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A little reflection daily about my language acquisition

Sunday 6 August 2017

325

When The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck mentioned Alan Watts, I took notice.

In Watts’s autobiography, In My Own Way, there are at least two references to foreign languages.

Watts translates quotations “because most of my American readers, especially the younger, do not understand French, or any language other than their own”.


At school, he “noticed that the muscular, athletic boys had an extreme and uncomfortable resistance to the correct pronunciation of French. They would grunt and mumble over their textbooks, absolutely refuse to articulate the French r, and seemed to feel that speaking French properly was effeminate.”

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