I studied French for five years (give or take one) in ``middle
school'' (Dutch middle school combines the American middle school
and high school into one, that is to say, I had French classes
from age 11 till 16). I was allowed to drop French in the fifth
year due to my dyslexia and would have otherwise had six years in
total.
I -- like most people how had any foreign language in school --
remember very little of my French classes. Most of them focussed
on grammar and literature, which are two aspects I know nothing
about even in my native languages. The only knowledge I retained
of French were the useful phrases picked up in the first year (my
name is, I don't speak French very well, can you slow down, where
is the supermarket/hospital/pharmacy, etcetera).
Just in case anyone was wondering, this is the same for people
who dropped French after two years in favour of German, Latin, or
Greek, and for people who pursued French for the full six year
program.
After graduating, i spent some time in France, and most of my
actually useful French knowledge came from that brief period.
Needless to say, when I encountered a potential source of my
masters dissertation written in French, I was not exactly
ecstatic about translating it. The paper seemed at first glance
to be very useful however, so I made a cup of tea, grabbed my
notebooks and tablet, and set off towards the study room in my
village.
The paper I was translating is titled ``Valeur critique de la
mystique plotienne'' by Jean Troulliard. This is a highly
specialized work containing lots of Neoplatonic jargon and a fair
amount of ancient Greek and Latin. Also, did I mention that
`translation' was a course reserved for 6th year Frech? The year
I happened to drop?
Luckily, there are many tools these days to facilitate
translation. Large language models are an order of magnitude more
adept at translation compared to traditional digital methods such
as google translate, and the availability of digital online
dictionaries further facilitates the process.
The first problem I had to solve however was getting the document
in a machine readable format. I possessed only a scan of the
document which I put through an Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) program to get the paper in text from. This was actually
fairly accurate. The program struggled slightly with the French
quotation marks << and >>, and it completely botched the Greek,
footnote markers, and occasionally interpreted a speck on the
lens as a period or comma.
So I went through the entire document first in French, doing an
instal pass on the spelling, punctuation, and transcribing all
the Greek parts by hand.
I then fed this data in its entirety to Chat GPT (it is 2024
after all) and put that output into a latex document.
I went thought his document as I normally do, reading and
annotating important parts whist making notes in my physical
notebook for the sake of redundancy. Having already made a pass
on the original French, I felt as though this went a lot faster
than normal. While reading, I also improved the automatic
translation here and there, mostly breaking up sentence
structures which appeared rather obtuse in English, and fixing
some mistakes the LLM made with philosophical jargon. For this
step I was assisted by someone more versed in the romance
languages and French in particular, which proved not entirely
necessary, but certainly improved the translation at the end.
Whist reading, I noticed I was being a lot more critical.
Usually when reading paper like these, I just take what the
author says for granted while reading (unless it is particularly
outrageous) and reflect critically at a later date. Now however,
I found myself scrutinizing every line -- primarily for
translation errors, but therefore also picking out lines which
did not seem in-line with what I knew of the Neoplatonic
tradition.
At the end of the day, i spent nearly six hours reading 10 pages
of text, only ~12 times slower than my usual speed. Great
success.
What stood out to me most about this exercise is how enjoyable
and educative it was. Wanting to actually read the paper did
wonders for my motivation, whereas reading French ``high
literature'' in middle school was always a drag. Furthermore, I
learned more about French sentence structure in these six hours
than in five years of classes, and I doubt the sixth year would
have helped much either. Having to transcribe the Greek by hand
did wonders for my comprehension of the alphabet (which used to
be shoddy at best, but is now shoddy at worst), and the whole
project made me much more excited about reading French texts in
the Future.
All of that is to say: (middle) school language classes (and
classes in many other areas for that matter) have failed me and
almost everyone I know. They both fail to actually teach, and
suck so much joy out of learning that people develop permanent
aversions towards certain topics. I was convinced by my teachers
that I was not good at languages. Now I am fluent in two, capable
in two others, and a beginner in yet another pair, whist knowing
phrases and basics for a handful of languages in various
families.
I sincerely hope that the educational system has improved since I
left, but given that its main focus currently seems to be
`modernizing' -- id est: giving 4 year olds personal laptops
and/or tablets, so they can stay glued to a screen even at school
-- I am not expecting much.
