On French lessons

This year I am learning French.

I begin by buying the Michel Thomas Method box-set, he being the whisperer who taught the likes of Woody Allen, Priscilla Presley and Sophia Loren and who sounds exactly like David Suchet doing Poirot. His, he declares with terrific scorn, is a method with no homework, no memorising, no working things out before you speak. ‘You’re trying to remember again,’ he admonishes the student on the tape, who may or may not be a fake. ‘Don’t do that!’

By the end of the first session, you will be speaking full sentences in French, he promises. Yeah right, I think, while lying in the bath and exfoliating. But, lo and behold, I am! And not any old sentence either, but ones like, ‘What is your impression of the political and economic situation in France at the present time?’ (Of course, it’s not nearly so grand when you twig that almost all of those words are the same in French as in English.)

Présentement, I find I must use my new tongue in conversation with an actual French person and not my own feet: I need to phone a lawyer in Paris and ask him a question. I dial the number and say, in French, ‘I would like to speak to Monsieur Lesbancs, please. My name is Louise Candlish and I am calling from London.’

Well, it sounds so cool. Properly French; no stumbling; no illicit trying to remember. Then the person on the other end speaks back. Naturally, I don’t catch a word of it. I repeat my opener, she repeats her gibberish. I giggle. And so we reach the flaw in every language-learning system: since you can’t understand a bloody word of what people say back to you, wouldn’t it be more honest to admit your incompetence up front than to hoodwink natives into believing you are fluent?

Sadly, Michel Thomas died in 2005 and is not able to answer this question. Perhaps I’ll see if Woody, Priscilla or Sophia ever got to the bottom of it.

First published in SW magazine, January 2012 issue