The French Connection

When I taught English in Russia, one of the tasks I often had to perform was that of conducting language tests for new students. New students at my school were given a written and an oral test, the latter of which was my responsibility to administer. One of the challenges of adminstering these tests was getting students to understand that the test was not to judge them but simply to find the right class for them.

As you might expect, prospective students were all over the map in their ability to speak English. A few had never studied the language before and had been sent to me for testing by mistake (our school had a policy of not wasting absolute beginners' time with a test that would only show that they were, after all, absolute beginners). Others had such mastery of English that I wondered why they felt they needed an English class at all. Most, however, fell somewhere in between--usually having had some English in school but either having forgotten it, not used it, for now having a need to improve or prove their level (usually for employment purposes).

Our school would always ask students what background they had in foreign languages--not just English, but any foreign language. Quite a few had studied either French or German before they came to us. One or two had Spanish.

So, at this outset, as I become a new student of Portuguese, I am giving my language-learning background, which--though I do say so myself--is diverse if not terribly extensive. It has also included a variety of techniques, from the traditional grammar-translation method (more on this later) to more recent communicative approaches to self-study.

I first studied a foreign language on any regular basis, and in any serious way, in eighth grade. In eighth grade, I started attending a small boarding school in St. Louis, Missouri. By small, I mean very small: we had all of seventy students in six grades (seventh through twelfth). My graduating class was considered large: it had fourteen people in it. The school had a fairly traditional language-arts curriculum that required all students to take Latin, Greek, and a modern foreign language--the last being a choice of French or Italian.

At school, I took a year of Latin. This is all I was able to take; Latin was offered to seventh- and eighth-grade students only. A new student entering in the eighth grade, such as I, took a year of Latin before starting in on Greek. I remember liking Latin a great deal, doing reasonably well in it, and regretting that I was forced to switch to Greek--a language I remember having a great deal of trepidation about because--gasp--it had that funny alphabet.

That funny alphabet, it turned out, was the least of my worries. Within a month of starting Greek, I remember swearing to anyone who would listen that I hated the language and would never do anything useful with it. Somehow, though, I managed to make reasonably good grades in Greek, enough so that I was able to skip second-year Greek and move straight into third-year.

Latin and Greek are what scholars term dead languages--meaning, languages no longer spoken by living people as their native tongue. The main reasons for people to learn them are either to develop a better understanding of their own languages (this is true for speakers of many European languages, which are chock full of Greek and Latin borrowings) or to delve into Latin and Greek literature. Naturally, my school's Greek curriculum was focused on literature. I recall translating the entire first book of the Iliad, as well as one of Plato's dialogues and possibly bits of the New Testament. What we call ancient Greek actually consists of multiple dialects, none of which ever achieved enough cachet to become the standard version of the language. So a student of Greek ends up having to contend with two or three dialects, at least.

As I was struggling through third-year Greek, I was breezing my way through first-year French. A consensus existed in my French class that any student who was spending more than 20 minutes a night on French was throwing time away; it was that easy. Second-year French took more than 20 minutes a night, but I enjoyed it thoroughly and did extremely well in it--so well, in fact, that my teacher had me enter a French essay contest that I won handily, twice. The second time I won it, I hadn't studied the language in a year.

I was sufficiently confident of my French that I proceeded to do nothing with it all through university. Well, almost nothing. I did end up fulfilling my college language requirement in it, though not until I had already tried my luck at Russian. Readers of my other blog know the story of my college Russian studies--which I attempted to take from a native speaker not of English, not of Russian, but of Italian. Despite grandiose dreams of one day reading Dostoevsky in the original, I gave up on Russian after one semester, a bad case of the flu the day of my final exam, and a C-plus.

I did, however, take a year of college Hebrew, for religious treasons. This was a disappointment to me in two respects: first, it was Modern Hebrew (the variant spoken in modern Israel), n0t the language of the Bible; and second, my one attempt to use it on a trip to Israel resulted in someone firing back that the bathrooms were on my right--in English.

My only language-learning experiences post-college has been my work on Russian last year, in preparation for going to Russia. I bought a Teach Yourself Russian course and worked on it, haphazardly and irregularly, until I got to Russia. I prepared flashcards, color-coded them--and then completely ignored them when I was in the only situation in life I am ever likely to have a chance to learn this beautiful yet incredibly difficult language. My main reason for neglecting my studies was that, almost all the time I was with Russian people, I was teaching them English, or they were eager to practice their English. So my Russian never really found a purpose.

French, however, has turned out (not surprisingly) to be an excellent springboard into Portuguese. A few weeks ago, I was staying at a hostel in Boston when I happened to strike up a conversation with a Frenchman who was visitng the United States. Though embarassed at how rusty my French has gotten, I was able to carry on conversation with him, only occasionally having to ask sheepishly for a word here or there. Starting off with Portuguese, I find myself constantly saying, "Oh year--just like French."

Portuguese and French look so much alike because they come from the common source of Latin. Latin's daughter languages--known to linguists as the Romance languages--include not only commonly-taught Spanish, French, Italian and less-often-taught Portuguese, but also real rare birds like Occitan (also known as Provencal, as it's spoken in the Provence region of France), Romanian, and Romansch (one of Switzerland's four official languages). There has also been quite a bit of borrowing among these languages, so a fair amount of similarity is not surprising to find.

Of the Romance languages, scholars believe that Portuguese actually preserves more of Latin's verb conjugation system than any other language.

So learning Portuguese is, in a way, helping me re-learn French. More on that later.