Foreign Languages
Like all anglophone children in the Canadian school system I took French class every year in school. Growing up Canadian — and living there — exposes you to a fair amount of French as a matter of course, even if the French population where you live is miniscule. There was always the mandatory CBC radio and television in French, the official documents in both languages, the cereal boxes with English on one side and French on the other. And most job ads specifying requirements that the candidate be “bilingual” weren’t interested in people who could speak English and Mandarin, or English and Russian, or Russian and Hindi, or all four — French and English was the combination that mattered.
Yet I didn’t know a lot of Canadians who could speak French confidently unless they were actually from Quebec. I knew people who went to French Immersion schools at young ages, but it didn’t seem like they spoke any better than the rest of us by the time we got to university. In Toronto, I knew people who nursed fantasies of moving to Montreal (and I was certainly one of them) but we all knew about the Quebec language laws — Tim Horton’s had to drop the possessive apostrophe from its name —and my French certainly wouldn’t have passed muster.
I have always assumed I’d never be truly proficient in a foreign language, because getting good at one requires learning a lot of facts, like verb conjugations and vocabulary, and being willing to talk a lot and risk making mistakes (ideally to native speakers, and by necessity). I didn’t like doing either of those things. My language classes in school were usually my least favorite, and I was relieved when I passed the French requirement in University and could drop the entire enterprise.
But in my 30’s, when I started to travel a lot more outside North America, I realized that there are benefits to studying a language even if you’re unlikely to ever become fluent. The travel benefit is the one most people probably think of — it enables you to be a little less helpless and a little less rude if you can read street signs and restaurant menus. If you like books and especially poetry, you expand your understanding if you look at your favorite translated works in their original language (poetry in translation, with its awkward forced rhymes, often loses so much). Your English can also get more colorful if you add some foreign-derived words to it. And you learn some fun new curses.
A few years ago, when I thought I might be traveling more often to Switzerland, I started taking the German course in Duolingo on my phone. It’s very easy to start and aggressive about notifying you when it’s time to practice (sometimes with a large heaping of guilt). It also has a number of other quirks that make it handy for the street-signs-and-menus case but not so much for being able to compose a thought. It can’t really help you if your accent is bad, but at least you can listen to what the right accent sounds like. I feel fairly confident that the majority of readers of this newsletter have tried Duolingo at some point over the past few years — it cheerfully informs me every few days that it has more users than there are students in language classes. I abandoned the course once it became clear that Switzerland wasn’t going to happen. But during the pandemic I took it up again, and have reached a streak (consecutive days of practice) of nearly 500 days, cheat days aside. I work on it more consistently than I ever worked on French growing up, but my French is still much better than my German, just from so many years of having it floating around in the air.
Some stories about German:
I talked to a Canadian woman who had lived in Germany for a few years, and she said that the single most important sentence to learn was Das ist nicht richtig. It means that is not correct, and according to her, the Germans were constantly chastising her with it.
In Switzerland, I went to a restaurant with a group that included some German speakers. At the time Duolingo gave you a “fluency score”, and told me I was 17% fluent. Some others in the group had a conversation with the waiter — getting directions to somewhere — and afterward I joked that I understood a lot less than 17% of the conversation. “That’s because that wasn’t German,” one of the group said with some scorn. It was Swiss German, of course.
I told a German-speaker that I was using Duolingo to learn some German words. He asked me what words I had learned, I blanked, and the only thing that came to mind was the word schuh, which sounds exactly like the word shoe. It also means shoe. No one was impressed.
I am still maintaining my Duolingo streak in German, mostly because to see that number 500 go back to 0 would be sad. But now I’m trying something else.
In a fit of optimism about the possibility of travel, I recently decided to challenge myself to see how much Italian I could learn in a short time. Italian is a language I have a bit more familiarity with, due to being musical. I was an opera fanatic from a young age, and certain phrases like Nel pozzo — nel giardino as well as a fair amount of numbers (Figaro’s cinque… dieci… venti… trenta… trentasei… quarantatre I can recite almost as surely as I Can Sing a Rainbow) are burned into my brain forever.
Much of the technical terminology in classical music is Italian, but this isn’t as useful as you might think. There are words to mean various flavors of fast (allegro, presto) and slow (adagio, lento); loud (forte) and quiet (piano); smooth (legato) and sharp (staccato). But of course these can be deceptive — legato in colloquial Italian doesn’t mean “smooth” but rather “awkward” or “tied up”; I assume the relationship to a smooth melodic line comes from the idea of the notes being joined together. Conversely, staccato actually means “detached”. The English-speaking writers who use phrases like “her staccato voice” are getting it from their childhood piano lessons, not from any knowledge of Italian.
And as for opera, while its language isn’t technical, it’s limited in scope. You learn the words for the big emotions, like love (amore), hate (odiare), death (morte), happiness (felicità), shame (vergogna), as well as various royal titles (re, regina, principe, contessa). Also, it can never quite be trusted — it’s a kind of “elevated” Italian whose words may or may not be in colloquial use. Opera characters are constantly calling their enemies scellerato! (villain!) but I suspect it would get a few raised eyebrows in a modern city.
All this is to say that I’m taking a stab at the Fluent Forever method, developed by an opera singer. It’s outlined at length in a book by the same name, and of course there’s also a TED Talk. The premise is that the way we learn languages in classrooms is all wrong: there’s no point in memorizing conjugations, and learning words in thematic groups like “colors” and “fruits” means you’ll get them mixed up. It emphasizes getting the pronunciation correct right away, before even learning basic vocabulary, because no matter how much you learn, you won’t be understood (or understand anyone else) if your accent is dreadful and you say all the words wrong. The rest is mostly about making flashcards with pictures on them instead of translations, learning sentences as a whole instead of individual grammatical constructions, and feeding the whole thing into a spaced repetition system.
So far it feels more fun than Duolingo, although it’s more work, at least at the beginning. As part of the method it suggests acquiring a traveler’s phrasebook, which can be entertaining to read through: the one I picked has a substantial section on how to complain about your restaurant, including the food (it’s too cold/too hot/stale/not fresh/bad/undercooked) and the service (it’s taking too long, you got my order wrong).
Is the system any good? Check back with me in a few months, I suppose. In any case, it feels worthwhile. I doubt I’ll be able to match my French, even though my French is pretty paltry. But even a little bit of Italian is better than none, even if it only helps me understand a few more words in Tosca.