In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, learning French helped transform Lula Mae, a farm girl from rural Texas, into Holly Golightly, a New York café society girl. It’s a tall order, but I can verify that learning French improves English pronunciation, as it certainly did for me. Not only for the accent however, it also advanced my overall English proficiency by a mile. Some 50% of the English vocabulary is derived from either French or the same origin as French. Thus learning French will expand your English vocabulary in depth, with regard to word origin and decomposition. You’ll also improve grammatically and learn novel ways to construct sentences. English itself is of Germanic origin and another 30% of its vocabulary is derived from German, so supplementing German will have you basically grabbing English by its horn.
I’ve not yet picked up German. But I’ve also learned Italian and Spanish, dabbled with Russian and Hindi. Learning another language opens a new world, regardless of your comprehension level. I learned new sounds, new scripts, and even completely different constructions of sentences. It inspired me to explore a new people and culture. I listened to their music even if I didn’t understand it. I read their books in their English version. I watched their movies and even attempted to cook their food. In retrospect, learning the new helped me understand and appreciate more of the old, that of my own cultures and languages, by ways of contrast and comparison.
Resources are plentiful for learning popular languages such as French, Spanish, and German. I would borrow from the library a set of CDs and listen to them on my way to and from work. Learning basic grammar and vocabulary took a few months. Sometimes, it seemed enough and I would not pursue further. Other times, I would move on to more advanced materials: reading and listening to short pieces of news online, watching a movie in its language with its own subtitles, and translating my own writing. Online translation tools are helpful; so is traveling. I found that traveling certainly motivated me to get through the basic material fast. Going beyond basic required greater inertia however. My motivation to learn French was being born in a former French colony, thus much influenced by its language, cuisine, and outlook. In learning French, I was also attempting to better understand my own native land, and myself.
To stay fluent in a language, you must use it often. Even as a bilingual, I forget my mother tongue without daily usage. Fortunately, keeping abreast is easy with internet access. To assess fluency level, the Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) provides a description of proficiency and ranking for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The scale is utilized for professional workers learning a foreign language. It is not always applicable to everyday usage. A functional native may not qualify for a professional proficiency ranking and vice versa. I would rate my Vietnamese fluency at functionally native, but not at a professional proficiency level.
Yet nothing is ever truly forgotten. The brain already tagged that frame and filed it away. It sits somewhere in the back of the mind, so that at the call of a melody, a scent, it may sneak up to catch you by surprise, or that at an auspicious moment, to come back to open doors and make stories.
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