Languages

The government is urging schools to devote some time to Mandarin because China is "the country of the future". However, Mandarin is not, it seems, an easy language to teach or learn and the High Master of St Paul's School, Martin Stephen, writing in The Times today, thinks it would be preferable if pupils learnt the language after school and that it should be taught with regference to Chinese arts, history, music and so on; in other words it shouldn't be taught as "a language subject" in the curriculum but as a sort of cultural experience. One reason is that if learnt as another language, a student can get it wrong. He cites a case of a man who learnt it on his own for a year, then when he greeted a local dignitary in China, instead of saying thank you, he appeared instead to compare him "to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig."
I recall a visit to the west of France and, in my schoolboy French, asking at a butchers' shop for a small quantity of meat only for the grateful butcher to come from a back room with a lump of meat the size of a bull's chest.
On another occasion I wished to know if there were any mosquitos in ther area and having to resort eventually to a mime of a flying creature buzzing about the room and landing on my arm. No one knew what I was trying to convey. Then someone said "an aeroplane?"
In general on the continent I usually found it more satisfactory to mime rather than speak. Tea of course is easy; sandwich is quite easy (slap one hand on the other and bite the invisible sandwich); wine is too easy.In Rome I asked for a half carafe of wine only to have delivered a whole carafe. It's not only easy, it's fun.