How did James Michener learn French?
Well actually how his character (the narrator, George Fairbanks) learns French. A big part of the novel The Drifters (by James Michener) is the story of George Fairbanks, a 60 year old guy who is somehow connected to six 17-22 year old young people in the late 1960s and him learning about their lives, culture and music. A running thread in the book is George being introduced to the music of the late 60s and how he doesn’t really understand that music, until he finally does. He explains how he learns to understand the music by analogizing it to how he learned French.
George was moving to Geneva, Switzerland, for a job at a financial institution. And therefore needed to learn French. He decided to go to a “crash program” at the University of Besançon, where “a pure French was spoken.” His teacher was Madame Trenet. The first session was Madame Trenet speaking to George for sixty straight minutes in French about French rivers. In these sixty minutes George was not able to understand much other than recognize the names of the rivers. But while she talked to him “her face became diffused with memory, and the spaciousness of what she had seen was transmitted to me, and for a brief second the French words, which I could not possibly comprehend, conveyed a message which was clear and visible as a newspaper headline.” George tells us that he listened “with intensity.”
The next day there was again sixty minutes of straight French lecture, this time about French cinema. Again he is not able to understand much but he hears the name of a French actress that he knows, Arletty, and is able to tell his teacher that he knows the movie she is in, Les Enfants du Paradis. He is able to make light conversation with the teacher about this movie. There is a third, fourth and fifth lecture about French painting, French theater and French foreign policy. He says that sometime during the last lecture “suddenly the random sounds she had been making for five days fell into orderly place.” At this point Madame Trenet recognizes this epiphany by Fairbanks and assigns him two hundred short words to memorize as well as about eighty phrases. She tells him to start using these in conversation and she teaches him present, future and past tense. About two weeks after his first meeting he is able to give a short talk in French. She also instructed him to memorize a list of words that were important to his business but then to throw the dictionary out - it is much better to guess the meanings of words than to look them up and he will “enjoy remembering it more.”
So that is how George Fairbanks, the narrator of The Drifters by James Michener, learned French. And in a similar way the character also broke the “sound barrier” with understanding the music of the late 1960s, by being around it (the music) all the time in the bar the Alamo, in Torremolinos, Spain.
Can I do this in my life? I am not sure. Can I use youtube? Find a Spanish speaker in town to lecture me? But even if I learned Spanish, if I don’t use it consistently, it is not going to stick, I think.