What 30 years of not taking French taught me

The first time I tried to learn French, Reagan was president. And now, more than 30 years later, I’m dusting off my lessons again.

By Joe Capucini

I know what you’re going to ask, and I have two approaches to the question of whether any of this is triggering a sense of nostalgia or continuity with where I happened to be in my life at that time. Both of them are gonna start with yes.

Yes, of course I do, primarily because — and I beg your forgiveness for sounding like a cad — my French teacher was very attractive.

I’m not a superficial person, but I enjoyed going to her class. Plus, she was a really cool person.

I remember a time when we were studying foods. The French phrase for a single egg is “un oeuf,” and she was at the board writing and I said, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Un oeuf is un oeuf! (Enough is enough!)’ The class started laughing, she dropped her head at the chalkboard, and dismissed class. That was just very funny.

When you make learning pleasant, it goes from a “have to do it” to “I get to do it,” and there’s a huge difference between the mindset of having to do something versus getting to do something.

At the same time, that was also when my grandmother got sick, and we eventually lost her when I was taking that course in French.

Family demands took me away from studying, so I had a gap between French I and French II, which really hurt me. Then I had another gap. After French II, I dropped out of college and I was out of college for five years, and I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to finish, because at least 85 percent of French III had to be spoken in French. I knew there was no way that was going to happen.

I went to college to study acting and theater. This was in Toledo, Ohio. It’s a nice, little community theater city. There’s no acting there. It’s not New York. It’s not Chicago. It’s not L.A.

The Dean of the College Arts and Sciences was the former chair of the French department, and she was a big supporter of the theater department, and I knew her socially. So I asked if she would allow me to swap out that French III requirement for a quarter of sign language, and she accepted and basically waived that requirement. Without her, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate college.

What I didn’t anticipate then was how I would eventually find my way back to learning.

I was bartending at this nice little family-owned Italian restaurant, and I had built up a loyal clientele. One of the gentlemen that I was serving was a director of a department for an accountant software company. They were growing, and their flagship program was going from a Dot-based system to a Windows-based system. They had 25,000 users that had to be converted within the next couple of years, so they grew a training department and he asked me if I would be interested. He saw some qualities in me that he thought would be effective as an adult learning specialist, as a corporate trainer, as a presenter and a facilitator.

Over multiple industries, over the last 17 years, that’s been my non-theatrical profession. I am an adult learning specialist. I’m a trainer. I’m an instructional designer. I’ve designed e-learning modules. I’m really in tune with the cognitive process and information transfer. I’ve worked in the accounting industry, then I worked in the health field. I worked … oh, goodness! Where have I been? I’ve worked in the banking industry. I’ve worked in web design. I’ve worked in other software industries, and now I’m back in the health industry.

Within each individual industry, I had to learn their proprietary software. I had to learn the common terminologies that were specific to that industry in order to design and deliver with some sort of credibility. If I’m in the nursing home delivering a software presentation, I have to be familiar with the terminology that the nurses use on a regular basis. Otherwise I’d look like a lump.

Learning as an adult takes me back to a more innocent, non-technology driven time. It was the ’80s, man.

In the ‘80s and the early ‘90s, my mind was in an academic learning condition. Fast forward 30 years: it’s different. The mature, and I use that word cautiously, the mature adult mind learns things more prejudicially. And by that I mean it learns things and it challenges things.

When you make learning pleasant, it goes from a “have to do it” to “I get to do it,” and there’s a huge difference between the mindset of having to do something versus getting to do something.

First of all, I’m still learning. I haven’t mastered a second language. Learning a new language is a necessity for some. For me, it’s just a way of exercising the mature adult brain. It’s a muscle, and you have to work it out.

But in every way that counts, I got to learn, and I get to continue to learn, a language.

It’s never too late to pick up where you left off. Try a free Babbel lesson if you’re feeling tempted.