The Fascinating Tale of François Gouin, My Favorite Language Learner

Devastating. Relatable. Revolutionary.

One of the earlier iterations of formal language learning looked something like this. You’re an elite, wealthy, young European man in the 1700s or 1800s. Society tells you that you need to study languages like Latin to be a true intellectual, so you listen. In class, a teacher lectures you for a few hours about grammatical rules while you dutifully take notes. At night, you sit at a table and memorize lists of vocabulary by candlelight.

maybe you’ll copy off a friend, too.

After a few months, the teacher plops a classical Latin text on the desk in front of you. Using your grammatical rules and vocabulary knowledge, you fumble your way through The Aeneid, clumsily translating the text into your first language. Congratulations! You’re a real scholar now.

This method of language learning, known as the classical method or the grammar-translation method, was useful for some things — namely, for learning how to translate classical texts — but clearly was lacking in other areas.

François Gouin, a French teacher of Latin in the late 1800s, grew up in this tradition of language learning. And in his attempts to study language on his own, he experienced firsthand just exactly where this tradition fell short.

The Story of François Gouin

a relatable icon for many reasons.

As an adult, Gouin decided to embark on an exciting new journey: learning the German language for the first time. To kick off this adventure, he moved from France to Hamburg, Germany to study the language for a year. But instead of soaking in the sights and sounds of Hamburg, he decided to go in a different direction.

In the first 10 days that he spent in his Hamburg, Gouin holed himself up in his room to memorize a full German grammar book — as well as all 248 irregular German verbs — confident that he would emerge with at least halfway decent German skills to get by around the city.

Equipped with this new knowledge, Gouin excitedly went to the local university to test out his newly acquired language skills. But he was struck with a shocking discovery: that although he had memorized extensive linguistic knowledge of German, once he was actually surrounded by German speakers, he “could not understand a single word, not a single word!”¹

Instead of switching up his strategy, Gouin decided to hunker down and really get to work. For a full year, Gouin dedicated himself to the study of German, memorizing books, translating the works of notable German authors, and even memorizing 30,000 German words from the dictionary.

But whenever he emerged from his room and attempted to converse with actual German speakers, Gouin would inevitably find himself retreating in embarrassment. And when his one year in Germany was up, he dejectedly returned to France, notably not as a new German speaker.

he could probably rattle off this entire chart if you asked though.

A New Direction

Luckily, this is not where the story of our friend Gouin ends. Upon returning to France, Gouin noticed something fascinating: that during the year that he was abroad in Germany, his three-year-old nephew had gone from speaking zero language at all to becoming a full-blown French speaker. Gouin was faced with a new, shocking question: how had this ordinary child acquired language so successfully, while Gouin had not?

After this formative experience, Gouin went on to introduce one of the earliest language learning methods outside of the classical method, known as Gouin’s Series. Unlike the classical method, Gouin’s Series aimed to teach language without overly relying on translations or grammatical explanations. His method was built on providing learners with a series of comprehensible and interconnected sentences for them to decode.

For example, learners might start out with understanding the sentence, “I walk.” They would then build on that knowledge with new sentences (and sometimes accompanying actions when appropriate), such as “I walk to the door,” “I walk to the door quickly,” etc.

The classical method was decidedly disconnected from real-life communication needs, focusing on building up scholars rather than interlocutors. But Gouin’s Series introduced something new. Learners had the chance to build their knowledge and engage with language in a way that clearly connected to their immediate reality, much like how Gouin’s young nephew had learned French. This was a revolutionary concept, and was one of the driving forces that launched a new wave of thinking about how languages can be learned and taught.

If you’re a language learner, can you relate to Gouin’s struggle? And what have you learned during your process of acquiring a language? I would love to hear from you in the comments!

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1. Brown, H. D. & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Pearson Education, Inc.