The Peaks And Pitfalls Of Learning A Second Language
J’apprends la Francais. That means ‘I am learning French’.
I think?
I mean, the letter C in ‘Francais’ needs a little squiggly dash under it, but I don’t know how to do that on a keyboard and I’m too lazy to open Google translate and copy-paste it. Oh crap, hang on – do the French use capital letters for country names or not? At least I’m fairly sure I’ve got the gender right. France is feminine. ‘Vivre la France’ and all that. It’s got to be ‘la’. Right? Right?!
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If you’re going to learn a new language, the first thing to understand is that you’ve got to want it. Without a powerful motivation to learn you’ll more than likely lose interest and give up - assuming you’re anything like me, at least. My Duolingo app is a graveyard, littered with headstones of languages half-learned and abandoned. Here Lies German, October 2016 – February 2018. Spanish We Hardly Knew Ye, April 2018 -May 2018. Rest in Peace Portuguese, Attempted for Precisely One Hungover Hour in July 2019. French is the only one I’ve stuck with because I have a concrete reason: my girlfriend is French, and I want to learn her language so I can once and for all confirm my suspicions that her friends mock me when they come over for drinks.
If you embark upon the wonderful and infuriating odyssey that is learning a new language, you’ll likely find, when you first begin, that you’ve a knack for it. You’ll learn the translations of words like ‘feet’ and ‘lunch’, and you’ll learn how to say things like ‘my mum eats bread’, and you will feel as accomplished as a Renaissance polymath. ‘This is child’s play,’ you will think aloud after your sixth or seventh lesson. ‘How much more can there be?’
The answer to this will be revealed to you when, blinded by your beginner’s arrogance, you attempt to watch a foreign language film, and find that beyond the initial pleasantries, all conversations are so incomprehensible they may as well be replaced with whale song. Scary phrases like ‘conjugation’ and ‘infinitive’ and ‘future perfect’ will loom suddenly from the page of your workbook, casting macabre shadows over the familiar words you felt so comfortable with just minutes before. By night, friendly verbs fracture into dozens of sinister variants. Cute words like ‘mange’ mutate into stinkers like ‘mangeons’, ‘mangerai’, and ‘mangeassent’. Gross.
This is usually the point where people (me) quit. Do not quit! Chip away at it, and eventually you will reach the next stage of language learning: the bastardisation of your native tongue. Obscure words and phrases of foreign speech will begin to drift through the blackness of your mind at all hours, like the Windows screensavers of old. I still remember the first time I mistakenly uttered ‘Quoi?’ instead of ‘What?’ in conversation with my friends down the pub. I recall the silence that ensued, the furrowed brows, the ‘We get it Dan, you’re learning French’. I shudder.
Assuming you are able to traverse the stormy seas of pronunciation, you will finally arrive at the balmy shores of Casual Conversation. You’ve worked hard, and you’ve made it a fair way down the road to fluency. Your reward? The freedom to be eyeball-gougingly dull in a foreign tongue. You can talk about your day and the weather and your job, and you could feasibly get yourself to a hospital should your bowels suddenly betray you in a foreign land. But you don’t know many adjectives. Few verbs, either, really. You might be Oscar Wilde in your mother-tongue, but when you approach a conversational level in your new language, you’ll find that speaking with any humour, insight or charisma is out of the window. You are now, for all intents and purposes, the village idiot.
Now, contrary to the decision you may have reached after reading this article, I’m not a lunatic. I wouldn’t keep learning French if it was causing me nothing but mental strain and public humiliation. The rewards of learning a second (or third or fourth or fifth) language unfurl tantalisingly as you progress. Yes, I may still mistake a canard for a connard on occasion, and I may confuse my beaucoup’s and beau cul’s. Yes, I may never pronounce that damned French ‘r’ without sounding like Homer Simpson drooling over a doughnut. However, as the fog clears and my understanding deepens, a whole new world has begun to reveal itself. Foreign literature, cinema, music, comedy, careers, cuisine, friendships and so much more – things that once would have been dreamt of with only a longing sigh – become tangible opportunities.
Best of all – and I must apologise, because this particular benefit is relevant only to me – the new world I am steadily gaining access to is a world in which my girlfriend resides; a world in which she is at her most relaxed, her most confident and playful, her wittiest and her most profound. Anybody who speaks a second language will attest to the fact that you have different personalities in each, and I’ve found it to be true. In French I may be a tedious, monosyllabic half-wit, but I’ve never seen my partner look so graceful.
All that remains is to figure out what on earth her mates are saying about me. Can anybody help me figure out what imbécile means?
Written by Dan Hackett
Dan is a copywriter living in Bristol. He wrote his first novel last year, though he's not tried to get it published yet. Instead, he is currently sitting on it like a goose on an egg, refusing to let it hatch, mortified at the prospect of releasing it out into the world. If you fancy telling him to get his act together, his Twitter is here. Oh and he writes about travelling sometimes, too.