Recently someone was kind enough to give me a copy of a French textbook published in 1965 which contains some perfect examples of the occasional absurdities of the grammar translation method referred to in a previous post. Grammar translation was commonly used for teaching Latin and Greek and then applied to modern foreign language learning. Basically, it does what it says on the tin. You translate phrases into and out of your native language and use that process to practice grammatical structures. The grammar occasionally ends up more important than the sense of what is being conveyed. The more recent communicative approach emphasises getting one’s meaning across, occasionally at the expense of grammar. So we shift from one extreme to the other. Swings and roundabouts, swings and roundabouts. C’est la vie, non? This sixties book ‘Advanced Level French Course: Book One’ by W.T. John and G.W. Crowther contains some delightful examples of useless things to be able to write in French (the method left only a lucky autodidactic few able to speak the languages).

The following short excerpts (admittedly all the more absurd for my taking them out of context) will not order you a croissant or help you to say ‘bonjour’ to the Boulanger but it might just give a hint to the method’s implicit respect for the imaginative literary and philosophical other worlds which the learning of a foreign language promised and indeed still promises to reveal. The texts seem to be a heady mix of simply absurd and absurdly dull: making tedious topics of everyday life into miniature literary portraits. May the texts’ mild absurdity tickle your reality or show up its banality! But just imagine being able to say or having to write such things in French!

‘Fishermen are strange people: sometimes they won’t say anything, sometimes you can’t stop them from talking.’ (p.2)

‘Before setting out for work, Mr Smith would always help his wife to do the washing-up and make the beds. If you think that she no longer had anything to do, you are wrong.’ (p.3)

‘I soon found myself in front of the other pupils, pretending to be a drunken old nobleman’. (p.2)

‘ “I am going to give you a spade and a rake,” said my uncle. ‘With those tools you can do more than most people think.’ (p.6)

‘The vicar was certain a lunatic was in the church-tower; Andrew thought it was a trap; the cook’s cousin alone was calm. He was not afraid. But he had a gun.’ [Adapted from E.Nesbit, Five Children and It, Ernest Benn]. (p.12)

‘Finally they had to be pulled out by their legs, Voltaire last and screaming all the time.’ [Adapted from Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love, Hamish Hamilton] (p.26-27)

Paradise Lost?