Useless Foreign Language Phrases

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language, then you can probably relate to my experience, especially if you tried to learn it from a book.

Back when I was in eighth grade, I had German class, and I still have seared into my memory some phrases from the book we used, which happened to be a circus-themed book.

So we were learning things in German, like, der Elefant ist auf dem Ball. The elephant is on top of the ball. And the goat is playing the piano.

All these words that I… Yeah, not real life situations really, right? German circuses aren’t really a thing, are they?

Exactly. I’ve never had a chance to use those with a German speaker.

And when I was a little kid, I was trying to learn Spanish from the Berlitz records that my parents had. So I was up in my room, little nine-year-old, reading sentences that translated as, please send the valet up to my room.

Because naturally you had a valet. Well, I’m never going to have a valet. But you know what? There’s a word for these kinds of sentences.

Oh, really? I only found this out recently. They’re called postillion sentences.

Postillion. Why? Postillion. You know what a postillion is?

No. Picture a horse-drawn carriage without a driver for it. The postillion is the guy who rides on a horse next to it and just makes sure that everything’s okay.

Sometimes you’ll see Queen Elizabeth in a horse-drawn carriage without a driver, and there’ll be a guy next to her in a uniform riding along.

P-O-S-T-I-L-I-O-N? Double L, maybe? Or one L? Sometimes it’s either way.

But the reason that these are called postillion sentences is because there were jokes going around in the early 20th century about phrase books that had silly lines in them, like, my postillion has been struck by lightning.

And in fact, if you Google my postillion has been struck by lightning, you’ll find all these great examples of that.

Oh, there are some classic mess ups in phrase books. But your comment about German reminds me of something that Mark Twain wrote in one of his letters.

You know, in the 1870s, his family was living in Germany. They were in Heidelberg and they were all trying to learn language.

He writes about his daughters being conscientious and going to bed, mumbling German phrases to themselves. And then waking up in the middle of the night and coming to their father and going, Father, did I have this correct still?

And he’s got this line where he’s talking about his own problems with learning German, just as you. And he’s like, he writes, I scorned that grammar.

And it gratifies me to know that the few sentences I am obliged to utter daily in the course of trade always break all the laws of the German grammar at a sweep.

So they’re all caught up in this need for the day-to-day language and yet finding German so insurmountable.

Yeah, he wrote that whole essay on the awful German language.

Yeah, you can hear echoes of it in this letter that he wrote to a friend.

Yeah, and actually he talks about a postillion sentence in there. The bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain.

What? We’d like to hear your travails, your dramas, your comedies when it came to learning a foreign language.

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