Learning French

Mood:
Listening to: Wavin' Flag Haiti Remix by the Young Artists for Haiti
Hungry for: apple pie
Bella says: 'zzz'

Anyone who knows anything about me knows that I am astronomically useless at learning foreign languages.

Part of it is that my passionate, slightly obessively creepy love of the English language makes it hard for me to grasp foreign alphabets and sentence structures, part of it I admit is pure laziness and lack of talent, but a big part of it is a long string of rather useless teachers and broken learning programmes.

I started in the rather weak Australian public schools' LOTE program at the age of seven, a year younger than usual as a year two student in a split 2/3 class, too keep me out of trouble, I suppose, because I was wreaking havoc in the lessons I was beyond and my behaviour was even worse in the subjects I was struggling in. The language of choice was German, for some unknown reason - as a seven year old, I had never met a German or a German-speaker in my life, despite having a German cousin. German took place in a seperate classroom then the homeroom where we had the majority of our lessons, in the new demountables. I have fond memories of struggling to carry my plastic chair with my books and pencils perched precariously in the seat about 100 metres from my classroom to the LOTE demountable, tripping over and bashing my knees.

My teacher also taught Science and Health, for some unfathomable reason, and she could also speak French. Lack of focus prevented me from learning any German aside from 'Hallo', 'Guten Morgen', 'Guten Nacht', 'Auf Wiederzehn' and 'Ich bin sieben jahre alt', as well as a few broken verses of Schnappi das Kleine Krokodil or however the Germans spell crocodile and this rather silly nursery rhyme:

Ich bin Ich und
Du bist Du,
Ich bin ______ wehre bist du?

(I am me and you are you, I am ______ who are you?)

which got rather annoying when you chanted it three million times in one go, getting progressively faster and higher-pitched.

German lasted from the ages of seven to ten, because when I was eleven we made the swap to French, because for some inexplicable reason they decided that 'lower school' (years three to five) should learn German and 'upper school' (years six and seven) should learn French, as if they expected us to learn an entire language in two years based on biweekly lessons. So, in year six, we started learning French.

French for me was a lot more enjoyable. There was a lot less hacking and gacking or saliva flying in French. French was an elegant language, a seductive, provocative language that was exciting and new to us, newly minted adolescents. It was also bloody hard to learn.

My teacher, who started out quite jolly and nice, got increasingly more frazzled and short-tempered as each year passed under her tutelage. At the end of year six, she quit her job and left the school.

By then it became increasingly obvious that English and French were not the languages of choice in the world, but Mandarin Chinese. So the school employed a volunteer teacher's aide from Christmas Island to teach our mainly-white classes Chinese.

Let me tell you - Chinese is not an easy language for children who have spoken English all their life to learn. We're used to alphabets, not squiggles and wiggles and obscure ancient symbolism. We're not used to having to memorize 5000 characters - after all, in English, you only have to know the nine basic numbers and the 26 letters of the alphabet to get around the modern world. In English you can sound things out, guess, and there's a good chance you'll get the spelling roughly right. In Chinese, there is no alphabet. There is no guessing. It's just a shitload of memorizing.

Our lives weren't made any easier by our teacher, who to us, seemed to be permanently stuck in Stone Age China, despite being a Christmas Islander. After explaining to us in Pidgin English that her name was Mrs Foo but if we were to address her in Chinese we had to call her by her maiden name, so she would be 'ling lao shi' (a concept which I understood, growing up in an Asian family where married women kept their maiden names), we were still all confused, and ended up calling her 'Mrs foo ling lao shi', which eventually morphed into the easier 'Mrs Tofu'. Tofu, for white kids, described Mrs Foo/Ling Lao Shi perfectly - an unremarkably hopeless lump of goo.

Mrs Foo tried valiantly to teach us her language, but her attempts were in vain - the white kids mocked her mercilessly with her efforts to be 'cool' and her attempts to discipline us, and the Chinese kids mocked her elementary Chinese, which she used literally, word for word, ignoring rather comically some of the sayings and anologies common in the Chinese language. In the end, none of us could say more than 'ni hao ma' - which was how much Chinese we knew to begin with. I was considered one of the top students because I knew one other word - my Chinese name, Quan Zhi Xiu.

So after six years of a very motly LOTE education, I, along with the majority of the graduating class, remained stubbornly nonolingual. At least I was part of an alarmingly small percentage of schoolkids that can boast of a satisfactory grasp of our mother tongue, English. But ass horrible as we were to the teachers, I still don't think we are entirely to blame. I mean, when the only people who can speak another language are those taught outside the school by foreign parents, then there's obviously something wrong with the system. I mean, English schools teach French, and a larger majority of Brits know school French than Aussie kids know school anything.

I've always wanted to learn French. The exoticness that struck me as an eleven year old never fully left me, but more importantly, I knew that French would be a very useful language to learn - much more useful, it seemedto me, than Chinese, as I was intent on sticking to the Western World.

French in year eight was a hopeless story, with an Australian bloke with the same mental capacity as dear Mrs Foo and a horrible grasp of the delicacy of the French language, as well as the basic pronunciation. Ironically, this year is slightly better under the instruction of a slightly psychotic Italian teacher, but there was still the problem of being taught one thing and then the test being on something completely different, with confusing instructions written by Teacher Number One, as we will call him.

I still haven't given up on learning French. Perhaps I will learn it myself one day, pick it up, as I have picked up, rather incompetently, but still, I have taught myself basic html. Perhaps.

Until then, Auf Wiederzehn. Jai zian. Au revoir.