"I can come to a lesson on Monday" is
better English than “I can come to lesson in the Monday”. Even so, I understood
what the person I am helping learn English by providing the opportunity to chat
with a native speaker on Skype wrote perfectly well. Being understood is close
enough for me when I try to communicate in French and closer than I can usually
come. Learning French has always been, like playing guitar, just a hobby for
me. Maybe that is why, after several decades of playing with French and my
guitar and 15 semester hours of college credit in French, the only person who
has ever been able to follow my spoken French was a Haitian that I was helping to
prepare for the American citizenship exam. He assumed, probably because my accent
américain is richly augmented by a southern drawl, that I was trying to speak Creole.
Maybe I should check out opportunities for ESL instructors in Haiti.
English is rapidly becoming the second language of
the educated world; the language that two people who do not share a mother
tongue will use to negotiate a contract or conduct other important business
when just “voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir” alone, even delivered in a
really sexy voice, is not quite formal or detailed enough to seal the deal. This
means that many people learning English as a Second Language (ESL) are trying
to learn English well enough to do highly demanding judgement jobs while
speaking English. I will never need to function as a professional in French. I
have lived long enough to be part of a global lucky few who can go as far as
their talents will take them, no matter how ambitious they are, speaking only
the language they learned at their mother’s knee. The British Empire is long
gone and the American Empire is on life-support but the English language enjoys
still an exorbitant privilege that the rest of the world may decide to leave in
place long after both are dust just as a matter of convenience.
I fell in love with French at around age fifteen,
while growing up in Alabama, without ever hearing it spoken face-to-face by
anyone. At that time, I had never encountered anyone who did not speak English.
Finding English translations of Camus and Sartre at my local library was the beginning
of an unrequited love of the French language that had nothing to do with any
desire to visit France and everything to do with the way these translations and,
later, French New-Wave films that I only saw years after they were released,
spoke to me. I tried to learn French in college chasing after whatever was lost
in translation. I never wanted to go to France. I wanted to read “Being and
Nothingness” in the original French and follow French films without the
sub-titles. Given this, it is not surprising that I made a “D” in “Intermediate
French Conversation” the same term I made a “B” in a first course in reading
French literature and writing about French literature in the original language.
According to my instructor, I was the only student she had ever had who did
better in her introduction to French literature than in intermediate
conversation taking both in the same term. It helped that I had the English
translation of L'étranger, one of the books we covered, half-memorized, was
majoring in philosophy and convinced that Jean-Paul Sartre came closer to
getting things right than any philosopher ever.
I can’t regret falling in love with French rather
than Spanish all those years ago even though I would have been better off in
many ways if I had chosen Spanish. Half-speaking Spanish would have had practical
value during the many years I spent in Texas and Florida, teaching students
some of whom spoke Spanish better than they spoke English. I would have had
plenty of occasions to practice and could have achieved immersion just be
moving to the right neighborhood. I might be functionally bilingual now and,
better yet, functionally bilingual in English and the mother tongue of the largest
group of people in American who might need the services of an ESL instructor.
This, along with twenty years of experience teaching on-line, might be all that
I would need to make a nice living working from home doing something I enjoy.
