feel a subjunctive. When they say, "Il faut qu'il soit bien méchant," they are not saying that he is a bad lot, but only that he would have to be to fulfill certain conditions. English people in talking French try to work out subjunctives from a rule, without ever having really got the idea of them. I remember hearing an English lady at Calais request a customs official to let her pass with the words, "Permettez, monsieur, que je passasse." The polite Frenchman bowed and said, "Passassiez, Madame." The lady moved on with a gratified feeling of bilingualism achieved. A friend of mine once told me that in leading up to a proposal to a very charming French girl, he asked her if she would mind crossing the ocean. She replied, "Ah, non! si j'étais avec quelqu'un qui me fit oublier les ennuis du voyage." His astonishment and admiration of her use of the preterite subjunctive struck him silent so long that he lost her. Two lives went astray over a lost mood.
English people can, with effort and difficulty, reacquire the subjunctive sense. But if not, the only thing to do is to go ahead without it; trample it down and forget it. After all no Frenchman, and few Irishmen, can ever learn to use shall and will. The subjunctive must either be used instinctively and through the sense of it or left alone. Seen in this light how terrible is such a thing as a "grammatical exercise" beginning with the dictum, "In French, verbs of fearing, avoiding, denying, forbidding, etc., etc. govern the subjunctive. Ne is inserted before the verb in the subordinate clause to indicate an affirmative conclusion; ne pas, to indicate a negative." Then follows an exercise. Translate: "I am afraid he is coming. I am not afraid he is coming. I am afraid he is not coming. I am not afraid he is not coming." Enough of that stuff puts a student of languages beyond resuscitation.
The time comes presently when the pupil in learning French on a proper method may begin to read it. And here again the secret of learning is to try to say good-bye to the English translation as rapidly as possible. "Le Petit Chaperon Rouge" is what the French call our "Little Red Riding Hood." But having said "Little Red Riding Hood" once in this connection, never say it again. Call up the vision of the little girl picking flowers in the wood, her red cloak falling back from her shoulders, and connect with the picture the words Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Learn what a little bit of the French story means and say it over and over again; get it away from the English and as you go further on with reading never bother as to what a French word "means" (in English) provided you can hit the general sense and go on. Better one half the sense in French than all of it in English.
When you read French in this way there will come a time when you find that you can read it, more or less straight ahead, without thinking of English. It is like learning to swim. It comes to you, after the hard initial effort that made it possible, with a warm glow of accomplishment. After that the language is yours. You have set up in your mind a division into compartments in one of which is English, in the other French. Henceforth they will not interfere. When you read French in this way a lot of the words will carry vague meanings that gradually clarify; but it doesn't matter much whether they do—just as, in English, people go on reading sea stories all their lives without knowing what the "lee-scuppers" are except that people fall into them, or whether the "binnacle" is what the captain sits in or where the men sleep.
The French speech of a person trained in this proper way and the French writing of a person properly taught are necessarily for a long time filled with inaccuracies; children in learning to talk English at first are apt to run their words to a pattern, for example to make all the verbs "weak"—to say, "I bited the apple," "He sawed me coming," and so on. This clears away of itself, not by learning rules but by continuous and unconscious imitations.
But what is utterly unnatural is the false and overdone standard of excellence of the student of French in a grammar class, writing out twenty sentences of subjunctives without an error, finding feminines for blanc, for beau, for turc, for tourangeau and so forth, as easily as picking flowers. The method of teaching French here shares in the fault that goes with all examination discipline—the pressure to put on the last increment of excellence that only comes at an inordinate cost, an inordinate sacrifice of other things. A steamer whose economic speed is sixteen knots can perhaps be forced up to twenty at a double cost, and even beyond that, at an expense utterly disproportionate. A pupil who takes over ninety per cent in French grammar is like a little tug raising enough steam to move a freighter, at the expense of being all boiler and no cargo.
I admit the full difficulty of turning what is here said to its practical application in re-forming the curriculum of a school. But just as the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, so a clear sense of what is desired, of the goal to be achieved, will sooner or later find the means of achievement. But even without attempting in any degree to lay down a school curriculum in French, one or two generalities may at least be hazarded. Students ought to begin with nouns and names, learned off picture-placards by the oral method of fifty years ago—spelling and sound together. Follow these pictures by phrases, and plenty of them, learned as far as possible without connection with English: Voici un hibou; Voilà un cheval.... Steal from bygone Ollendorf one or two question-and-answer forms endlessly repeated: Voyez-vous le cheval! Oui, je vois le cheval.... Let at least all class-room directions be in French: Asseyez-vous.... Fermez la porte.... Écoutez bien.... And exhort the student at the start to try to get away from his own language.
A little further on comes reading out loud by the teacher; here enters such a story as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge—the English of it only explained once, just as little as is necessary, and then endless repetition of the reading. Dictation of French, to be written and spelled by the students as best they can and turned back and forward into Ollendorf questions, is a true linguistic discipline, the best there is, and the one, I imagine, the most nearly abandoned by our colleges in their entrance tests. And most of all it is necessary to realize that a percentage examination, carried on in writing, and calling for a false degree of excellence in detail, in this as in nearly every other part of education, spells frustration and defeat. But of that I speak in more general and fuller terms in another chapter.
In what I have said about the teaching of French I have been referring to the situation in North America—the United States and Canada—where it is probably the worst in the world. The whole power of a vast, expensive and enthusiastic public education is here directed along false lines of effort. In Liberia, where they make no effort at all, I am sure they do it better.
In England for various reasons the situation is different from ours. The proximity of France across the Channel, the fact that thousands of people learn their French from actual contacts and the fact that "native" teachers are everywhere available counts for much. So too does the fact that French was widely taught in England before the era of modern "translation" text-books, before analytical sentence-translation, and was taught largely in phrases and on a "natural" method. Even the earlier translation texts were not like ours. If anyone will glance at the famous Ollendorf of a hundred years ago he will see that it aims at a constant repetition of similar French forms by means of questions and answers. "Avez-vous le chapeau de mon père?" "Non, Monsieur, je n'ai pas le chapeau de votre père."
Ollendorf seems to be wrong in admitting English as the medium. But the intention of his famous "method" was that the pupil would, by the repetition system, jump out of English to French; each French sentence would suggest a new one; each French thought would reproduce itself in a slight variation. "Avez-vous mangé votre déjeuner?" "Non, Monsieur, je n'ai pas encore mangé mon déjeuner."
It has been only more recently that up-to-date textbooks on the model of their own begin to swamp out older and better methods.
Now the English are naturally the worst linguists in the world, but they carry down from their insular history the remains of a contempt for foreign nations, including foreign languages. The Eskimos are accustomed to call themselves "the people" and the English in many things share the Eskimo attitude. This sense of superiority, in point of language, carries advantages and disadvantages. English people are apt to consider that they "know French" when they are able to pass a few phrases back and forward across the lunch counter at Dieppe, or call out in a confident voice, "Garçon, l'addition, s'il vous plaît!" They are seldom interested in shades of pronunciation; they pronounce tenez and savez as if written in English tenny and savvie (to rhyme with "many" and "navvy"), and are willing to let it go at that. On the other hand, use and custom have enabled them to grasp far more easily than we do what a Frenchman is trying to say and to answer him with some such apposite phrase as "Très bien, Monsieur" or "Cela ne fait rien."
I remember, as an illustration of this attitude, the visit to my university, McGill, about forty years ago, of Andre Siegfried, then an unknown and inquiring young Frenchman, since known to all the world. He stood and talked in easy effortless French to one of my elderly colleagues, an Englishman of the Oxford type. As Siegfried talked my colleague stood first on one foot and said, "Oui—oui—oui—ah, oui," and then on the other foot and said, "Oh, non—non—non," and then back to oui. Afterwards I heard him telling of the interview: "Delightful young man, speaks really excellent French. We chatted away for a long time—all in French, of course."
This easy unconsciousness of the very problem of language gives a sort of reality to French in England, vastly different from the anxious, pathetic failure of French in America.
As a matter of fact, a full mastery of even two languages is a very rare thing. It can only come as the result of a special environment, the opportunity to talk both, the will to do so, and therewith a certain aptitude. What is ordinarily thought as bilingualism falls away below this.
Compare, for example, the "bilingual" city of Montreal, of whose one million people, some seven out of ten are French. All the French people of any education understand English, and all of them speak it in a way to make themselves easily understood for business and for ordinary conversation. But with a very few exceptions their speech falls far short of the range and power of people speaking their own language. They can say what they mean but they can neither adorn nor embellish it. Their pronunciation, of course, while pleasing enough, is not the same as ours; it may be better but it is not the same. Even their understanding of English of necessity falls short in point of appreciation of our literature; so much depends, especially in poetry and in the drama, on the full connotation of the words, the shades of meaning which they have taken on with us from infancy.
Can a foreigner fully distinguish the curfew "tolls the knell of parting day" from "rings the six o'clock bell"? Can he feel the appeal of a tide that "drew from out the boundless deep" and "turns again home"? "In Flanders fields the poppies blow!" Can any foreigner appreciate the delicacy of blow? We have no measure of the intimacy of their comprehension, but it is not unfair to doubt it.
As to the bilingualism of the English people of Montreal there is hardly any of it. Most of them learn a little French in school, recognize a lot of French words, especially those on sign-boards and know that "Guy Street!" as called out by the bilingual car-conductor is in French "Ghee!" The exceptions are too few to matter. Yet here is a city where an unobservant visitor, haunted by a myth, would say, "In Montreal, of course, everybody talks both English and French."
People who have devoted attention to the subject of foreign languages may be inclined to differ from me as to their valuation of translation. They may argue that translation represents as it were the last word, the supreme exercise in language. The extraordinary difficulty of finding idiom for idiom, of carrying over from one language to the other an absolute identity of meaning with an equal excellence of diction, such difficulty is only matched by the attraction of doing it.
Now this is quite true. But such translation comes at the end not at the beginning of study.
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