Charlotte Mason, François Gouin, and the Truth About Living Speech for Foreign Language

One of Miss Mason’s contemporaries was a 19th-century French educator named François Gouin. He had a foreign language approach that Charlotte Mason incorporated into her own educational philosophy. She ecstatically declared, “I have no hesitation in saying that Monsieur Gouin’s work is the most important attempt that has yet been made to bring the study of languages within the sphere of practical education” (Vol. 1, p. 302).

With that level of praise, I’d love to know what Charlotte Mason’s reaction would be to TalkBox.Mom, which fits within her broader educational philosophy with its proven roadmap and tools to support families, but I digress.

Monsieur Gouin had a pivotal moment that led to what Charlotte Mason refers to as a “great reform in our method’s of teaching modern languages” (Vol. 1, p. 302). This moment is key to understanding “living speech” and the core of this approach.

In Volume 1 of Home Education, Charlotte Mason describes Monsieur Gouin’s “herculean labours in the attempt to learn German” in Germany. And I quote, “He knew everybody’s ‘Method,’ learned the whole dictionary through, and found at the end that he did not know one word of German ‘as she is spoke.’” Meaning, as the language is spoken.

We see this very often when someone has a language streak. They can identify words because that is what they practiced. But they cannot use the words in their own sentences because they never practiced that.

Miss Mason continues, “He returned to France, after a ten months’ absence, and found that his little nephew—whom he had left, a child of two and a half, not yet able to talk—had in the interval done what his uncle had signally failed to do. “‘What!’ I thought; ‘this child and I have been working for the same time, each at a language. He, playing round his mother, running after flowers, butterflies and birds, without weariness, without apparent effort, without even ebing conscious of his work, is able to say all he thinks, express all he sees, understand all he hears; and when he began his work, his intelligence was yet a futurity, a glimmer, a hope. And I, versed in the sciences, versed in philosophy, armed with a powerful will, gifted with a powerful memory … have arrived at nothing, or at practically nothing!’” 

“The linguistic science of the college has deceived me, has misguided me. The classical method, with its grammar, its dictionary, and its translations is a delusion.” “To surprise Nature’s secret, I must watch the child.”

So François Gouin goes on a ten-month trip to learn German. Doesn’t practice speaking it. Works through the classical method, with its grammar, dictionary, and translations, all to find out that his nephew is speaking a language just by hanging out with his mom. He realizes he was talked into a delusion that is commonly accepted even to this day.

I had a moment like this when I was in Brazil. We were in an apartment on our first day there with a beautiful view of the beach out the window, and I told my three-year-old and one-year-old that before we headed out to the beach, we’d, you know, practice conjugating a verb. I thought it was what we needed to do to be successful speaking Portuguese there.

My three-year-old looked at the textbook on the bed and said, “Mom, we didn’t come to Brazil to sit in a room.” And he wasn’t wrong. And I had never conjugated a verb with him before, yet his subject-verb agreement in English was perfect.

What was I doing? I realized that moms are actually the most successful language teachers in the world. We teach babies and toddlers all over the world to talk at a native level before our children learn reading, writing, and grammar.

I realized the delusion I had fallen into, and I knew it was time to teach a language like a parent and not a professor. 

If you’ve taken 400-level university language courses like I have, have a Bachelor’s degree in a language, or even took high school courses, we have to go through a painful realization that our efforts don’t translate into easily and accurately using a language in our home, which is the definition of fluency. While we developed skills in knowing about the language or even reading it, we didn’t practice what’s at the core of what moms do—using the language- so we cannot use the language with fluency.

Gouin went on to develop the Series Method of language learning, which emphasizes learning language through connected sequences of actions and real-life context, what moms do, rather than rote memorization or grammar drills. He believed language should be learned as a living expression tied to experience and thought.

However, Miss Mason didn’t adopt  Monsieur Gouin’s method wholesale, which I’ll discuss in the next video. While she drew inspiration from Gouin’s emphasis on meaningful context and natural learning, she developed her own approach to modern language learning that better fit within her broader educational philosophy.