Learning and maintaining a language: Exercise for the mind

It was almost three decades ago, but I remember the incident vividly. My younger son, then in kindergarten in a French school in Québec City, was playing with neighbouring children in the lane behind our house when he was called in to supper. He turned to his friends and said “Il faut que je m’en aille”—I’ve got to go.

I was pierced with simultaneous pangs of envy and pride. I found myself thinking “I spent hours and hours in high school memorizing the various forms that take the subjunctive—and my son, who does not yet know what the subjunctive is, let alone that it follows ‘il faut que,’ has just rattled it off without thinking.”

It was one of the many experiences I have cherished in my years of language learning: as a student, an adult, a journalist, and now as Commissioner of Official Languages.

For those of us who have not grown up learning a second language from parents or playmates, there are often difficult steps and stages, steep slopes and plateaus in the process. We all learn languages differently: some in a classroom, some in a social environment, some primarily from reading and reasoning, and others from listening and intuiting.

Sometimes, learning another language can seem totally hopeless—until there is a change of environment. In my last year of high school, I can remember feeling a chill when one of my teachers, a man of brutal sarcasm, said in a kind tone of unusual compassion that made his comment even more terrifying, “Fraser, you really have no gift for languages.” A year and a half later, on a summer project in Quebec, I had a breakthrough—and went from being a mediocre student of high school French to someone who was able to speak and understand the language.

Learning a second—or a third—language involves entering another world, and learning a new code. For an English speaker, the mysteries of the use of “tu” and “vous” provide a glimpse into new complexities of social relationships.

But speaking a language is not, as some think, like riding a bicycle—a skill that, once acquired, is never lost. Rather, it is more like learning a sport: stop practising, and the ability erodes; practise more, and improvement is almost inevitable. The old cliché applies: use it or lose it.

After three summer jobs in Quebec—one summer on an archaeological dig and two as an orderly in a mental hospital in the east end of Montréal—I graduated from university and went to work as a reporter in Toronto. My French began to deteriorate—but even just a weekend with friends from Montréal would result in an audible improvement.

Eight years after I graduated from university, I moved to Montréal with my family, and plunged into reviving and improving my language skills. Once again, my ears seemed to swell as I listened to sliding vowels, diphthongs and unfamiliar expressions and tried to wrap my brain around the different accents and social gradations of language. The extraordinary Quebec monologist Yvon Deschamps had recently published a book with a collection of his best-known monologues, and, with the disc on the record player, I would read and re-read the transcriptions, marvelling at what he had created, and what he did to my ear.

I came to realize that learning and maintaining a language is like getting and staying fit: there are an infinite number of ways, almost all of them pleasurable, but, to paraphrase the running shoe manufacturer’s slogan, you just have to do it.