LANGUAGES

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

As a Cornell grad, I was pleased as punch to learn that my old Alma Mater outdoes Harvard in at least one thing: the teaching of modern foreign languages.

There is, however, one impression I would like to correct: that the Cornell method gives the student a speaking knowledge of a language without any insight into the country's culture. In my elementary French class, the native drill instructors organized conversations around such subjects as French geography, French food and wine, French social life and mores, and that old standby, the French educational system.

In this way, I felt closer to the main currents of French life and thought than I did later on in the more advanced French literature courses, reading such masterpieces as, for example, Lautremont's "Les Chants de Maldoror," where page after page is spent describing how the hero made love to a shark. Frederick Seager 1L.

P.S.: By the way, it's le beurre, not la beurre.