With the best will in the
world, a boy will profit but little by three or four lessons a week
(which are the utmost that our system allows him). What he wants, or
at any rate will want, is to be able to cope with Mme. Chose. A
smattering of the irregular verbs will not much avail him in that
emprise. Not in the dark by-ways of conjugation, but on the sunny
field of frank social intercourse, must he prove his knighthood. I
would recommend that every boy, on reaching the age of sixteen, should
be hurled across the Channel into the midst of some French family and
kept there for six months. At the end of that time let him be returned
to his school, there to make up for lost time. Time well lost, though:
for the boy will have become fluent in French, and will ever remain
so.
Fluency is all. If the boy has a good ear, he will speak with a good
accent; but his accent is a point about which really he needn't care a
jot. So is his syntax. Not with these will he win the heart of Mme.
Chose, not with these the esteem of M. Tel, not with these anything
but a more acrid rancour in the silly hostility of his competitors. If
a foreigner speaks English to us easily and quickly, we demand no more
of him; we are satisfied, we are delighted, and any mistakes of
grammar or pronunciation do but increase the charm, investing with
more than its intrinsic quality any good thing said--making us marvel
at it and exchange fatuous glances over it, as we do when a little
child says something sensible.
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