Textbook error
If young people don’t want to learn languages, it might be because the teaching materials are so drearily trendyTonight’s homework: learn ‘Bonjour’, ‘Je m’appelle,’ ‘Comment t’appelles-tu?’ ‘Ça va?’ ‘Ça va bien’, ‘Pas mal’, and ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’. And the tired child, already sick to death of French, having been taught it since the age of three but never methodically, starts climbing the Everest of trying to master these horrible, spiky phrases, with their sudden apostrophes, their unexplained hyphens, and the dangly fives under some but not all of the ‘c’s.