Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me, and Nearly Broke My Heart
William Alexander
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1616200200
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“A delightful and courageous tale and a romping good read. Voila!” —Mark Greenside, author of I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do)
William Alexander is more than a Francophile. He wants to be French. There’s one small obstacle though: he doesn’t speak la langue française. In Flirting with French, Alexander sets out to conquer the language he loves. But will it love him back?
Alexander eats, breathes, and sleeps French (even conjugating in his dreams). He travels to France, where mistranslations send him bicycling off in all sorts of wrong directions, and he nearly drowns in an immersion class in Provence, where, faced with the riddle of masculine breasts, feminine beards, and a turkey cutlet of uncertain gender, he starts to wonder whether he should’ve taken up golf instead of French. While playing hooky from grammar lessons and memory techniques, Alexander reports on the riotous workings of the Académie française, the four-hundred-year-old institution charged with keeping the language pure; explores the science of human communication, learning why it’s harder for fifty-year-olds to learn a second language than it is for five-year-olds; and, frustrated with his progress, explores an IBM research lab, where he trades barbs with a futuristic hand-held translator.
Does he succeed in becoming fluent? Readers will be as surprised as Alexander is to discover that, in a fascinating twist, studying French may have had a far greater impact on his life than actually learning to speak it ever would.
“A blend of passion and neuroscience, this literary love affair offers surprise insights into the human brain and the benefits of learning a second language. Reading William Alexander’s book is akin to having an MRI of the soul.” —Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements
“Alexander proves that learning a new language is an adventure of its own--with all the unexpected obstacles, surprising breakthroughs and moments of sublime pleasure traveling brings.” —Julie Barlow, author of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory: An Introduction
Psychological Science (3rd Edition)
Rules for how language is constructed? Noam Chomsky’s answer to these mysteries of language, the theory that galvanized and divided the world of linguistics in 1957, is that humans are wired for language, are born with an innate ability to understand the basic rules of language: what Chomsky calls a universal grammar (UG), a “genetically determined . . . language acquisition device” in the human (and only the human) brain. Chomsky’s theory was so divisive that the first question a linguist at a.
On the Double-O Ranch), and then a few weeks later the fluttering bird of AFib has nested in my chest once again. For good, apparently, say my doctors, who try to reassure me that my future arrhythmic life will be just fine, once I get used to it, although I’ll be on Coumadin and beta blockers the rest of my days. Perhaps, but I’m a long ways from being used to it, so I’ve made an appointment with a cardiac electrophysiology specialist in the city to discuss treatment options. In the meantime,.
They have to go on the behaviorist approach, what they call communicative language teaching. Every one of them markets themselves like that. ‘We teach communication, and you will hear native speakers, situations in which you will learn how to function.’ ” That actually doesn’t sound so bad to me, and Byrnes acknowledges, “There’s a lot to be said for that, for that will in fact enable you to do those sorts of things. By the same token, for us as an academic program, that kind of approach.
To be asking is, have I learned enough in just three months of self-study to see us through ten days of biking in the French countryside, a trip we’d planned a year ago. I shouldn’t have let Rosetta Stone gather dust on my desk all spring. It’s been just . . . I don’t know . . . hard . . . to begin. Before tackling French I wanted to acquire some cultural insight into the people who speak the language—I guess you could call it Georgetown’s gestalt approach without the language part—so I set for.
The mouth (from open to closed) along one axis and the origin of the sound (from the back of the mouth to the front) on the other. She writes the various vowel sounds in the appropriate places. The most difficult enunciations for me are the ones in the corners, the extremes. “The French use the entire mouth when they speak,” Cécile explains, pointing to each corner of the chart and having me watch her as she pronounces the sounds. “In English”—she draws a circle in the middle of the chart—“all.