Textbook error

If young people don’t want to learn languages, it might be because the teaching materials are so drearily trendy

Tonight’s homework: learn ‘Bonjour’, ‘Je m’appelle,’ ‘Comment t’appelles-tu?’ ‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va bien’, ‘Pas mal’, and ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’. And the tired child, already sick to death of French, having been taught it since the age of three but never methodically, starts climbing the Everest of trying to master these horrible, spiky phrases, with their sudden apostrophes, their ­unexplained hyphens, and the dangly fives under some but not all of the ‘c’s.

‘Try to remember: there’s an “s” on the end of “t’appelles”,’ we say. The child keeps forgetting. And we can quite see why. He’s grammarless. We parents, having learned French in the 1960s and ’70s from our colourless but thorough W.F.H. Whitmarsh (A Simpler French Course) or J.R. Watson (La Langue des Français), know how much grammar is wrapped up in that ‘t’appelles-tu’: it’s the interrogative second-person singular of a reflexive verb.