The French have a completely absurd myth about language learning that blows my mind.

Having family in France, I'm lucky that I can sometimes visit. In some ways I'm unlucky, in that my family is largely insane, but insane family is a relatively common affliction. So, when a family member asked about my studies and then used that as a segue into pontificating about a totally ridiculous theory of why the French are physiologically incapable of learning English, I just assumed this was another instance of crazy family being, well, crazy.

Then I heard the same theory from a friend of my mother. When we recounted it to her French tutor, expressing our surprise at how two people who were apparently unacquainted shared such a preposterous view, this woman -- an educator, no less -- also supported it. As more and more French people we meet volunteer that they know and believe it, we're realizing it is a well-known, culturally ingrained myth. So what is it?

Apparently, it's simply common knowledge in France that The French cannot learn English (or other foreign languages) because of...different...frequencies...and...stuff.

The general gist of the idea is that different languages occur at different frequencies, and that native speakers of one language are ill-equipped to hear and interpret, and even worse equipped to produce, those frequencies.

It's unclear whether Mercury going into retrograde also affects things.

Now, as someone who likes to play Devil's Advocate, I kept trying to find ways to understand this nonsense. I thought, perhaps they recognize that the building blocks of a spoken language are its phonemes and that those can be thought of as being defined stochastically, so each speaker has a mental target, but every utterance will miss it by some margin of error. Maybe they also know that one can represent a speaker's vowel space by using a graph of the first and second formants (that is, the secondary frequencies produced by speech sounds) plotted as the x and y axes. This seems unlikely, but whatever, maybe it's common knowledge in France. If they recognize that individual productions of a sound will, in the aggregate, cluster around this target, maybe they also know that the target could potentially vary from speaker to speaker.