PicoBlog

When I was in high school, we had choices in the foreign languages we could study. You could take French, or you could not take French. That was it for languages taught in the small school I attended. It’s kind of amazing that we had that, come to think of it. Some of the neighboring small schools offered Spanish as well as French, and most, including mine, used to have Latin, but Latin was truly dead, as far as our education was concerned. Growing up Catholic, I learned more Latin by osmosis in church than was discussed in school.

French class started in 10th grade if I remember correctly. It was also one of the subjects that was ultimately graded by the state Regents Exams. Our teacher was a local woman who either majored in French in college and had lived in France for a number of years. I don’t remember for sure, although I do remember that she was not French.

We learned the language the good old-fashioned way, by rote – learning vocabulary, memorizing verbs and verb tenses, and some conversational questions and answers – “Parlez-vous français?” to which on should be able to answer, “Oui, je parle français.” Or more accurately, “Non, je ne parle pas français!” Nope, can’t speak French at all!

I’ve always admired multi-lingual people. I have a friend who grew up speaking English and Spanish, and as an adult very easily became fluent in Italian and Portuguese, and because he’s also an opera singer, learned German, as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he picked up some Russian, too. He works as a flight attendant on European and South American international flights. Being fluent in the major languages of opera made his life so much easier, and being able to communicate with almost anyone in the course of his job helped him tremendously too. What a gift!

My nephew, who is now 16, is also multi-lingual. His mother’s side of the family are from Latvia, so he grew up speaking both English and Latvian. When he was in elementary school, they offered Mandarin, which he studied throughout his school years, so now, years later, he’s fairly fluent in Mandarin. He was also exposed to Spanish at an early age and may have taken that in school as well. He’s grown up as quite an international young man, and very comfortable just about everywhere. I think that’s just amazing and great.

Most school systems in other countries begin teaching a foreign language in elementary school. Most Europeans, Africans and people around the world learn English along with their native language, since English is the global language of commerce and communication. If you go to any European city, or encounter Europeans here, most speak fluent English, often with no accent, and speak it better than a large percentage of Americans. Of course, age and income often have a lot to do with it, but on the whole, they put us to shame.

Americans are not required to learn another language at an early age. We may be proud of that in some circles, being ‘Muricans, but we shouldn’t be. I regret that I was not exposed to French or any other language when I was a child, liturgical Latin notwithstanding. By the time one is in high school, it’s not easy to learn another language. As an adult it’s even harder.

I did not learn French easily. Everything else (except math) came quite easily to me, but French did not. I had to study, study and study. Learning and memorizing adjectives and nouns was not that difficult. You learn the name of something, and that’s generally it, you can use it. My problem was with verbs and verb tenses. There are regular verbs and irregular verbs. Then you learn the six tenses of those verbs - present tense, compound past, imperfect, simple future, conditional and the present subjunctive.

What the ???

Add the fact that in Romance languages, like French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian, nouns are both female and male. “La” and “Le” are both “the” but the first goes with a feminine noun, the second with a masculine noun. It’s not always obvious which words are which. And don’t get me started with how you pronounce things. Mixed vowels. Who came up with that?

But really, it was those verbs.

At the end of the school year, after the second year of study, we had to take the Regents exam in French. We had to take Regents exams in most of our subjects, something I believe the state finally got rid of not too long ago. The language exam consisted of a written component and an oral component. My classmates and I were nervous about the written component, we were petrified of the orals.

We had to stand up in front of the proctor, in this case the French teacher, who would ask us questions in French which we had to answer. We were graded for our comprehension, grammar, word selection and general content of our answers. We were also graded on our pronunciation and our ability to speak the language.

I passed, decently, but could have done better. I was happy with what I had. I definitely was a better French reader than I was a French speaker. But I passed.

When I got to college, I signed up for a French class. One of the requirements of the class was attending language lab several times a week, in addition to the regular class. Language lab was really early in the morning, and once there, consisted of sitting at a desk with big headphones on and listening to the tape of the speaker and repeating words and phrases.

The way the undergraduate courses were set up at Yale, one could shop around for a couple of weeks to see if you liked a class. If it wasn’t for you, you could drop it, pick another, and there was no penalty or complication in doing that, as long as you took the required classes for your major and your degree. I regret that before the trial period was over, I dropped French and never looked back.

My decision was a combination of fear of failure and laziness. I’ve never been an early morning person, and getting up super early for language lab wasn’t for me. The fact that I was on my own for the first time in my life, without my mother making me stick to it, was liberating, but often dangerous. I signed up for the second level French class, because I could did have two years of the language, but the level to which they were working was far more advanced than where I was. I would have had to drop down to French I, which was beginning French, and I really was somewhere in between the two. I had no intention of being a French major, so I quit. I didn’t try to take another foreign language.

With my passable French in mind, I was as surprised as the next person that I decided to become an opera singer in my senior year. Except for the aforementioned Latin in church, I had never sung anything in a foreign language except perhaps “Frere Jacque.” “You do realize,” I said to myself, “that most of opera and classical art songs are in another language? Another three or four languages, actually. Maybe you should have stuck to those French classes after all.”

The first exercises and songs one learns in the classical repertoire are in Italian. So, I began learning how to pronounce the words correctly in Italian. There are rules, and many words are not spoken the way we pronounce the names of Italian food. The sounds of the vowels are different, more rounded, especially at the ends of words. Double consonants, like the “c”s in the word “ecco” (here) are both pronounced, so it’s “eck-coh” with the slightest of pauses between them. Lots of stuff.

One of the worst things you can do, in trying for a professional singing career, is butcher the language. You can get away with having to look up every other word, so you know what you’re singing about, which some people never did, but having a pronounced American accent while singing another language can be a career ender.

Unfortunately, my first three voice teachers never told me any of this. They were concentrating on my voice, not my pronunciation. I learned how to really pronounce words correctly much later. I was a little better in French, because I knew French had mixed vowels and many of the other idiosyncrasies of the language, but even there, it took me years to learn how to sing well in French. The same with German and Spanish.

The Romance languages and the Germanic languages, which includes English when it comes to singing are two different animals, and all have nuance and quirks. One also needs to modify the way one would speak a word as compared to when one sings the same word. We all do that, no matter what language we are speaking or singing. It’s also why some American singers, in every genre of music, when singing in English, are practically incomprehensible. Pronunciation and enunciation. But I digress.

Back to language. Because of my years of study in musical French, Italian and German, I learned a lot of vocabulary and grammar in those languages. Even verbs. Back when I was still singing, I knew enough in all three to follow simple conversations, I could find a bathroom, ask for a pencil, order in restaurants and pronounce the selections correctly, and could tell you about love, death and a whole lot about vengeance and curses. (Maledetto!!!) I found I now had an ear for language, in that I could copy the correct pronunciations, but those damn verbs!

I have a great admiration for any adult who comes to this country and learns English after they get here. English is not the easiest language to learn, especially vernacular English, with all its slang and fluidity of meanings. English has words that are pronounced the same but are spelled differently and have very different meanings. We have grammatical and spelling rules that we break as often as we adhere to them. We have impossible slang. “Yo dog, that’s bad,” is not about canines or something that’s not good.

I often imagine what it would be like if I chose to live in a new country where nothing in the local language was in any way familiar or comprehensible to me. Could I, at my age, learn quickly? Would I be able to navigate and survive in a city, with people yelling at me, and me not knowing what they are saying? They could be warning me that a bus is bearing down on me, or they may be telling me to go home, foreigner. What if I couldn’t read street signs, or any kind of document? How long would it take me?

Or would I find another English speaker and group of speakers and isolate myself in a world where I was understood, and where I could communicate? How limiting is that? Manners maketh man, they say, but language maketh understanding, and hopefully, common ground. We expect everyone, no matter where we are, to speak English. And much of the world complies. Which is great for us, but also fosters a false sense of superiority and in many, a rude arrogance. I really wish at least one foreign language was offered to every child in every American school, starting in kindergarten.

Maybe learning “Frere Jacque,” wasn’t such an irrelevant thing, after all.

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