Tout Le Monde Sait … (Everybody Knows …)

If I write another book, the subject will be one that does not require a second language.

My book tells a story about the French fleet at the beginning of World War II. Much of the action takes place on French soil or in French colonial waters. I began my research with the assumption that the most likely villain in the dispute between France and Britain would be France’s most senior Naval officer, Admiral of the Fleet Francois Darlan.

A bit off to the side, one small but intriguing player was Hélène de Portes, mistress of France’s premier, Paul Reynaud. Regrettably, but understandably, Reynaud neglected to mention Mme de Portes in his autobiography, but her meddlesome role in his government is whimsically noted in a number of other accounts.

Reynaud’s biography, along with other major works from and about that period can be found in English translations, but there was no way to find and know and tell the full story without being able to read French. Without the ability to access and understand books, journals, newspapers, letters, and other documents that are available only in their original French, I would have just one side of the story.

I had taken French in high school and college, lightly studying my way through two years of introductory classes in both places. I retained slight familiarity with bonsoir, s'il vous plaît, etc., and as I looked over several French-language resources - including websites and a few books in Notre Dame’s library - I recognized occasional words and a few simple phrases. I was in better shape than if my antagonist had been German or Russian, but in reality, only the slightest degree of fluency remained from my eight semesters of study more than forty years before.

I realized that I was not sufficiently prepared to absorb the volume of information that my research required. I knew I would have to re-learn French - another task for my project and another box for the PowerPoint slide on which I mapped out this project. In my typically stubborn way, I set about re-learning the language on my own.

I had traveled down that road once before, when I tried to learn Spanish on the go after contracting to provide several days of software training for a customer with an office in Cali, Colombia. Since I regularly drive long distances for work, I bought a Berlitz “Think & Talk Spanish” cassette collection to make productive use of my car time in the weeks leading up to that trip. The first 15 minutes of the first cassette went extremely well. I learned a handful of words and basic sentences and was able to count to ten. I thought: “this might work,” until the instructor commanded “Now open your workbook.” Since my commitment to learning Spanish extended only to the limits of my idle mind on the highway, that venture ended quickly.

For this project, I have a one-way, single-lane objective. I just want to re-learn how to read French well enough to understand it. I have no desire to speak French or to write French. Once I made up my mind to re-learn how to read French books and other documents, I looked into different options for learning the language.

My first thought was to try Google Translate, which provides dynamic translations to and from more than 100 languages ranging from Afrikaans to Zulu. It’s a free smartphone app, and it’s also freely available at translate.google.com, which is where I took my first stab at binge-learning my chosen language.

One of the books I had partially scanned at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library was L’Amiral Darlan Parle, by Alain Darlan, the Admiral’s polio-stricken son. “Admiral Darlan Speaks” was written in French, and I assumed it would be an essential source … if only I was able to read it. To test Google Translate, I started by typing in snippets of French from L’Amiral Darlan Parle – first a word, then a sentence at a time.

The individual translated words seemed plausibly correct, and although some of the translated sentences seemed a little bit stilted, I had a good sense of what the author was trying to say. As translated by Google, Alain Darlan’s book begins:

“Two main reasons have led me to write this book, in which is finally hear, ten years after his tragic death, the voice of Francois Darlan, Admiral of the Fleet and Vice-President of the Council ... my father.”

I gave up on Google Translate after a several weeks though, not because its translations weren’t helpful, but because the process I created for myself was so tedious. I manually typed each sentence from Alain Darlan’s book into the “translate from” box on the screen, read the real-time English translation, and then reviewed the original French entry. Then, since I wanted to keep a record of the translated text for future study, I pasted both the original French sentence and the English translation into a Word document. My comprehension was improving, but my progress was depressingly slow. I wasn’t convinced that I had found an effective way to re-learn French, and I decided to check out other options on the web.

Not surprisingly, there are a number of helpful and even cheerful Internet sites that promise to help you learn the language of your choice. Two of the most popular are Duolingo and Babbel, and I gave them both a try. Both sites are free, and they take similar approaches, starting at an elementary “See Spot run” level of engagement, and gradually advancing you towards conversational fluency. Both sites use multi-sensory reminders and reinforcement: pictures, multiple-choice selections, spoken words and repetition. They begin with cheerfully simple multiple-choice options with suggestive clues that all but whisper the correct answers in your ear as you are guided through increasing levels of complexity.

For example, one of the early challenges presented by Duolingo was to select the French translation of “the apple.” In addition to providing these 3 options – “la pomme,” “la chatte” and “la femme” – a picture of an apple, a cat or a girl appeared above each word. I got that one right. On a whim, I tried the introductory questions for Turkish – a language I had never before seen or heard – and aced that one as well. Maybe the questions are too simple. Or maybe the application is so effective that even I could learn Turkish while also re-learning French. No doubt, their goal is to draw you in with a “seems simple” initial experience.

If you’re looking for a path to polite conversation, these language sites are ideal. But my reading material pulsed with edgy confrontations and deadly skirmishes. I wasn’t looking for help in placing a restaurant order, picking up dry-cleaning, itemizing my medical symptoms, or chatting about the weather. I had no desire to read breakfast French or grocery store French; I needed to read naval base French, contentious cabinet ministers’ French, and I must with profound regret require you to sink your ships within six hours French. (Je dois avec un profond regret vous obliger à couler vos navires dans les six heures).

So I returned to Google Translate, this time with a simpler plan. I no longer wasted time pasting French sentences and English translations into a Word document. It seems like a little thing, but in addition to saving time, this added a helpful degree of continuity as I plowed through Alain Darlan’s memoir, followed by De Mers-el-Kébir à Londres, in which Jean Boutron describes his experiences under fire on a French ship on July 3, 1940.

My previous attempts at learning French had lacked commitment and a consistent effort. My “learning time” was too sporadic and unfocused. I needed to learn how to read French and I needed to retain more of what I learned. Since I was doing this on my own, I needed to make a per commitment than if I was using a structured program like Duolingo.

I committed myself to spending 15-30 minutes with Google Translate every possible day, a more consistent commitment than my previous attempt. Work, travel, and family commitments sometimes made it impossible to find the time, but the more time I spent with Translate, the less of a drudge it seemed. I spent more time reviewing sections that I had previously translated, and that cycle of repetition and review helped quite a bit.

I learned to appreciate the value of reading and translating entire paragraphs at a time. The benefit of context would often help me translate individual words and sentences that I might otherwise have struggled to comprehend.

Google Translate, of course, does not provide reliably precise translations of phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. Words in combination have nuances that defy any translation app. For me to rely on Google Translate would be to risk my authenticity and credibility on quotes like “this book, in which is finally hear, ten years after his tragic death…” I used Google Translate to help identify passages worth digging into in more detail and worthy of a precise translation. For those translations, I relied on fluent friends and colleagues.

I maintained and regularly updated a spreadsheet with the French words that I most commonly stumbled over, and I periodically reviewed that ever-growing list of French words and English translations. For travel study, I even printed little flash cards with those words, their translations, and an example of each word in a short phrase. Pro tip: Use PowerPoint and use one slide per word. Print the slides six to a page and cut out the individual slides. Yes, you will feel like an absolute loon, and you will not mention this to a soul until you write a book about your project.

I actually began to enjoy my French studies. Of course, I considered keeping track of my progress. But tracking minutes is messier than counting pages. It would have taken too much time to track my time. So I simply focused on my work. I was that committed.

I would never claim that my approach is a best practice that I would recommend to anyone else with an interest in learning French, Turkish, Afrikaans or Zulu, but this focused, incremental approach to learning how to read selective bits of French worked well enough for me as it significantly extended my comprehension of written French.

One nice advantage of teaching myself French by translating topically relevant sources collected during my research was that my effort was now directly focused on the words and phrases common to my area of interest: the idioms of French ships, sailors, soldiers, and politicians.

Instead of the French version of “What is for breakfast?” or “That color looks great on you,” I learned to read: “le gout d’agir manqué” (the taste for action is lacking), “sa prétendue haine contre les Anglais” (his alleged hatred of the English), and “Les Britanniques ouvrent le feu sur les Francais.” (The British opened fire on the French).

I included one other small learning aid in my regimen. When Barbara and I visited Paris for a week, I made a one-day solo side trip to the site where Germany surrendered to France at the end of World War I, and France signed its armistice with Germany at the beginning of World War II. The small museum store there sells a 32-page booklet titled: “1918 and 1940: The signing of the Armistice in the forest glade of Compiegne.” The booklet is available in both English and French, so I also bought: “1918 et 1940: La signature des Armistices en foret de Compiegne.” I studied them side-by-side as another small step to extend my comprehension of written French.

One of the books I read in the course of my research was The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II, by Douglas Porch. One of the sources cited by the author was an article titled “Could Admiral Gensoul Have Averted the Tragedy of Mers-el-Kébir?” I tried to find a copy online but found that it had been published in The Journal of Military History, which is not accessible to civilians or non-academics.

So, I took a short trip to a rich source of military research. I spent a day in the library of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is just about an hour from where we live. I had hoped to access military publications that are otherwise inaccessible to non-students and non-military personnel. I had a short list of publications in mind (The Journal of Military History, English Historical Review, The Field Artillery Journal … you know, all the popular periodicals), and when I was not able to find them in the library’s stacks, I asked a librarian for some direction. He was anxious to help, and was very generous with his time, as he used his privileged credentials to expand my on-line search capabilities for the day.

He quickly found - and very kindly printed - a copy of the Gensoul paper that I was seeking. I then asked if he would mind searching for additional articles about Mers-el-Kébir in military journals. He was happy to oblige and typed “Mers-el-Kébir” into the search box on his screen. As a long list of articles filled his display in a slow scroll, his face and his voice dissolved into disappointment. He quickly scrolled back toward the top of the list and said: “These all look pretty old, plus they all seem to be in French”

“Hey, wait!” I stopped him.

To my slight surprise, even though all the titles were in French, I understood every word.