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[/audioplayer]My children won’t learn French. If their school tries to force the issue, I’ll fight tooth and nail. There’ll be the mother of all Agincourts before I let it happen.
It’s not that I have any problem with the language, even though it has too many vowels and you have to say 99 as ‘four-twenty-ten-nine’, making it impossible (I imagine) to sing that song about red balloons.
It’s just that I want my children to be successful, and learning French makes no business sense. There’s a moral issue too, but first the business: no English person moves to France to hatch a business plan these days. They might go there for the lifestyle, or the wine, or to live out their years. But nobody goes there to succeed. My nephew, who recently left school in Brittany, had modest ambitions to be a shop assistant, but found he needed a three-year accreditation in retail.
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