Foreign Language Instruction

I always find it fascinating what phrases our instructors teach us in foreign languages. For example, Toque McToque said she learned how to say “life isn’t fair” in her Spanish class, which led me to wonder about the objectivity of her teacher. Just sayin.’ In Portuguese classes in college, we had a unit on asking people their signs of the zodiac and another one on travel that included the word for hijack. It has always been a great comfort to me to know that if I am ever on a Brazilian airline, I could say, “Good day, my name is Famous Hat, I am a Capricorn, and I am hijacking this airplane.” You never know when that could come in handy.

If you really want to blow your foreign language instructor’s mind, you could do what I did: learn all your German from Bach cantatas and then take a German conversational class. This is a very good idea if you like being asked why your entire German vocabulary seems to consist of 18th century words for Heaven, Hell, Devil, and singing.

As my regular readers no doubt already know, I spent a summer in the Basque area of Spain when I was twenty, and there I learned really practical Basque phrases, like, “How much does this beer cost?” The family I lived with quickly realized that I understood Spanish pretty well, so they talked to me in Spanish when they wanted me to understand and used Basque when they didn’t want me to know what they were saying. However, the only bad words I learned were in Spanish.

In French class we once learned a bad word when our teacher dropped a framed picture of Notre Dame she was showing us, and the glass cracked. She didn’t mean to teach us that word, it just slipped out. It means poop, if you see what I’m saying.

My parents once gave me tapes to learn Gaelic, but then they asked to borrow them back and they will not return them. Every time I ask, they say, “We’re not done with them, and you weren’t really using them anyway, were you?” So the only phrase I know in Gaelic is a dirty one that is probably not on the tapes.

I think everyone should learn a foreign language. I have never heard anyone say, “Man, do I regret all those semesters of French! I could have been learning something really useful instead!” If you want all that French to be useful, just go to France. Or Montreal.

Famous Hat