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Ideally, at this point the pupil blames himself, and continues to throw good money after bad. The sensible just surrender.

All linguists more or less agree that people who are successful at language learning (such as babies) do so because of one critical variable — need.

Living in an isolated, monocultural island, my students’ need for English was not obvious. The president of my firm couldn’t even speak English himself, nor could many of the teachers in his employ. Those who could almost always had a some quirk in their biography to explain the aberration — born abroad to diplomat parents, educated in London, etc. Indeed, it was the broad awfulness of the Japanese at teaching this exotic foreign tongue that necessitated importing hacks like me.

True laziness is a cloistered elite who dismiss linguistic science to preserve comfortable fantasies that everything they have was earned.

When it comes to fulfilling our betters’ demands for French fluency — a requirement for an ever-increasing array of jobs in the federal government — your average English-Canadian is much like the hapless Japanese. Bereft of any daily need for French, we seek magic cures and quick fixes, from French immersion kindergarten to semesters in Quebec City, only to emerge with little more than the names of office supplies and a hatred of Frère Jacques. As with the yo-yo dieter, failure breeds self-loathing, particularly as the hardbodies of Montreal and Ottawa tease that we lack the self-discipline to be more like them.

Official bilingualism is the worst dysfunction of Canadian democracy. Just as the lawyers of England continued speaking Latin long after everyone else because it proved an intimidating class barrier, over-privileging French fluency has turned Canada’s rulers into a linguistic aristocracy.

Both opposition parties now promise to make French a mandatory skill for Supreme Court judges. It’s perhaps just a matter of time before Justin Trudeau again condemns as “lazy” anyone unlucky enough to not grow up in the mansion of a bilingual prime minister who insisted on speaking different languages on each floor.

True laziness is a cloistered elite who dismiss linguistic science to preserve comfortable fantasies that everything they have was earned.

National Post