2007/02/13

English Grammar in French

Today, I had a conversation with an Austrian exchange student.
She is in Paris to learn about English and French, which seems a perfectly convenient choice.
But there is something she doesn't understand, and since we talked about it, neither do I.

English grammar courses are taught in French.
I just can't figure why it is so.
My first reaction could have been : "Well, it's easier this way, since we use a specific vocabulary we first acquired in junior high..."
But then, so do we in Literature or Cultural Studies. Literary criticism is done with specific terms, demographic or sociological studies are done with a vocabulary we generally heard of years ago in Geography classes...

Plus, it can be quite unsettling for the Erasmus students who honor us with their will to study English here. I mean, they could have gone to England for this purpose, still they chose France. Aren't we supposed to feel proud about that ? Aren't we supposed to try to confirm that we can indeed teach English as well as the English themselves ?

Then, is it that we feel so proud to be French that even we it's all about another language, we need to show off how good our language is ?

Or, and that might be a little too harsh but I'm seriously beginning to feel this is probably the closest answer to the truth, we don't realize that people who study English can actually understand it. When we chose to go to the University in order to learn English, do they really think it was because we felt uncapable of understanding it ?

Well, if that was the case, even though I don't delusion myself with the range of this message, we have to realize that the students who chose English want to know more about something they are already familiar with. It's never been about "English for Beginners", here.
And we, students, were able to use translated technical words in Literature or Cultural Studies, we can definitely use translated terms in Grammar and Linguistics too.
For the difference between "subject" and "sujet" is quite the same as the difference between "epithet" and "épithète" : these words are all distorted Latin.

1 comment:

Hanna Sirén said...

A good point! (I can't remember how grammar is taught in English philology courses in Finland... In English, I think?)