German (then) French (now)

Journeys beyond the mother language

I’ve recently started receiving ads on social media promoting the concept of learning a language in three weeks. These learning apps, from seemingly different companies, have a couple things in common: (1) they are built around Artificial Intelligence products like ChatGPT that are designed to engage in dialogue-based queries, and (2) they are peddling snake oil.¹ I’ve been down the language-learning path before, at different stages of life and with different languages, and the concept of learning a language in three weeks with an AI tool is sheer nonsense.

Growing up I found the notion of speaking languages other than English intriguing. There was a bookcase in our home that held, among other things, the books an uncle had used while a student at Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts). He had died in an accident on campus, plunging his parents into a lifetime of mourning, and his textbooks, some of which were in German, were among the relics that had been carefully preserved.²

I was fascinated by the unusual fonts in the German-language texts—these books were from the 1920s and were printed using German Fraktur typefaces. They covered subjects in physics, chemistry and zoology, and there was also a textbook for beginning learners of German. My mother explained to me that German was “the language of science,” and to study zoology as my uncle had, you had to be able to read German. Time had moved on, however, and I suspected that this was no longer the case. When in college, however, I was made to understand that if I were to pursue the study of music from a scholarly perspective, knowing German was critical. It was, and for my interests, it still is.

So I began two years of college German. The experience was dreadful, focused on learning grammar, which was made more complicated by elucidations of the various cases (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) with concepts borrowed from English grammar. Nonetheless I struggled ahead with it. I even chose in my final undergraduate year to live in the college’s language dormitory so I could participate in the German Stammtisch that convened in the dorm’s dining room. By graduation I could read well enough. But speaking ability? Not so much.

Graduate school required, in the second year, passing language exams in both German and French; this consisted of translating a passage from a scholarly article. That was no problem. After my third year I earned a fellowship to work on my doctoral research and I planned a year in Germany. I knew that in spite of passing these tests, I had to get serious about learning to actually speak German in order to get by.

The day after arriving in Germany in 1978 I travelled to Freiburg im Breisgau to enrol in a four-week intensive German class at the Goethe Institut. A language test placed me, disappointingly, in Grundstufe II—advanced basic German—but the course for that level was full and I was sent across the country to Munich (actually a village outside of Munich, Grafing-bei-München) instead. So off I went, hitch-hiking, only to learn upon arriving that the course there was also full. Fortunately I was given the choice of enrolling in the more challenging, four-week intensive Mittelstufe II class (advanced intermediate, equivalent now to level B2³). That was the best thing that could have happened.

In the classroom it seemed like the shroud of complexity in learning German was lifted. The miserable and repetitive explanations of grammar I had found so constipated were simply dispensed with. We were taught only that verbs governed case and that by itself simplified things considerably. The focus was on reading, listening, understanding and speaking. The mantra was that fluency consisted of understanding and being able to make oneself understood, which made the objective of language competency much more attainable.

The other dimension of the Goethe Institut experience was being placed in the home of one of the village’s residents. The family to which I was assigned had been resettled in Germany after the end of World War II, having previously been part of a population of German-speaking people in what was to become Yugoslavia. The woman who ran the household took her role in helping students learn German quite seriously and engaged me daily in some kind of conversation. Her language, though, was a dialect that was, to me, almost indecipherable, and quite different from the Bavarian dialect that was generally spoken in the village. In our brief conversations I would speak in my school-taught high German, and she would dutifully correct me by re-stating or re-pronouncing my sentences in her dialect.

Living with the host family was also something of a cultural experience. The Goethe Institut building had good facilities—a breakfast and lunch room (we had coupons for dinner at various local eateries) as well as showers, which I used each morning. Nonetheless Saturday was bath day in the household where I was staying and there was a ritual element to getting the bath.

The house did not have hot running water, nor a shower. In the bathroom, which had no toilet, there was a bathtub and next to it a large water heater that was fired by coal. My bath was strictly timed since it took a long time to charge the water heater and for the water to heat. My hostess did not accept that a shower at the Goethe Institut was an acceptable alternative, so I would gratefully take the bath then go about my business. One Saturday after bathing I stayed in my room, opposite the bathroom, and was able to observe that once I had finished, a new tank of water was heated, then all four family members would bathe, in sequence, using the same tub of hot water.

By the end of the four-week class I felt that I’d achieved the goal—I could understand most things and could make myself understood across a broad range of different situations. Compared to my university experience this was truly transformative. It was just the beginning, however.

I started about my academic research, spending days at the Bavarian State Library reading and transcribing music from the 17th century. However, the U.S. dollar was going through a steep decline in value and I could not live on my stipend. I learned from a fellow I had met when first arriving in Munich that one could earn 60 German Marks through day labour at the Grossmarkthalle—the enormous fruit and produce distribution centre in the south of Munich. One would report at 4AM to stand outside a bar frequented by day workers (some workmen would go inside and order coffee then mix it with Jägermeister), and trucks would come by looking for labourers. The driver would lean out the window and point and yell; it was almost guaranteed that eventually you’d get summoned. I was fortunate in that, whenever I needed money, the same person would pick me up, so I became familiar with him and some of the other workers at his facility. The work was varied. Some days, for example, it meant separating bananas into saleable groups and wrapping them; at other times it could involve dragging 25 kilogram bags of potatoes from Czechoslovakia to a hole in the floor, ripping open the bag and dumping the potatoes down the chute.

This was a place where only Bayrisch (Bavarian) was spoken. Bayrisch is not something that was taught at the Goethe Institut, of course, and I struggled. I did, however, become fluent in Bavarian curse words, or Fluchen, which favoured religious themes (Fluchen differ from Schimpfen, which are secular swear words). I also learned there about Karl Valentin, a comedian who has been called the Bavarian Charlie Chaplin, that he spoke the Munich dialect, and that recordings and transcriptions were available. I began to study them with great zeal and diligence.

I’d also met an English fellow who had moved to Munich to be close to the alps. His passion was rock climbing and there was hardly room to sit in his tiny car since it was always full of mountaineering equipment. We often had “tea” together, frequently dining on damaged salad-makings I had brought home from the Grossmarkthalle. He had found a job working in the kitchen of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, but eventually secured a professional position at Messerschmidt as a draftsman. He spoke to the steward on my behalf when he left the hotel, and before you knew it, I was engaged as a part-time Spüler, or dish-washer.

The job at the hotel was a life-saver. It was close to the library where I was doing research in the daytime, and not too distant from where I had a room in the Kaulbachstrasse. I could work at night, but being on staff meant I could take good and very inexpensive meals there anytime. And I was getting paid! It was also a new linguistic and cultural experience. There, language seemed to follow a distinct pecking order. The Chef was the Baron of the Kitchen and acted the part, and could only be overheard speaking in his Prussian high-German—one did not approach him directly. The stewards played the role of middleman between the Chef on the one hand and the lowly kitchen staff on the other. There were Bavarians, Hessians, Swabians, and others from across Germany and the European Community; the entire crew that ran the huge steam-belching dishwasher was Indian. German/Bayrisch was the common language, with two exceptions. First, the Indian dishwashers, who spoke only English and Hindi (and who taught me the vilest words in the Hindi language), and second, and a British “Kasserolier” whose job was to remove rubbish from the hotel and who magically believed he would “pick up” German from simply being there—I remember him saying several times that he was “on the verge of speaking German.”

Complicating the colourful linguistic palette was the steward’s practice of distributing a 500 millilitre bottle of cold beer, each and every hour, to all staff toiling in the hot kitchen. I worked part-time in the evening so what I drank just helped me sleep after work. But the line cooks who might have been there eight or more hours could be very slurry in their speech and wobbly on their clog-shodden feet. When the after-the-opera crowd arrived late in the evening to dine in the Vier Jahreszeiten Eck, it worried me to watch the tipsy cooks ignite the cognac in their poêles above the open flames of the stoves. It was all part of an education and by the end of the year my German intonation had a distinctly Bavarian sound and I could cope with much of the regional dialect.

The point of this, I suppose, is that learning German under these circumstances seemed to be part of a complex and changeable social and cultural experience. The lasting result is that now, although I live in France and speak French every day, German still feels more natural to me—even though my competence has suffered through lack of use.

My mother was once again instrumental in shaping how I thought about French at an early age. She explained that it was important to know French since it was “the international language.” She emphasised this by explaining that French was also the “language of diplomacy,” and that the preciseness of it made it the language of choice for international treaties. Now I accept that this was perhaps the case when she was in grade school, or at least I can imagine that this is what she had been taught (even though she had studied Spanish in school, not French). This conviction about the importance of French led her to arrange private lessons for me and my siblings with a woman who lived nearby, who I think was actually Norwegian. I enjoyed the learning sessions and especially the books, above all the French versions of the Beatrix Potter stories (I only realised in perhaps my thirties that they were originally written in English). But the lessons ended when I started school.

My grandmother was also a native French speaker, having immigrated to the U.S. at an early age from an Acadian community in Nova Scotia. Learning French held the promise of being able to speak with her in her mother language, but she would have none of it. It was possible to start a conversation in French with her, but she’d quickly become self-conscious and exclaim with laughter “I’m speaking French !” then switch back to English.

This childhood experience might have had some benefit. I can pronounce French very well, as can my sister. But it might also have contributed to the awful Groundhog-day experience of French classes in school, where year after year the classes assumed no prior knowledge of French, or were populated by children who had taken French classes but had learned almost nothing in them. I developed a genuine disdain for studying French until college. There I became curious about a French literature class that was reserved for those “concentrating” in French, but the professor, the wonderful Madame Deguise,⁴ allowed me to enrol as an auditor. It was a survey of French literature, and a revelation. Above all I loved the early weeks of the class where we were introduced to the poetry of Ronsard and du Bellay. Hearing Madame Deguise read these texts aloud was inspiration enough to want to set aside the earlier bad classroom experiences and learn French for the joy of it. Alas, that was the last French class I ever took. Studying music had so many requirements that it was just not possible to do more.

That was then.

Now really began at the end of 2021 when after thirteen years of working in Dublin (another curious cultural and linguistic experience) our family moved to Nice, France for retirement. We arrived during the Covid pandemic with an agenda to quickly establish ourselves with banking, housing, and to integrate with French administrative systems. This experience takes one into a completely new language domain. In a couple months’ time we were confronted with lengthy lease agreements; insurance policies for housing and health insurance; service contracts for phone and utilities; and administrative documents to transition driver’s licences, health service entitlements, and much more. 

The language and concepts involved in these processes are not taught in French class. It’s possible to hire consultants to look after such issues when moving to another country, but it seems to me that, in spite of the challenges, to do so would be to miss an opportunity to gain competence with specialised language, administrative concerns and systems that are an important and recurrent part of everyday life.

We live in France now, and I see this was a lifetime commitment. I want to be part of the community we live in, to participate in it, and to do so without challenges of language comprehension, as well as without challenging the patience of people I interact with. So how to meet that goal?

Initially I thought I might replicate the experience of my twenties and improve my foundational French abilities through formal language study. The reality is, that hasn’t worked, although I have favourable words for Alliance Française.⁵ It’s probably a function of age, or perhaps it also has something to do with the nature of the French language, but this has been no three- or four-week trek to fluency. I attend several language exchange groups each week, plus there are routine interactions with acquaintances, merchants and service providers. I recognise, happily, that my abilities with French have improved exponentially over the past thirty months. Sometimes the language flows almost effortlessly. But there are times when I hardly understand a word—just ask my barber.

The point is, again, that learning a language is not just about acquiring vocabulary, mastering grammar, picking up expressions and slang. Language and culture are sometimes hard to differentiate, and trying to separate them seems to me to be probably one of the great hindrances of learning new languages. Language is inherently and obviously social—everyone seems to speak their language a little (or a lot) differently. In my student days in Germany, social contacts were far more diverse than they would be later in my professional life, which always involved partnerships with German academic colleagues, and I learned so much more as a result. Language is also a physiological phenomenon. Obviously we use the many muscles of the speech organs differently in approximating the sounds, accent and rhythm of a foreign language than we do with our mother tongue. It feels different to speak German than to speak French.⁶ And we speak with our eyes and our bodies too—if you are skeptical, just try having a telephone conversation in a language you are still learning.

Let me put it this way: learning a language is a multi-faceted cultural experience. I’ve been intrigued by it most of my life. However, no matter how one experiences the learning of new languages (especially as one ages), it sure isn’t achievable in three weeks with some one-dimensional virtual AI gizmo.

1. “Snake oil” can be translated into French as la poudre de perlimpinpin—a French expression that just makes me laugh and which was used famously in a debate between Emanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen; see this remix on YouTube:

2. Other relics of John Brooks Howard, Jr. (1908-1929) are now held at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, University of Massachusetts, call no. RG 050/6 1930 H69; finding aid: http://findingaids.library.umass.edu/ead/murg050_6_1930_h69.

3. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) organises language proficiency in six levels—A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2. See https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/level-descriptions for details. Viewed 28 September 2024.

4. See Dick Ahles, « The Extraordinary Who Lived Among Us, » New York Times (26 December 2004), https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/nyregion/the-extraordinary-who-lived-among-us.html. Viewed 28 September 2024.

5. Regarding the history of the Alliance Française and pertinent links see Wikipedia, “Alliance Française,” https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_fran%C3%A7aise. Viewed 28 September 2024.

6. There might be an element of attitude as well. A dance instructor used to emphasise the importance of adopting an “appropriate attitude” to convincingly execute different styles of dance—to make the movements expressive and meaningful. Sometimes I wonder if that might be the case with languages as well.