Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart

by William Alexander

  I’m particularly interested in the two areas of the brain most associated with language. The Broca’s area is largely responsible for the production of language, although it also plays a role in comprehension (especially decoding syntax); the region known as the Wernicke’s area handles language input, both spoken and written. Although we’re using state-of-the-art equipment to examine these areas, their role has been recognized for over a century: autopsies of patients with aphasia, unable to express their thoughts in speech, often show damage to one or the other of these regions.

  After I’ve completed the scans, a colleague processes and analyzes the images on his computer, coming up with some interesting results, particularly in the French/Japanese comparisons. Here’s a look at my brain a year ago, before I started studying French. It’s a composite image of the left side of my brain created by comparing the neural activity while listening to French to the neural activity while listening to Japanese. The dark areas indicate where there is comparatively greater activity during the French audio clip. As you can see, there’s only a smattering of it; that is, a year ago my brain was processing French pretty much the way it was processing Japanese.

  Here’s what the same composite image looks like now, a year later. Notice how much more of the brain is “lit up” while listening to French. After a year of studying, “my brain on French” no longer looks anything like “my brain on Japanese.” Formidable!

  The increased activity is especially high in the Wernicke’s and Broca’s language centers, and while we can’t see it in this image, the right side of my brain—where the reasoning functions of language, such as intonation and emphasis, are handled—shows much more activity as well. Clearly, something positive happened, and while I didn’t totally comprehend the excerpt from Le petit prince, I did pick up more phrases this time, and the reading just seemed less foreign, more familiar, and that’s probably what the brain activity is reflecting.

  No linguist or neuroscientist would seriously suggest using an f MRI scan as a measure of language acquisition, but last year I’d also taken a baseline college language-placement exam. My score on that written, online test, which measured comprehension and grammar, was 310, not quite qualifying me for first-year college French. I retake the test and am surprised to see that I’ve scored 418, just two points shy of admitting me to third-year French. Thus in a year of study I have, by this measure, learned the equivalent of two college years of French. So I am making decent progress if we ignore the oral and aural parts.

  Sans doute I do know quite a bit more French now. The size of my vocabulary has increased by an order of magnitude, and given enough time (a critical qualifier), I can conjugate all the regular and many of the irregular verbs in the most common tenses. And I did navigate an airport bomb threat and a dentist.

  But here’s the thing: While I have learned a lot of French, I have not learned French. And that is a major distinction. I have always subscribed to the maxim, have always taught my children, that with enough effort, anything can be accomplished, at any age. As an adult I’ve acquired the skills of woodworking and baking. But language, as has been suggested, does seem different. I wonder whether it is in fact a child’s game, limited by a critical period. Was I simply too old to learn French?

  Not necessarily, according to linguist David Birdsong, who, after listening to my progress report, tells me, “It’s not too old for anything in the sense that it is, I think, a disservice to the species to not put yourself out there and try to do your best at whatever it is that you’re doing. Yes, the odds are getting stacked up against us; it doesn’t mean we can’t push back.” Nevertheless, he says, “Your level of motivation, and effort, and dedication to this, should’ve paid off more. But there are a lot of individual differences that come into play, which is not at all the case in first-language acquisition.”

  That is, everyone learns their first language, but when it comes to second languages, there is huge variation. And I want to be crystal clear about this: My failure to learn French should not deter anyone else from trying. For to do so is not only a “disservice to the species” but a disservice to yourself, and you may have a great deal more success than I had. You may even become fluent. Some people have a gift for languages and some don’t.

  Elissa Newport, who first proposed the second-language critical period theory, is less surprised at my lack of proficiency. Some years ago she’d followed the English progress of Chinese college students who’d immigrated to the United States. “They have these times of quantal jumps,” she says, “but you don’t see anything approaching fluency until about five years out.” And these are young men and women. What about a fifty-eight-year-old? Was there ever any hope for me? “Sure,” she says. “If you had lots and lots of immersion . . . for five to seven years, you’d get to be pretty damn good.” Five to seven years of immersion? There’s another term for that: moving to France. Let’s see, if I can convince Anne to give up her medical practice and retire to France when we’re sixty-five, I’ll be fluent by the age of just . . . seventy-two. Keep dreaming.

  My Millefeuille classmate Karen is in her seventies and still, to her great credit, pursuing and learning French. If I blame my failure on age, how to explain her success? I’d figured that in two weeks of classes, given the advantage of my relative “youth” and my intense preparation, I’d catch up to her, but I never did. My theory is that, while both of us had taken French in high school and let it disappear from our lives for decades, I had dropped it after only the tenth grade, while Karen continued throughout high school and a year of college. Those extra few years she gained on me decades ago, while we were both within the second-language critical period, made, I think, a huge difference. My theory, then, is that the age at which you’re trying to master the language as an adult is less important than how much time you spent with it in childhood and adolescence, no matter how long ago that might have been.

  I mention this to Birdsong, who confirms that studies suggest that age and duration of first exposure are critical, and you retain more of the language than you realize. Even forty years later, the language is still there in your brain, a sleeping giant, waiting to be awakened. Unfortunately, my giant kept hitting the snooze alarm, and I may be kidding myself that enduring a couple of more years of Madame D—— might have made a difference.

  Perhaps this project was doomed from the start. All those hours down the drain, and between the shocks, the anesthesia, and the French, I probably got dumber to boot. A year ago I’d taken a cognitive-function exam, and my low scores had me concerned about more than learning French. I’d been below average in nearly all of the ten categories, with alarmingly low scores on two critical tests, landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent for my age group on the visual memory test. How much lower, I wonder, as I gloomily prepare to retake the exam, can I go?

  “ANNE! ANNE!” I FLY down the staircase, two and three steps at a time.

  She hears the commotion and comes running to meet me, braced for whatever emergency she’s about to face. “What happened?”

  I’m catching my breath.

  “Is everything all right?”

  I wave a piece of paper. “Everything’s fantastic! You’re not going to believe this!”

  My cognitive scores have skyrocketed. I am now above average in seven of the ten categories, and average in the other three. My word recall, or verbal memory, score has shot from the bottom half to the 88th—the 88th—percentile! But hold on: some of that effect is surely due to employment of those memory techniques I’d learned, including constructing a memory palace for the words that were being flashed at me. Yet I had no such technique for the visual memory test, where one has to memorize abstract shapes—boxes inside triangles, that sort of thing. And on that test I’ve leaped from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th.

  As for the most important measure, my total score, here’s what a year of French has done to my brain: my neuroco
gnition index has gone from the 55th percentile, just about average, to the 84th, a significant jump.

  Studying French has been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth!

  We fellow baby boomers have been seeking this elusive fountain of youth with more determination than Ponce de León, as we try to avoid becoming the Alzheimer’s generation, spending billions of dollars on brain exercise games and adult piano lessons.

  I revitalized my brain merely by studying French. And as a bonus, I can order dinner in Paris. A disappointing year? This may have been the most significant year of the rest of my life, as I’ve stumbled quite by accident across the strategy to keeping my brain sharp and functioning as I move from middle to old age. What had felt like Waterloo has instead become a rousing victory, with implications so startling, so important, I can almost overlook my failure to learn French.

  FRENCH: BEAUTIFUL, MADDENING, TENACIOUS. It won’t let me win, but it won’t let me go. I have no potatoes in my Hudson Valley kitchen, only the more poetic pommes de terre—apples from the earth. Instead of a slice of lime—bah, ouais!—I top off Anne’s côté voiture with citron vert—smiling to myself that the French call it simply a “green lemon.” I text Katie often in easy French—ça va?—and she responds likewise, a game we can’t stop playing, as if we share a secret code.

  I may not have learned all the French I wanted to, but what I did learn has enriched my life immeasurably. Yet perhaps the most important French lesson learned over the past year is this: you can love a thing without possessing it. Even as French has eluded me, my ardor for the language has only grown. I love, and will always love, French. Whether it loves me back, I have no control over.

  Je ne regrette rien.

  Lagniappe

  A Louisiana French word unknown in France, a lagniappe is a little extra measure thrown in by a merchant (such as a free thirteenth doughnut when a customer buys a dozen).

  Last night I dreamt I was French. As before, this mainly involved sipping absinthe at the window of a dark, chilly café, wrapped in a long scarf that reached the floor, legs crossed, Camus in one hand and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other.

  But this dream continues, as Anne slips into the booth, giving me a bise on each cheek, while la serveuse places a café au lait in front of Anne before she even has her coat off.

  “Madame le Docteur,” la serveuse says, smiling.

  “Merci, Catherine.”

  “Avec plaisiirre,” she says with a wink.

  Anne, of course, has no medical license in France but, not ready to retire, has found another, unofficial calling in the picturesque but remote Provençal village that we’ve made our home.

  “Tout va bien? ” Catherine asks, and everyone in the café leans in to hear the answer.

  Mother and daughter are fine, Anne replies in perfect French, which my smartphone translates into English for me. Although the phone says it was touch-and-go for the veal. I guess it meant the calf.

  “Did Dr. Chinitz help out?” I ask.

  “No, dear. He’s not in this dream. You don’t need him anymore.”

  Anne has been to the marché. I peer inside the bag, which is overflowing with bright orange carrots, crimson tomatoes, beets the color of a sunset, baguettes, a freshly killed duck, and a half kilo of foie gras, the last item a gift from the grateful farmer.

  “I ran into Jean-Claude,” Madame le Docteur says between sips of her café au lait. “He asked if you want to go rabbit hunting on Sunday.”

  Baah, ouais! My mouth starts watering like Elmer Fudd’s.

  A rap on the window. It’s Minnesota le Gros, my pétanque partner, with an armload of boules, motioning with his chin for me to come out and play.

  “Uh-oh,” Anne says, hustling out. “I’d better warn Fanny.”

  On the sidewalk I see Sylvie and Antoine, pushing a stroller with their twins, Guy and Alexandre. “Bonjour,” they call. I smile and wave. In the background, Mont Ventoux looms majestically, its pinnacle tantalizingly hidden behind a wispy white mist, a cloud of milk in a cup of tea.

  I glance at my watch. Like Anne, I need to keep busy in retirement, and I’ve also found a calling. My two-hour lunch over, I walk to the schoolhouse, passing a pâtisserie. My New School instructor, Marc, in apron and toque, runs to the door, crying, “Ploo de gâteau! ”

  At the school a packed classroom of adults, seemingly half the town, awaits my arrival.

  “Vous avez un stylo? ” a student asks.

  “Madame D——,” I scold her, “no French, please. This is an English class.” She pulls herself out of class by the ear.

  “But English is so difficult!” another student cries. “Your r’s are impossible, you have too many words, and we are too old for this.” A murmur of assent, then in unison the class says, “We are never going to learn this language!”

  The mob starts to advance threateningly.

  “Écoutez! ” I say. “C’est vrai, nous sommes âgés. Mais nous pouvons repousser.” We can push back, I tell them, my accent so atrocious that the mob starts giggling, some collapsing to the floor. Seizing the moment, I jump onto the desk, thrust a fist into the air, and give one final battle cry to my language students.

  “Courage! ”

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  Acknowledgments