Kipling’s French, according... «Through the Window»
Oksident17 января 2017Kipling’s French, according to his biographer Charles Carrington, ‘was fluent, though inaccurate, and powerfully helped out by gestures’. At school, he had been taught the language with the help of a clever trick:
I was ‘invited’ to study French. ‘You’ll never be able to talk it, but if I were you, I’d try to read it,’ was [the master’s] word. I append here the method of instruction. Give an English boy the first half of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in his native tongue. When he is properly intoxicated, withdraw it and present to him the second half in the original. Afterwards – not before – Dumas the Prince of amuseurs, and the rest as God pleases.
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