Pretending to learn a language

YOU CAN PRETEND TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE (TRY TO REALISE WHAT I REALLY MEAN BY THAT), BUT YOU CAN’T PRETEND TO LEARN TRANSLATION

Well, I’ve recently been on holiday in Monaco watching the Grand Prix live and I didn’t expect to be posting another comment so soon after I got back, not least because my last one was more than 3,000 words long. Predictably, I enjoyed the excitement of watching Lewis Hamilton live as much as every other British person there; but I won’t comment on what I think of Nico Rosberg here. For this is my latest business blog, and I am keen to say this: did I “practice my French” or “practice my foreign languages” more during this trip?

One thing is for sure: if there is any scenario where I would be expected to PRACTICE MY FOREIGN LANGUAGES (in this case French), it’s during a trip abroad! The thing is: having studied and used French as long as I have done, I long ago stopped considering the mere ordering of food in restaurants and buying tickets and other similarly simple things to be “practicing” it, hence I tended to neglect doing it. I fully expected to hear my Mum and Dad lament about me not practicing my French. But even then I laugh – I invented “soit me donné” (and similar phrases in the vein of it). I explain this in the following paragraph.

“Soit me donné” is a “special” phrase I invented a long time ago for ordering stuff in French restaurants in style, so to speak. It is special because it is “fancy” in that it uses a relatively little-used form of the French subjunctive: “soit me donné(e)(s) [followed by one or more accusative nouns]” means “may [the thing or things you’re ordering] be given me”. I love it because it’s educated and inventive, if peculiar. And my family know this, so I stopped doing it for that reason (well, most of the time).

I thought of suggesting that we have conversations in French. I thought of having us play Scrabble in French (which I remember doing at school once during a French lesson because it was the end of term). As a last resort I might actually have bought a local newspaper or magazine and encouraged everyone to read / translate a paragraph from a given article in turn. Even when I did speak French to locals during said holiday, they were eager to speak English to me, which wasn’t helpful (actually, I would often speak French while they spoke English, as if it was all totally normal). But it wasn’t exclusively me seeing locals exemplifying their knowledge of English with pride and expecting tacit appreciation for it. (That said, however, there was a time when we had sandwiches in a restaurant where the guy who served us originally talked to us in English even it wasn’t instantly clear to any of us who weren’t actually listening to him at the time, but I was ready for it even if the rest of my family weren’t.) It was then that I realised: did I have my mind set on practicing my French, or practicing foreign languages, or practicing translation?

I doubt that many methods used in language learning and practice are ones that remain used by most people all the time, without change. But then I also guess that I would do well to remember, reminisce what things were like for me during my first days of foreign language learning. This is actually quite amusing – it reminds me of the time I thought of keeping a diary of learning a new language or visiting a foreign language class as an observer for the sake of gathering “press article material”, or rather content for these blogs I write. Is it practicing my French or practicing my languages?

In the linked episode of Mind Your Language here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Faeq6h5mLHA the “quiz” questions that Mr. Brown asks the students, is that practicing English or practicing languages? Because anyone can, say, learn a page of vocabulary in a foreign language and pretend that they have an absolute understanding of all the words in all the circumstances where they would come across them. Cross-cultural communication is no less important a theme in Mind Your Language as learning English is – it does seem to me that, generally, most of the jokes in this programme revolve around the students in some way.

Even today, there are certain expressions in English which I know are very common ones but for which I’ve never even considered determining a translation / equivalent in French or German. Seriously, it was actually after I got back from the aforementioned holiday that I found myself asking myself, “How do you translate ‘to make something up’ in French?” I couldn’t agree that it was strictly a matter of a single word, so I decided to invent a phrase which more or less meant the same: it was something like, “faire la creation de quelque chose par son imagination.” Or even just “imaginer” might be good enough – but people “make up” things both fictional and non-fictional all the time (everyone knows that), so maybe it depends?…

At the end of the day, ever since I started translating as a profession, career prospects has become the main reason for me practicing and perfecting my language skills in place of fun or gaining appeal among peers – but then that should be no surprise. I am indeed saying that you cannot pretend that you are learning / teaching yourself translation like you can with languages (maybe it was only a matter of time in my case). You know, when I was at school, there were times when I didn’t pay as much attention as my teachers and parents would have wanted – for reasons which were not always a belief that the lessons would not help me in the real world – but then I could today go and buy a copy of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to read again easily enough, or revise what I learned about NOR gates, NAND gates etc. in physics (isn’t the Internet great?). But you see, this reminds me of when I was learning for my driving theory test and in the instructions it said “don’t just LEARN THE ANSWERS. They should mean something to you when such situations actually occur in real life” (or words to that effect). For translation is a real art by any other name. It’s not unlike martial arts: at the time of writing I have a green belt in jujitsu, for which I have learned a handful of techniques and by no means poorly so, but I am still expected to show patience to overcome my otherwise seldom-mentioned limitations and frustration when it comes to perfecting them for what they are REALLY for (or at least could be for) (like, anything can happen in an actual combat situation). But getting back to the topic at hand: it’s fine to learn a new language purely for basic convenience purposes, but you just know that things all change when you actually mean to resolve to become apt at, say, learning to make innuendo remarks in a new language, or similar language instruments. For example, I really don’t know of any equivalent phrase for “coming out” (i.e. like Ellen Page did) in French and German, but there MUST be one, right? For the time being, I could only think of saying something more stiff, “plain” and ultimately literal (like “admettre son homosexualité” in French or “seine Homosexualität bekannt machen” in German). If I knew many equivalent phrases of such expressions in French and German, then it would likely be only a matter of time before even educated native speakers agreed I had mastered all aspects of the language with flying colours in absolute terms. Now that WOULD be good.