Very keen to finish my private list on time last week, so I could get to my French lesson. My surgeon asked me, baffled, why I still bothered with learning French, since I’ve been doing it for thirty years with no improvement? I was outraged. It’s actually been nearer forty years, including several painful years with Madame Sebastian, my high school French teacher (whom I remember crying when Prince Charles got married, which goes to show how long it’s been). OK, my progress in French has been slow going but not only has it opened up French culture for me, but most importantly, it’s actually done wonders for my understanding of English. In my day, it was unfashionable to teach grammar. One was supposed to pick it up somehow by osmosis. Hence my profound fear of apostrophes (‘s?), and also the humiliating experience I had a couple of weeks ago as editor of our departmental newsletter when someone called me out on my use of “who’s” when I should have said “whose”. Yes, I would love to be a grammar nazi, but sadly I am woefully underqualified. Without my foreign language learning, my situation would be even more perilous. How would I know about part participles, conjugating verbs, or even tenses without it?
I managed to scrape by on my sabbatical in Montpellier last year amongst people whose (happy, Kirsten?) English was even worse than my French, and that was a real confidence boost, but what I’d really like to be able to do is say “ooh sorry – French as a second language!” the way my Asian colleague can say the same about English whenever he says something he regrets and wants an excuse for (yes, I’m talking about you, Melvin!)
Of course, it could be much worse. My Mum was a fiend for foreign language learning. Not enough to be a forensic psychiatrist – visiting high security prisons to tell the inmates that no, they weren’t allowed any more benzos – she was looking for a challenge. She did a BA in linguistics while we kids were growing up, doing several years of Japanese, then Maori, and finally Spanish night classes. I used to sneer at her French accent – what a prat I was. She had shelves and shelves of her bookcase devoted to languages – books, cassette tapes, LPs – and not just of the usual suspects – German, Italian, French – but also obscure ones like Serbo Croat, Arabic and Greek. In comparison, I am the height of restraint.
