French class

To give a bit of background- my friend Elmas runs a Facebook page for people who are learning English as a second language. Because I’m good at languages, she asked me to contribute some content every now and then. I wrote this for her page.

Hi everyone, 

Today I wanted to tell you something that isn’t directly about English, but more about the way we learn languages. 

I grew up in the Netherlands, and because Dutch is not a very widely spoken language, you are taught foreign languages in school from a young age. 

When I was in school, we were taught English and French from age 12, and German from age 13. 

The language I would like to talk about now is French, and the reason for that is the teacher I had in my first year of high school. Her name was Femke Veenhuizen and she was one of the best teachers I ever had. Ms. Veenhuizen was a short, rotund woman and a fanatic Francophile. She drove to school in an old battered Renault 5 which must have come out of the factory some time before I was born. (This story takes place in 1986, when I was 12)
While other teachers moved around the different class rooms throughout the day, she had commended her own class room on the 4th floor that she made her own. She refused to teach anywhere else. The room looked like a Paris apartment. It was full of French flags, empty wine bottles and posters of the Eiffel Tower, Mont St. Michel and other French landmarks. She had taught herself how to write with both her left and right hands so that, if she was writing on the blackboard, she could span the entire width of the board without moving. She also loved traveling, mainly to French overseas territories like St. Martin and Martinique. 

The reason I bring her up here is one significant thing that she taught us. 

In most Germanic languages, and in English, the adjective comes before the noun. So for example, in English (and in Dutch and German) you would say

“I have a green jacket” or “I have a blue car”.

In Roman languages, like Italian, Spanish and, as here, French, however, this is the other way around, so you would say 

“I have a jacket green” or “I have a car blue” (j'ai une automobile bleue)
To make it just a bit more complicated, in French, there are 17 exceptions to this rule, where the adjective comes before the noun, like it does in English and German.
So here was ms. Veenhuizen’s challenge: how do you make 12 year old kids remember all these exceptions? 

She played around with the exceptions for a while and then came up with a genius solution: she turned it into a rhyme. 

The way she got us to remember all these exceptions was this little rhyme:

Bon Beau Joli

Haut Long Petit

Jeune Vaste Grande

Vieux Mauvais Méchant

Nouveau Autre Gros

Premier Dernier

Say it out loud. It just has the right rhythm and cadence. 

To this day, 34 years after she first taught me this, I can still say this out without hesitation. 

You can wake me up at 3AM and ask me this question and I will rattle it off as if I was in French class yesterday. 

The last time I saw ms. Veenhuizen was on a school reunion in 1999. I have no idea where she is, or if she is even still alive, but I will always remember her French lessons. Teenagers often ask why they have to learn things in school. Well, this is why.

Enjoy your weekend.