A Legacy Project

My friend Brian Bennet turned to me in band class and said something in German. He was taking the one foreign language class offered at our high school. This was ninth grade. 

I asked him what he said.

He seemed pleased with himself, repeating his German, then translating: “How many fingers has Anne?” 

“Huh,” I said. “That’s a weird question.”

The question required knowing the German word for “five.” He answered the question. Fünf. Fünf was a fun word. 

He might have been capable of asking, and answering, “How many moons are in the sky?” “How many slices of bread make a sandwich?” How many sides in a triangle?” “How many seasons of the year?” It didn’t seem like useful knowledge to me. Another friend was taking German as well. He enjoyed using the word “schnell,” which he could have learned watching Hogan’s Heroes on tv (and probably did). 

I passed on foreign languages until my last semester at EMU. The last class I took was introduction to French. It was Spring 1975. The following fall I was starting a Masters program for which, the program description indicated, a foreign language was required. This was Eastern’s crash course, two semesters of French packed into one six-week term. It was a disaster. I understood nothing. I couldn’t get my mouth to make French sounds. The grammar made no sense, the verb conjugations and tenses. I was pretty good in English grammar. I could diagram sentences. But sentence diagramming, which seemed like a useless exercise in seventh grade, now proved to be useless once again. In French I was deaf and dumb, or as they might say, sourd et muet. (No, that word did not rhyme with suet.)

The following fall, one Saturday morning as part of the new cohort of MA students, I was handed a few paragraphs of literary criticism published in a French journal and told to translate it. Yes, we could use our French-English dictionaries. The subject was Charles Baudelaire’s interest in Edgar Allen Poe, or maybe the other way around. I panicked. I began to sweat. I’d never translated anything. In my French class I learned to say “Where is the library?” Otherwise I had not practiced using academic lingo. Thirty minutes passed. The girl in front of me got up to leave. She’d never even opened her dictionary. One after another my classmates started to leave. At the end of the hour I figured I was done. Done as in out of the program. And in fact, the next week I was informed I would need to sit for the next foreign language exam. It would be offered winter semester.

I failed that one too. 

In the end, I think they gave me the degree just to get rid of me. I was glad to go.