Literature on Language - Swimming and Drowning

Jonathan Marks

Jonathan Marks has recently contributed to the Macmillan English Dictionary webzine, the Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus dictionary, the onestopenglish website, and has co-written a set of grammar companions for Inside Out. He is working on a pronunciation course and a(nother) Polish-English dictionary, among other things. E-mail: jonathanmarks@wp.pl

The late Chris Brumfit once put together an anthology of 'literature on language', published as one of Macmillan's MEP monographs in 1991. It consists of extracts from imaginative literature and autobiography, all concerned with language, language acquisition, and the experience of language learners, language teachers and language users. It's a marvellous antidote to all those books and articles weighed down with statistics and references.

And in the same spirit, here are a couple of extracts from a recent Polish novel, Wszystkie Jezyki Swiata ('All the Languages of the World') by Zbigniew Mentzel (2005).

[Sections in italics are translations from the novel, but the bits in normal type within those sections are in English in the original text.]

The novel's set in Poland in the late 1960s. The narrator learns English in a language lab with an enthusiastic teacher called Maciej, who uses the latest methods and the latest materials brought in from the west: Louis Alexander's First Things First. There's a description of the teacher's skilful treatment of lesson 75, a dialogue between a salesman and a woman customer in a shoeshop. (I've checked in my copy of First Things First, and I can verify that the dialogue is accurately reproduced in the novel!)

The narrator watches the teacher with admiration as he works the tape recorder -

..... intuitively rewinding the tape not too much and not too little, so that every sentence we had to repeat started in exactly the right place.

"Have you any shoes like this?" - We repeated the customer's question, and with a quick movement, like a magician producing a rabbit out of a hat, the teacher pulled out from under his desk a pair of women's shoes .....

"What size?" asked the salesman. "Size five." "What colour?" "Black." But in the end he announced with true regret that although he'd had shoes like those a month ago, now he didn't have any left.

"Can you get a pair for me, please?" The customer evidently hadn't given up hope that sooner or later she would get a pair of black size five shoes of the kind she wanted.

"I'm afraid that I can't." The salesman shrugged his shoulders and explained that the customer's favourite shoes had been popular for the past two years, but had recently gone out of fashion, and now there was no chance of getting them any more.

The dialogue continued slowly but surely towards the punch line. "These shoes are in fashion now," the salesman's voice came through the headphones, and at the same moment the teacher showed us a pair of funny red shoes with amazingly thin, high stiletto heels. Where on earth had he got them from? I couldn't imagine. "They look very uncomfortable," the customer said doubtfully, and we had to listen to this sentence from the tape recorder three times. I had a feeling that we were approaching the most important part.

"They look very uncomfortable," Maciej replayed a fourth time, raised his forefinger high above his head and held it there for a while, building up the tension, then pushed the button of the tape recorder and played the salesman's answer at full volume: "They are very uncomfortable. But women always wear uncomfortable shoes!"

I repeated over and over again with the whole group, Maciej conducting us and swaying to the rhythm as if he was in a trance: "They look very uncomfortable. They are very uncomfortable." And it seemed that after a few more lessons from Alexander I would finally start to speak English.

One month, and 12 pages, later, the narrator is in London. He goes into a shoeshop to buy himself a pair of shoes, sees two women customers and takes a fancy to one of them, who's trying on a pair of shoes.

The other girl, a blonde with short hair, gave her friend an extremely critical look. "They look very uncomfortable." I suddenly heard the familiar sentence, and before I knew what I was doing I reacted to the stimulus like Pavlov's dog and said out loud: "They are very uncomfortable. But women always wear uncomfortable shoes."

The girls both turned round at once. "Pardon?" said 'mine'. "They are very uncomfortable," I repeated, this time a bit more uncertainly.

The blonde girl burst out laughing. "I can see that you learned your English from Alexander," she said in Polish. She was Polish - a compatriot, and she'd come to my rescue! I felt relieved, but a bit disappointed, too.

It turns out that the other girl is American. He invites them for a drink.

For a while I talked to both of them, using a few English stock phrases and humorous remarks that I'd learned by heart, but in a few minutes I'd exhausted my repertoire, and I switched to using Polish.

"Ask me if I can swim."

"Can you swim?"

"I can hold myself above water," she replied in Polish. "Do you know what that means? It means I've got no idea how to swim. And after a minute I drown, I go right down to the bottom."

The American, who couldn't follow what was going on, suddenly grabbed my hand.

"Talk to me," she said, emphatically.

"What? What about?" I stammered.

"About you. Your country. Your job. Your life. Who are you?" she rattled out without stopping for breath.

"Go on, talk to her," the Polish girl encouraged me. "After all, you can make yourself understood in English. You must be able to say who you are and what you do. Can't you see that she likes you? I can't imagine why," she added mockingly.

The American was still holding me by the hand. "Talk to me, please!" she repeated. The army of English words stationed in my head was routed instantly. The Polish girl was right. I felt myself going down. Drowning. I said nothing.

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