Delphi complete works of.., p.349
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 349
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.
