Les maths en français

So, I probably never told you, but I don’t really know how to do math in English. Oh yes, I would know how to count to a quadrillion upon my son’s request, but I certainly could not tell you any trigonometry term, and even though I was the best student in my math class for all my schooling, I don’t really have a clue what you’re all talking about when you say “calculus” and “algebra”.

Do you know why that is? It’s because I have never taken a math class in the US! As simple as that. If you don’t get exposed to a certain field, you don’t know the language of that field, even though you may already have the skills to excel in it. And like most people, I have never really used most of the math I’ve learned in school in my daily life, or at least not out loud with other people. So I did not really have the opportunity to find out what most math words are in English, and when I occasionally did, it was just a first encounter with the new vocabulary that was never solidified by other encounters.

You see, it’s very much the same as it is in your native language. Each field has its jargon, and only those who are exposed to that field know the jargon. For example, you may not know cooking words that I know in English. What does that have to do with a foreign language? Well, just like we might seek to be educated and knowledgeable by exposing ourselves to a variety of contexts in our native language, so that we know more words and more facts, we need to do the same in the foreign language we study if we want to know more of it (i.e. to move towards fluency).

Because, really, you’ll still say I’m fluent in English even though I don’t know math vocabulary (actually, you’d probably never notice), but you wouldn’t say so if I knew neither cooking terms, nor how to designate cleaning products, nor how talk about doing my groceries, nor how to talk to a doctor, nor –you get it.

So, do you need to know how to do math in French? Yes, for the math that’s relevant to your life. Do you need to know more? Not necessarily, if you’re not interest in it. However, when learning a foreign language, we all need to get exposed to as many fields and to as many contexts as possible. Not only does it give you more opportunities to practice and to organically acquire the mechanics of the language, it also will broaden your vocabulary to the level of a native speaker, or close. You may still never know how to say “the square root of pi is approximately 1.77245385”, but you’ll know how to say what most native speakers know how to say.

Baptiste Delvallé