Je ne regrette rien

I was surprised the other day at lunch when someone asked me a question that, I suppose, must come with age: Had I any regrets in life? 

Matt Collins

The obvious answer, of course, is yes: roads not taken, words not spoken, opportunities ignored or mishandled. I would like to have done this and that, or gone here and there; but on reflection I decided that, all things being equal, life has turned out essentially the way I wanted it to turn out—has been better, in fact—and the only genuine regret I have is never to have mastered a foreign language. 

I may qualify this by saying, in my defense, that I do have a rudimentary knowledge of French and German. I wasn’t a very good student of language in school—even in English, I found grammar to be torture—but I have kept up both languages informally, and have what I call a tourist’s proficiency. I can carry on a simple conversation in Stuttgart or Normandy, comprehend a newspaper, roughly understand a panel discussion on TV. Indeed, I was once interviewed on television in Bonn—it was the morning after a German federal election, and the crew chose me at random as a man in the street—and I have never had the experience of speaking French to a Frenchman and being answered, contemptuously, in English. 

The problem is that my knowledge of these languages is largely confined to the written word; understanding oral French or German depends on the speaker. Many German philosophers are incomprehensible even in translation, but I occasionally read Friedrich Nietzsche in the original because he tended to write a simple, emphatic, straightforward German. I am a connoisseur of General de Gaulle’s appearances on YouTube because he spoke slowly, carefully, and distinctly: I have finished translating sentence one by the time he is ready to launch into sentence two.