Read Online Flirting With French by William Alexander - Free Book Online
Authors: William Alexander
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very night I wake before dawn, feeling really strange, as if a sparrow has hatched in my chest during the night and is flapping its wings, trying desperately to get out. I put two fingers to my neck but can’t pick up a clear pulse. I wake Anne, who, being a physician, can. It’s over two hundred.
“AFib,” she says. Next thing I know, I’m being whisked into an emergency room bay. An EKG confirms that my heart is in atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of arrhythmia where the atria flutter out of rhythm with the rest of the heart owing to a short circuit of sorts in the heart’s nervous system. The fluttering itself will not kill me, but if one of the clots that can form in the blood that’s sloshing around in the atria moves out and reaches the brain, it’s
au revoir.
Thus the first thing they do in the ER is to start an intravenous anticoagulant in my arm. Meanwhile the doctor quizzes me. Any unusual alcohol consumption? No. Drugs? Don’t be silly. He continues down the list, and I continue shaking my head. No reason for this to have popped up now—none! Finally he asks, “Any new stress in your life?”
We lock eyes.
“Well, I
am
studying French.”
The Event
“Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.
“Like, what kind of a party?”
“Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”
“Oh, wow . . . You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”
— WOODY ALLEN , “The Whore of Mensa,” 1974
Unable to sleep in my room in the telemetry ward—with two intravenous lines in my right arm and a blood-pressure cuff and heart monitor connections on my left, I am virtually chained to the bed, unable to turn over or get comfortable—I switch on the TV and come across an infomercial that I have more than a passing interest in. “Learn a language the way you learned it as a child,” the host says. What does that mean, exactly? How
did
I learn language as a child? As I recall, I picked up English pretty easily without conjugation charts or language tapes. And that’s the paradox that all linguists grapple with: For infants, language comes effortlessly. It is a skill that virtually every child, regardless of his or her intelligence, masters by the age of three or four. Witness this conversation between a three-year-old and Art Linkletter, from his popular 1950s television show
People Are Funny
. Linkletter has just asked the boy, “And who is in your family, Scott?”
“My mommy, my daddy, and my brother Henry. Oh, and when Daddy goes away on business trips, Uncle John comes and stays with Mommy.”
Safe to say that language is acquired before the filters that govern its use are in place. Yet for adults, learning a new language is work, hard work, and we fail far more often than we succeed. How do children manage to do it so easily? It’s an unfair contest because babies are born with a head start on language. With really not much else to do, they’ve been listening to the chatter on the other side of the womb since about the thirtieth week of gestation, and they emerge with a demonstrable familiarity with their mother tongue.
How do we know what’s going on in babies’ heads? In one experiment, scientists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk ingeniously fitted a baby’s bottle with a nipple that, when sucked on, would play a tape of either spoken French or Russian. The researchers found that four-day-old French babies suck harder when they hear French than when they hear Russian, and that their sucking picks up in intensity when the tape switches from Russian to French, but not when switching from French to Russian.
As an unrepentant Francophile, I’d like to think that this is because French is the most beautiful, most melodic language in the world, but if you do the experiment with Russian babies, they show a preference for Russian over French. Interestingly, the experiment yields the same results even if the audio is muddled so that specific words
“AFib,” she says. Next thing I know, I’m being whisked into an emergency room bay. An EKG confirms that my heart is in atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of arrhythmia where the atria flutter out of rhythm with the rest of the heart owing to a short circuit of sorts in the heart’s nervous system. The fluttering itself will not kill me, but if one of the clots that can form in the blood that’s sloshing around in the atria moves out and reaches the brain, it’s
au revoir.
Thus the first thing they do in the ER is to start an intravenous anticoagulant in my arm. Meanwhile the doctor quizzes me. Any unusual alcohol consumption? No. Drugs? Don’t be silly. He continues down the list, and I continue shaking my head. No reason for this to have popped up now—none! Finally he asks, “Any new stress in your life?”
We lock eyes.
“Well, I
am
studying French.”
The Event
“Suppose I wanted to—have a party?” I said.
“Like, what kind of a party?”
“Suppose I wanted Noam Chomsky explained to me by two girls?”
“Oh, wow . . . You’d have to speak with Flossie,” she said. “It’d cost you.”
— WOODY ALLEN , “The Whore of Mensa,” 1974
Unable to sleep in my room in the telemetry ward—with two intravenous lines in my right arm and a blood-pressure cuff and heart monitor connections on my left, I am virtually chained to the bed, unable to turn over or get comfortable—I switch on the TV and come across an infomercial that I have more than a passing interest in. “Learn a language the way you learned it as a child,” the host says. What does that mean, exactly? How
did
I learn language as a child? As I recall, I picked up English pretty easily without conjugation charts or language tapes. And that’s the paradox that all linguists grapple with: For infants, language comes effortlessly. It is a skill that virtually every child, regardless of his or her intelligence, masters by the age of three or four. Witness this conversation between a three-year-old and Art Linkletter, from his popular 1950s television show
People Are Funny
. Linkletter has just asked the boy, “And who is in your family, Scott?”
“My mommy, my daddy, and my brother Henry. Oh, and when Daddy goes away on business trips, Uncle John comes and stays with Mommy.”
Safe to say that language is acquired before the filters that govern its use are in place. Yet for adults, learning a new language is work, hard work, and we fail far more often than we succeed. How do children manage to do it so easily? It’s an unfair contest because babies are born with a head start on language. With really not much else to do, they’ve been listening to the chatter on the other side of the womb since about the thirtieth week of gestation, and they emerge with a demonstrable familiarity with their mother tongue.
How do we know what’s going on in babies’ heads? In one experiment, scientists Jacques Mehler and Peter Jusczyk ingeniously fitted a baby’s bottle with a nipple that, when sucked on, would play a tape of either spoken French or Russian. The researchers found that four-day-old French babies suck harder when they hear French than when they hear Russian, and that their sucking picks up in intensity when the tape switches from Russian to French, but not when switching from French to Russian.
As an unrepentant Francophile, I’d like to think that this is because French is the most beautiful, most melodic language in the world, but if you do the experiment with Russian babies, they show a preference for Russian over French. Interestingly, the experiment yields the same results even if the audio is muddled so that specific words
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