I had a French teacher once, a charming mustachioed former footballer, who delighted in tormenting his students with tongue-twisters.
“Prenez!” he’d say, thrusting one hand under his blue blazer, Napoleon-style, while waving the tobacco-stained fingers of the other. This was the cue for us to whip out a pencil and a blank sheet of paper.
It was also a cue for a collective groan. We all knew what was coming: “une dictée,” or, in other words, a French dictation.
The similarity of the words “dictation” and “dictator” was not lost on us. Those of us who were also suffering through Latin knew that “dictation” came from the root dictare, i.e., “to order.” As in, “I order you to write down the brain-liquefying sounds that are about to foam forth from my mustache.”
Some of the dictation was commonplace, sentences like, “Where is the library?” or “Claude stole three strawberries last week.”
But then there were the nightmarish ones, fusillades of alien phonemes that still haunt me to this day.
With apologies in advance to Susan Marcus, who’s tasked with reading these columns out loud for Vision Resources of Central PA, I’ll give you an example. This is what we would hear, spelled out phonetically:
“Dee-dawn dee-nah, deet-awn, der-dee doh doh-doo de dee doh-doo dan-dawn.”
From that hideous swamp of Gallic syllables, we were supposed to extract the following perfectly grammatical — if nonsensical — French sentence:
“Didon dîna, dit-on, de dix dos dodus de dix dodus dindons.”
Which, translated freely, means, “They say that Dido dined off the ten fat backs of ten fat turkeys.”
You didn’t have to know that the Dido in question was the queen of ancient Carthage; or that there was such a thing as a Carthaginian turkey, which apparently had deliciously marbled back meat. All you really needed to know was:
a. that sadism was invented in France
b. that your seemingly charming French teacher was actually a sadist
c. that no one in your class was going to get it right, and therefore
d. the whole exercise was pointless.
Of course, in retrospect, it wasn’t pointless at all. From the comfort of my writing desk, with a good thirty years separating me from the bewilderment and misery of those dictations, I can say with confidence — and a straight face — that untangling a foreign tongue-twister has pedagogical merit.
Every first-year language student is familiar with the feeling of drowning in sea of foreign sounds. That’s why they call it “immersion.” Watching a French movie, or taking a stroll on the Champs Elysees, far from carefully tailored sentences about libraries and stolen strawberries, you enter the hurly-burly of language as it’s truly spoken: quickly, casually, figuratively, profanely.
Dictation is meant to sharpen the ear; to help the student internalize a series of unintelligible sounds; and to develop the skills necessary to crack the foreign code.
I was reminded of all of this a few days ago at my daughter’s cello lesson, where she was suffering the throes of a different kind of dictation: musical ear-training. The ability to take musical dictation — i.e., writing down on staff paper, with proper notation, a line of music that one has just heard for the first time — is one of the requirements of AP music theory.
Her teacher would play a musical phrase on the piano, tell her the starting pitch, the key signature, and the clef, and then she’d be on her own to set it all down on paper: the bars, the rhythm, the intervals, everything.
This is a skill I never learned, despite countless hours of music-making as a young person. All of my energies were focused on the other side of the equation: sight-reading. That’s the skill of deciphering the sheet music clamped in your sweaty choirboy palms so that you’re singing the right notes at the right time.
She struggled at first. The notes came too fast and furious; the musical symbols weren’t fresh enough in her mind; it was all over before she could write anything down. But patience and practice carried the day. By the end of the lesson, her hand was starting to catch up with her ear.
These were baby steps, the musical equivalent of “where’s the library?” But she’ll get there. Some day soon, she’ll be tackling complex pieces, études, perhaps, on the order of Dido’s tasty turkeys.
She hates the dictation, and I can’t say I blame her. No one likes that panicky feeling of not knowing.
But the goal is fluency, whatever it takes.
With any luck, in thirty years she’ll be telling stories about her charming cello teacher, whose sadistic methods helped her make sense of the maddening, beautiful, and intricate language of music.
