“Répétez, plus lentement? ” I request.
She repeats, more slowly.
I still don’t understand.
“How about you speak in English and I speak in French?” I suggest. We chat for a while in this way, and the French is coming with great difficulty and, I know, many, many errors. Catherine is quite happy to tell me, in very good English, about her day at work, what she’s making for dinner, her horrible boss, and the weather in Paris, and while the cultural exchange is enjoyable, I’m trying to learn French, and this isn’t helping un morceau. I ask her if she would be willing to correct my spoken errors. There is a long pause.
“If I correct every error,” she says as politely as you can say something like this, “we cannot have a conversation.”
Ouch. Well, the French are known for being direct. Nevertheless, that stinger will be sticking around in my attic-brain long after I’ve forgotten the first-person past tense of “to embarrass,” that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, while we’ve been burning up the wires chatting, Catherine has burned her dinner. I feel responsible and try to make up for it with an elegant good-bye: “C’était un grand plaisir.” Now she decides to correct me—specifically my pronunciation.
“Plaisiirre,” she says, drawing the word out so pleasurably, so sensually, it’s like her tongue has reached across the Atlantic and is flicking my ear. It is the single most beautiful word in French I have ever heard, the perfect fusion of word and meaning, of form and function. “Plaisiir,” I try hopelessly to imitate.
She is not impressed. What am I doing wrong?
“You have to get into the mind of the culture,” she explains. “Each language means one culture, one behavior, one emotion. So when I was young, learning English, I tried to feel English, by which I mean a little snobbish. When I learned Spanish, I made myself feel very proud. And German . . .” A pause. “German, you can imagine. But that was more my instinct than my intellect. Anyway, it has helped me; it is like to play as an actor. So I think it would help you to know how you feel the French and ‘play’ one of us. That’s just an advice.”
Damn good advice. When you hear that so-and-so has a gift for languages, you think of being able to remember vocabulary or having a good ear for pronunciation. But I’d never considered this intangible, the ability to connect to the culture, to pick up language clues and cues from the nature of the people speaking it. Perhaps this is the source of the “gift” for languages.
It’s hard to “play as an actor” when using Rosetta Stone, which ignores culture totally in its one-photograph-fits-all-languages approach. In eight months with the course, I learned not a single thing about French customs, the French psyche, or even French cheese. But from a single conversation with Catherine, I’ve learned that they still think the English are haughty, the Spanish too proud, and as for the Germans—“you can imagine.”
A few days later, searching for my inner Frenchman, I repaint the kitchen—in bright Provence yellow and blue. It’s a start.
IN A BROADER SENSE, what—if anything—does a language tell us about its people? The myriad rules of conjugation and grammar would suggest the French like (and abide by) regulations, as anyone who’s even just mailed a parcel in France can attest. Yet I would argue that it’s the language’s idioms, invented not by salons and committees but by common folk, that provide the clearest window into the French soul. Compare the American (in most cases, British as well) and French versions of these common idioms:
AMERICAN: It costs an arm and a leg
FRENCH: Il coûte la peau du cul (It costs the skin of the ass)
AMERICAN: Bottoms up!
FRENCH: Cul sec! (Dry ass!)
AMERICAN: To tie the knot
FRENCH: Se passer la corde au cou (To put a rope around your neck)
AMERICAN: To have a stroke of fortune
FRENCH: Avoir le cul bordé de nouilles (To have an ass full of noodles)
AMERICAN: To have a wet dream
FRENCH:Faire une carte de France (To make a map of France)
In case you’re as baffled as I initially was, that last one comes from the shape of the splotch of semen that a teenage boy might wake up with on his belly. (Mine was always more Italy, but close enough.) Asses, nooses, and geographic ejaculations! The French versions of these idioms are earthier, more rural, and more vulgar than anything an American would dream of saying. As are the French people. They in turn find us prudish, pointing to the fact that our public television stations don’t even have a late-night porn channel. But look carefully at some of these idiomatic differences: certainly hanging a noose around a French groom’s neck is a far cry (goodness, it’s hard to write without using idioms) from his American cousin’s tying the knot. Shall we discuss the notorious sexism of French society or the widespread custom of French men taking mistresses while we’re at it?
For other idioms, it’s just interesting to see the slight differences: We eat crow; they swallow grass snakes. We kick the bucket; they eat dandelions by the root (I love that one). To a Frenchman a condom is an English letter; to an Englishman it’s a French letter—tit for tat, you might say (but the French would say à bon chat, bon rat—to a good cat, a good rat). We have a frog in the throat; they have a cat in the throat. We have other fish to fry; they have other cats to whip. We buy a pig in a poke; they buy a cat in a pouch. We call a spade a spade; the French call a cat a cat. Something about the French and cats, it seems. And while we’re on felines, what we vulgarly call “pussy” the French call “cat”—chatte—and yes, it’s a feminine chat. At least they got this one right (cf. “breasts” and “vagina”).
I’ve saved the best for last. Surely the strangest idiom in this country renowned for its disdain for organized religion is one that a Frenchman might say after sipping a smooth red wine: C’est le petit Jésus en culotte de velours! It’s the baby Jesus in velvet shorts!
What!?
Relax, it’s just the French way of saying “It’s the tops!” (a Roaring Twenties flapper might’ve said, “It’s the cat’s pajamas!”) or it goes down easy, like God in velvet shorts—or underpants, depending on who’s translating. You get the idea, although getting the idea doesn’t make it any less curious. My secret fantasy is to see an American presidential candidate slip up and use that expression on the stump: “Winning Connecticut would be the baby Jesus in velvet shorts!” Not only would his career be over, but I swear, I’d probably make a map of France, right then and there.
French and the Middle-Aged Mind
Middle age is that perplexing time of life when we hear two voices calling us, one saying, Why not? and the other, Why bother?
—SYDNEY J. HARRIS, American journalist (1917 – 1986)
On November 4, 1970, Los Angeles County authorities made a gruesome discovery in the form of a teenage girl, given the pseudonym of Genie, who had spent nearly her entire thirteen years isolated in a bedroom in her parents’ house, strapped most of that time to a potty chair, rarely touched, and never played with or hugged—or spoken to. And because of her lack of exposure to it, Genie had not acquired language, could not even vocalize.
Her case sparked the interest of scientists around the world, including Susan Curtiss, a first-year graduate student of linguistics at UCLA, who saw a rare opportunity to test the “critical period hypothesis.” Proposed just three years earlier by neurologist Eric Lenneberg, it stipulated that language could be acquired only during a window starting in late infancy and ending with the onset of puberty. The notion of a cutoff age (while Lenneberg put it at around twelve, most scientists today suggest an age closer to six) for acquiring language was almost as galvanizing in the linguistics community as Noam Chomsky’s controversial theories a decade earlier.
Under Curtiss’s tutelage, Genie began to acquire vocabulary at a rapid rate, “hungry to learn the words for all the new items filling her senses,” Curtiss later wrote. Learning syntax, however, was another story. Even as Genie learned to speak, she rem
ained stuck at the two-word-string stage (“Me hungry”) for years, and when she used a third word, it was often out of order or meaningless (“Applesauce buy store”). Even after a full seven years of intensive language rehabilitation, Genie never acquired the ability to produce a negative sentence or ask a question, not even the persistent one-word question we most associate with toddlers: “Why?”
Genie, at the age of thirteen, was too old to acquire language.
Abused children make for poor research subjects, as do feral children,* but studies involving youngsters who acquire language—American Sign Language—at varying ages have since lent credence to the idea of a critical period. The concept of a biologically based limit for acquiring language may seem counterproductive, but critical periods are quite common in the animal kingdom. Perhaps the closest parallel can be found among birds, who, if not exposed to their species’ birdsong by a certain age, will never acquire it.
Why would nature have evolved critical periods? Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, suggests that the brain—especially the young, developing brain—has a lot of work to do, and it can’t do everything at once. Learning language (as opposed to using language) is pretty much a one-time proposition. It is, as Pinker puts it, “use it then lose it.” Once you’ve acquired language, which metabolically is very expensive, you no longer need the scaffolding that has been set up for your brain in order to facilitate that function. Your body returns the language-acquisition set of genes to the gene library and checks out a different set, perhaps the ones you need to sense danger or kill a wild boar, to learn math, or to operate your iPad. Pinker writes, “The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies.”
The theory is backed up by the remarkable neurological changes going on in the young brain during the period when we are learning language. The newborn brain—the one that learns language before learning to tie its shoes—comes out of the womb with, give or take, 100 billion neurons, each connected to about 2,500 other neurons. As the brain develops during the first two to three years of life, the period when language acquisition is taking place, the neurons continue to make additional connections, or synapses, up to an average of 15,000 each (some neurons will make as many as 100,000 synapses).
This is way more than even the developing brain needs, but the redundancy has a purpose: Brains aren’t perfect, and the plethora of synapses allows, for example, language function or vision to move from one region to another if there are problems. And there often are problems, starting with birth, when the soft skull is squeezed through the smaller opening of the mother’s cervix. The surplus of synapses also allows the brain to adapt to the particular circumstances of its environment, a feature called plasticity. For example, if you are born blind (or are blinded early in life), the aural centers can develop more, compensating by providing you with especially acute hearing. Surrounded by not one but two spoken languages? The language centers grow.
Up to a point. Beginning at the age of two or three, the unused synapses start to get—in the surprising term that neurologists share with gardeners—pruned. The synapses that are in use (one might say, bearing fruit) stay, but the unused ones (including, in my case, those that might have been learning français while I was in the crib) start dropping like French soldiers under fire. By adulthood, you’ve got less than half the synapses you had before you were out of diapers. It’s been theorized that these extra brain synapses are vital to the acquisition of language.
The neurology of language acquisition isn’t fully understood, although the existence of a critical period is now nearly universally accepted. But what about learning a second language? I remember hearing references to a second-language critical period at the language conference I attended. Does such a thing truly exist? Is there a critical period for second-language acquisition?
I put that question to Elissa Newport, a cognitive scientist at the University of Rochester who has studied both first- and second-language acquisition. Newport is the coauthor, with Jacqueline Johnson, of a 1989 paper that studied forty-six Korean- and Chinese-born immigrants, ranging in age from three to thirty-nine. All had come to the United States with no prior knowledge of English, and all had been living in the States for comparable periods, with comparable exposure to English, being either students or teachers. Each subject was given a test consisting of a list of simple English sentences, half of them grammatically correct, and half containing errors such as “Yesterday the hunter shoots a deer.” The subjects were asked to spot the incorrect sentences.
The immigrants who had arrived between the ages of three and seven performed identically to American students. Those who had arrived between eight and fifteen did increasingly worse the later they arrived. Those who’d arrived after age seventeen did the worst of all, but—here’s the interesting part—in that older group, age was not strongly correlated to performance, and success seemed more closely tied to individual differences than to age. Thus a thirty-nine-year-old arrival could potentially perform as well as a twenty-five-year-old arrival—but neither adult could come close to the proficiency of a child who had immigrated at age twelve.
Newport and Johnson argued that this large drop-off in skill after late adolescence—the graph of the data resembles a slight decline followed by a cliff (not the linear decline I’d heard a speaker describe at the SLRF language conference)—was evidence of a biologically based critical period for second-language acquisition, comparable to the one for first language. Why should this happen? “The brain changes over life,” Newport tells me over the phone. “It doesn’t apply to everything. We can learn lots of things pretty well as adults, but certainly for language and I think for other skills sort of like language, the plasticity—the machine—just doesn’t quite work as well.” Neurological studies suggest, she says, that adult brains speaking a new language are doing something different from children’s brains doing the same task. I wonder what my own brain will look like when I repeat the f MRI scans.
Plasticity aside, there’s another reason why kids are so much better at learning language than adults. “Kids are assisted by the fact that they’re so incompetent,” Newport says, explaining her “less is more” theory. “They start out being able to pick up very, very few elements out of a very complicated stream of speech. And that might seem like a disadvantage, but what it actually does, given the way human languages work, is it ends up directing them to the smaller bits, and the most prominent bits, to start with.” Kids get the important stuff, like nouns and verbs, at the beginning, and they don’t worry about the rest—like subject-verb agreement—and they get up and running with a basic command of the language quickly.
“But adults,” Newport continues, “try to do everything. They’re much more capable than kids are at pulling out and remembering bigger bunches of the speech stream to which they’re exposed. And then they have to figure out how the hell they’re organized.” Or, to borrow from the title of one scholarly paper written on this topic, we grown-ups might just be “too smart for our own good.”
If Newport and Johnson’s claim of a true second-language critical period—which I’ve missed by about thirty years—is true, well, c’est la fin des haricots! I’m wasting my time. But the theory remains a divisive one among scientists, so to get another view I contact David Birdsong, a researcher and professor of linguistics at the University of Texas. Birdsong (best name for a linguist ever), while agreeing that “earlier is better,” is skeptical of a sharp, biologically based critical period for second-language acquisition.
“I think the biology part is overstated,” he tells me, postulating that it’s the very existence of your first language, not some dramatic changes taking place in the brain at adolescence, that presents the main obstacle to learning a second language. “You’ve been speaking English for the past fifty-six or so years,” he says. “Therefore, the second language is always going to be talking back and forth with the first. When
ever you say something in one language the other language is activated to some degree. L2ers listen through L1 ears.” That is, you process your second language through the ears of your first. And the longer you’ve spoken your first language—meaning, the older you are—the more entrenched you’ve become in it and the harder it is to break free, whether we’re talking about hearing the foreign language’s phonemes or applying the rules of syntax.
The normal, gradual processes of aging are a hindrance as well. “Processing speed slows down with age, there’s no question about it,” he tells me. And processing speed is critical to language comprehension. While I’m still processing word A, the speaker has gone on to words B, C, and D. When you’re familiar with a language, you don’t process it word by word; you process it in chunks. As Birdsong explains, “You’re able as an English processor to anticipate the next word that’s coming out of my mouth. With French, or Chinese, or Spanish, nothing sounds familiar.”
And as if that’s not bad enough, “one of the things about French is that it doesn’t give you a lot of cues as to where words begin and end. French is horrible this way. It doesn’t lend itself to figuring out where boundaries between words and phrases are.” To illustrate this using an example in English, it’s really hard for even a native speaker without a context to discern whether someone is saying “the stuffy nose” or “the stuff he knows.”
There are more challenges for the middle-aged language student. “We see a loss in word retrieval ability,” says Birdsong. “When you’re sixty years old, you can still learn a new word. You can learn e-mail; that word didn’t exist that long ago. The ability to sort of ‘bank’ new items is simply not going away with age. What does go away with age—and this is a kicker—is your ability to come up with that item on demand.” I’m quite familiar with that phenomenon as well—what I call my French vapor lock, when I just freeze up, unable to recall a word.
Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart Page 12