Learn How to Conjugate "Rappeler" (to Call Back) in French

Month 1: arrived in France, kinda spoke bonjour et je voudrais un café avec lait.
Month 2: ordered a kebab, using je voudrais hors contexte du café. Also learned the wide variety of sauces. Sauce blanche didn't taste like what I expected it to taste compared to the version back home.
Month 3: French ex boyfriend said "je vais prendre une bière." I still use je vais prendre quelque chose until today.
Throughout the first year, I google translated a bunch of document and stuffs to get my OFII sorted, wrote emails to agents to find appartements, la CAF, Ameli, etc... My written French got way better than my spoken French.
Month 8: joined the liste BDE for campaign. Learned that du coup means therefore. Spoke to people in English, using oui occasionally, or "ouais" on chat. Cracked my first joke in French.
Month 10: i think after the BDE campagne my French listening improved. I could make out individual words in French, despite the fact that I didn't understand most of them. The liaison used to confuse me a lot.
At the end of year 1: joined a French-speaking class and could understand the teacher. Still very confused socially.
Year 1+4 months: could hold a very confusing phone conversation in French.
Year 1+6 months: woke up one morning and suddenly became less confused. Could survive in daily life and not be so lost.
Year 2: did a vendanges. Was very confused socially mainly because I still can't small talk with native speakers, but could get by, was able to ask for and keep track of the key informations.
Year 2+2 months: suddenly was able to hold a long small talk conversion in class. Understood the teachers much more completely and not like, fragmented main details and had to put it together using my general knowledge on the subject in English.
Year 2+3 months: could do non-awkward French interviews, write motivational letter for L3 without needing google translate. Still have to pull out a conjugation search sometimes.
Year 2+4 months: je parle couramment français, notamment français sur téléphone. J'ai pas d'anxiété quand quelqu'un m'appeler. My spoken French is still on and off some days, some mornings I get tongue-twisted. Understood the Deliveroo guy yelling at me cos his call didn't go through.
I'm pretty anti-social, but if you're outgoing and go to school or work or so entirely in a Francophone environment, you'll improve much faster than I did. For the sake of PG-13, I left out a good deal of awkward hookups with French guys in Paris where we both didn't really understand one another. Was a ride.
Hope this was helpful to somebody out there.

A complaint I've heard about LLPSI, especially from people using it on their own, is that the method seems to work great, almost effortlessly, right up until a certain point. And then it's like hitting a brick wall. The meanings no longer just click. Linear comprehension breaks down, encouraging you to hunt around the page or in the sentence for help. And because you've been so successful at comprehending up to this point, you have no idea what to do when comprehension fails. You're left frustrated with no clear plan for how to proceed. I want to explain why this happens and how you can prevent it from happening.
Very quick summary: When using an inductive curriculum like LLPSI, the premise is that repeated superficial comprehension of individual sentences will lead to deeper, implicit, generalizable knowledge of the language's underlying system. However, for various reasons, sometimes superficial knowledge doesn't transfer into deep knowledge. I look at a few reasons for that and propose a secondary reading strategy (observe - hypothesize - experiment) as a comprehension diagnostic and fallback method.
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TWO KINDS OF COMPREHENSION
Language instruction aims at instilling comprehension. But there is more than one level of comprehension. Superficial comprehension is understanding what is meant by a particular communicative act in a particular context. Deep comprehension, by contrast, is understanding how the linguistic elements of that communicative act work together to achieve that meaning. Another way of defining deep comprehension is understanding why particular linguistic resources (vocabulary, grammatical forms, syntactic structures, word order, etc.), in contrast to other ones, were chosen to communicate that meaning.
Let's have an example. When young Kingshorsey entered middle school, he walked into his first French class. Within minutes, he learned how to present his name to another person: Je m'appelle Kingshorsey, he proudly proclaimed in his best imitation of Lumière, the candlestick from Beauty and the Beast, his only reference point for French.
At this point, you could say I had a superficial comprehension of the phrase Je m'appelle. I understood that a person used it to state their name. I could use it actively, as when I turned to the boy next to me and said, Je m'appelle Kingshorsey. And I understood it passively when the boy nodded, politely disregarded my strange name, and said, Je m'appelle Tim.
Now, let's think about what a deep comprehension of Je m'appelle looks like. Deep comprehension isn't all or nothing; you can have deeper or shallower comprehension. I was told that day that Je m'appelle corresponded to "I call myself" in English. Even though it was just an English gloss, it still helped me understand the phrase better than before. It helped me form a rough idea that Je meant "I", m was "myself," and appelle was call.
But there were still a lot of things I didn't understand. I could not have explained at that moment why the form appelle was used, rather than appellez, appeller, or appelles, other forms I would see that day. I also couldn't explain why the order was Je m'appelle rather than, say, Je appelle m, or m appelle je. And although the apostrophe indicated to me that m' was a contraction of some kind, I didn't know what the full form of m' was or why it needed to be contracted there.
My comprehension deepened over time as I was able to explain these things to myself. But when I talk about explanation, it's absolutely critical that we make a distinction between deep comprehension and meta-linguistic analysis, which is what people often mean when they say "grammar." Let's compare the two.
Deep comprehension: I use appelle because that's the form that goes with Je.
Meta-linguistic analysis: Je is a first-person singular pronoun operating as the subject of the clause. The verb must be conjugated to match the person and number of the subject. The first-person singular present active form of appeller is appelle.
How much you choose to make use of meta-linguistic analysis in your language learning is your business. That's not a discussion I want to get into now. My point is that the explanation "Je requires appelle, not appellez or appelles or appeller" is sufficient to count as deep knowledge. A person in possession of that knowledge, whether implicit or explicit, will put the right verb form with the pronoun je.
More importantly, that knowledge is generalizable. Someone who understands the concept that je requires appelle should not have a difficult time understanding 1) that when je is used with other verbs, (at least some of) those verbs will have a similar ending; and 2) that subjects other than je may require their verbs to be put in different forms.
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LLPSI: WHAT WENT WRONG?
Now that we've established the two kinds of comprehension, let's go back and have a look at LLPSI. The natural method, on which LLPSI is based, is inductive. That means it tries to build abstract or deep knowledge through exposure to concrete instances. We can model it like this: exposure comprehension generalization/memorization.
The natural method very carefully sets up a series of communicative acts, expecting you to be able to superficially comprehend each one as you come to it. Repeated success in superficial comprehension subconsciously or implicitly builds deep comprehension. For the most part, this works very well. The brain is pretty good at taking individual, concrete examples and generalizing from them. But it isn't perfect.
There are a few ways this method can break down. Sometimes there isn't a sufficient quantity of input. If you don't succeed at superficially comprehending a specific linguistic feature enough times, you're unlikely to form a generalization. Another failure comes from inattention. Sometimes you're not really taking in every part of the communicative act you're encountering. Your brain forms a general idea of what's being communicated, you accept it, and you just sort of skim over what's actually written. This doesn't help form deep comprehension.
Another problem is a failure to comprehend. Sometimes, in a curriculum like LLPSI, you might think you understood something, but you really didn't. You extracted a meaning, but not the intended meaning. And especially if you're studying on your own, you might never realize what you got wrong. This kind of mistake misleads your deep comprehension. Finally, people just forget things. Even if you understood a chapter perfectly when you read it, it's possible that some of the deep comprehension you built doing so has been lost. And of course, you can't consciously feel yourself forgetting things. So, when you encounter something that you think you should be able to understand, but you can't, it's frustrating.
Over time, a combination of these issues may eventually result in your deep comprehension of Latin not being sufficiently advanced for you to continue making progress. Little bits and pieces of incomplete understanding or misunderstanding will clog up the gears of your mind, and you won't be able to assimilate new information easily the way you used to.
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OVERCOMING FRUSTRATION: TWO KINDS OF READING
My proposal for fixing your problems with LLPSI is to employ two separate reading strategies. Your first reading, or first several readings, of a chapter should focus on superficial comprehension. Basically, just read it, and see how much you understand. Once you think you understand everything, or you've clearly identified the parts that you're having trouble understanding, it's time to go back through the chapter for deep comprehension.
Read for deep comprehension using the OHE method: Observe - Hypothesize - Experiment. In the Observation phase, you will look through the chapter and try to pick out where in the text new word forms or structures are introduced. In the Hypothesis phase, you will come up with a theory as to why that particular change was necessary, or at least under what circumstances it occurs. Why is it that way and not some other way? In the Experiment phase, you will examine the whole of the chapter, and see if your theory holds up every time that feature occurs. If not, modify your theory. Pro tip: the Grammatica Latina section at the end of the chapter is telling you exactly which features Oerberg intended for you to understand. You can often troubleshoot your comprehension by reverse-engineering the grammatica section from the chapter.
For example, let's look at Chapter 1 of Familia Romana. Yes, people usually don't struggle here, but it's still worth exploring the method. Remember, at this point you have already read through the chapter at least once and have a pretty good comprehension of the meaning of the individual sentences.
Let's take a closer look at the first two sentences:
Rōma in Italiā est. Italia in Eurōpā est.
During your first reading, you probably understood both sentences just fine. But did you notice that there are two different forms of Italia? Italiā vs. Italia. Why are they different? Maybe you're not ready to put forward a hypothesis yet, but that's ok. The important thing is that you've noticed something.
A few lines down, you find this:
Estne Gallia in Eurōpā? Gallia in Eurōpā est. Estne Rōma in Galliā? Rōma in Galliā non est.
There it is again! Twice we have Gallia with a short a ending, and twice Galliā with a long a ending. At this point, you may be ready to venture a hypothesis: the a ending becomes ā after the word "in". Now for the experiment. Scan through the chapter and see if your hypothesis works. It does! So, you've won for yourself a piece of deep comprehension, without referring to any outside help such as meta-linguistic analysis in your first language.
You can see just how generalizable that knowledge is. In line 55, you're introduced to the phrase Imperium Rōmānum. But in line 58, you see the phrase Imperiō Rōmānō. What could account for that change? Yes, there's the word in right before it. So now, your hypothesis expands: just like a changes to ā before in, um changes to ō. And you might hypothesize even more generally at this point. You might suspect that other words endings also change when they come after in. When you eventually encounter other declensions, it won't be surprising to you that the word forms change. You'll more easily assimilate the new forms because you're expecting them.
Deep comprehension is especially helpful for when things don't conform to your generalized understanding. For instance, you'll be more likely to notice something almost all readers of FR initially miss. In chapter 7, there's a sentence: Syra ōstium aperit et in cubiculum intrat. Because the meaning of this sentence is pretty straightforward, many readers achieve superficial comprehension and just go on. And honestly, that's fine for an initial reading. But if in all your readings of Chapter 7, you never notice that cubiculum did NOT become cubiculō after in, you won't be able to generate a new piece of deep comprehension, and that lack of understanding may one day come back to bite you. On the other hand, the more you practice reading for deep comprehension with the OHE method, the more fine-tuned your linguistic senses will be, and the more likely you will be to notice that something did not conform to your mental model of how the language should work.
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CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Because quantity and variety of input is important, even before applying OHE, it can be a good idea to make use of supplemental sources of reading. You may find that a concept that you didn't pick up on reading FR alone clicks by itself when you also add in the readings from Colloquia Personarum or even from outside the LLPSI family. The best-case scenario is that your initial readings and superficial comprehension does transfer well to deep comprehension, so you don't need to fall back on OHE to diagnose and correct your understanding.
However, regardless of what beginner curriculum you use, you will eventually get beyond it. You will eventually no longer be able to rely on the carefully constructed reading environment of the natural method or the explicit instructions that preface all new material in the grammar-translation method. You will have to comprehend communication on your own. The OHE reading method gives you a tool to keep growing your deep comprehension when your pre-existing knowledge is not sufficient to proceed by "just reading."

Sources: https://mafiadoc.com/shadow-work_59d072d61723ddd7865befd7.html
http://www.philosophica.ugent.be/fulltexts/26-2.pdf (2.4 Megabyte pdf)
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My interest is in that entirely different form of unpaid work which an industrial society demands as a necessary complement to the production of goods and services. This kind of unpaid servitude does not contribute to subsistence. Quite the contrary, equally with wage-labor, it ravages subsistence. I call this complement to wage-labor "shadow-work". It comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job. It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labelled "family life."
In traditional cultures the shadow-work is as marginal as wage-labor, often difficult to identify. In industrial societies, it is assumed as routine. Euphemism, however, scatters it. Strong taboos act against its analysis as a unified entity. Industrial production determines its necessity, extent and forms. But it is hidden by the industrial-age ideology, according to which all those activities into which people are coerced for the sake of the economy, by means that are primarily social, count as satisfaction of needs rather than as work.
To grasp the nature of shadow-work we must avoid two confusions. It is not a subsistence activity, it feeds the formal economy, not social subsistence. Nor is it underpaid wage-labor, its unpaid performance is the condition for wages to be paid. I shall insist on the distinction between shadow and subsistence work[9], as much as on its distinction from wage-labor, no matter how vigorous the protests from unionists, marxists and some feminists. I shall examine shadow-work as a unique form of bondage, not much closer to servitude than to either slavery or wage-labor.
While for wage-labor you apply and qualify, for shadow-work you are born or diagnosed. For wage-labor you are selected; into shadow-work you are put. The time, toil and loss of dignity entailed are exacted without pay. Yet increasingly the unpaid self-discipline of shadow-work becomes more important than wage-labor for further economic growth.
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What today stands for work, namely wage-labor, was a badge of misery all through the Middle Ages [14]. It stood in clear opposition to at least three other types of toil : the activities of the household by which most people subsisted, quite marginal to any money economy: the trades of people who made shoes, barbared or cut stones; the various forms of beggary by which people lived on what others shared with them [15]. In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member : its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution. When one engaged in wage-labor, not occasionally as the member of a household but as a regular means of total support, he clearly signaled to the community that he, like a widow or an orphan, had no berth, no household, and so, stood in need of public assistance.
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Until the late 12th century, the term poverty designated primarily a realistic detachment from transitory things [19]. The need to live by wage-labor was the sign for the down and out, for those too wretched to be simply added to that huge medieval crowd of cripples, exiles, pilgrims, madmen, friars, ambulants, homeless that made up the world of the poor. The dependence on wage-labor was the recognition that the worker had neither a home where he could contribute within the household, nor the ability to rely on the alms of society. The right to beggary was a normative issue, but never the right to work[20].
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Until the mid 16th century[27], French poor houses were run on the medieval Christian assumption that forced labor was a punishment for sin or crime[28]. In protestant Europe and in some Italian cities which were industrialized early, that view had been abandoned a century earlier. The pioneering policies and equipment in Dutch Calvinist or North German work houses clearly show this[29]. They were organized and equipped for the cure of laziness and for the development of the will to do work as assigned. These workhouses were designed and built to transform useless beggars into useful workers. As such, they were the reverse of medieval alms-giving agencies. Set up to receive beggars caught by the police, these institutions softened them up for treatment by a few days of no food and a carefully planned ration of daily lashes. Then, treatment with work at the treadmill or at the rasp followed until the transformation of the inmate into a useful worker was diagnosed. One even finds provisions for intensive care. People resistant to work were thrown into a constantly flooding pit, where they could survive only by frantically pumping all day long. Not only in their pedagogical approach, but also in their method of training for self-approbation, these institutions are true precursors of compulsory schools. I have found a collection of thirty-two letters written by former inmates addressed to the workhouse in Bremen and published by that institution. Each one purports to be grateful acknowledgement of a cure from sloth by a successfully treated (schooled) patient.
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All through the 18th and well into the 19th century, the project of Economic Alchemy produced no echo from below. The plebeians rioted. They rioted for just grain prices, they rioted against the export of grain from their regions, they rioted to protect prisoners of debt and felt protected whenever the law seemed not to coincide with their tradition of natural justice. The proto-industrial plebeian crowd defended its "moral economy" as Thompson has called it. And they rioted against the attacks on this economy's social foundation : against the enclosure of sheep and now against the enclosure of beggars[30]. And in these riots, the crowd was led, more often than not, by its women. Now, how did this rioting proto-industrial crowd, defending its right to subsistence, turn into a striking labor force, defending "rights" to wages? What was the social device that did the job, where the new poor laws and work houses had failed? It was the economic division of labor into a productive and a non-productive kind, pioneered and first enforced through the domestic enclosure of women[31].
An unprecedented economic division of the sexes[32], an unprecedented economic conception of the family[33], an unprecedented antagonism between the domestic and public spheres made wage-work into a necessary adjunct of life. All this was accomplished by making working men into the wardens of their domestic women, one on one, and making this guardianship into a burdensome duty[34]. The enclosure of women succeeded where the enclosure of sheep and beggars had failed.
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[9] Subsistence. Should I use the term? Until a few years ago in English it was monopolized by the "subsistence agriculture", this meant billions living on "bare survival", the lot from which development agencies were to save them. Or it meant the lowest level to which a bum could sink on skid-row. Or, finally, it was identified with "subsistence" which, in turn, was identified with wages. To avoid these confusions, in my article in CoEvolution, part I, pp. 29-30, I have proposed the use of the term "vernacular". This is a technical term used by Roman lawyers for the inverse of a commodity. "Vernaculum, Quidquid domi nascitur, domestici fructus, res, quae alicui nata est, et quam non emit. Ita hanc vocem interpretatur Anianus in leg. 3. Cod. Th. de lustrali collatione, ubi Jacob. Gothofredus." DU CANGE, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, vol. VIII, p. 283.
I want to speak about vernacular activity and vernacular domain. Nevertheless, here, I am avoiding these expressions because I cannot expect from my readers of this essay to be acquainted with "Vernacular Values". Use-value oriented activities, non-monetary transactions, embedded economic activities, substantive economics, these all are terms which have been tried. I stick to "subsistence" in this paper. I will oppose subsistence oriented activities to those who are at the service of a formal economy, no matter if these economic activities are paid or not. And, within the realm of economic activities, I will distinguish a formal and an informal sector, to which wage and shadow-work correspond.
SACHS, Ignacy et SCHIRAY, M. Styles de vie et de developpement dans le monde occidental: experiences et experimentations. Regional Seminar on Alternative Patterns of Development and Life Styles for the African Region, December 1978. CIRED, 54 boul. Raspail , Paris 6., attempts a similar distinction between true and phoney use-values:"Le hors-marché recouvre deux réalités fort différentes, les prestations de services gratuits par l'Etat et la production autonome de valeurs d 'usage... Les pseudo-valeurs d'usage n'apportent aucune satisfaction positive de besoin autre que la satisfaction de posséder plus." For background on this: SACHS, Ignacy. "La notion de surplus et son application aux économies primitives". In L'Homme, tome VI, no 3, juillet-sept. 1966. pp. 5-18; and EGNER, Erich. Hauswirtschaft und Lebenshaltung. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974. An interesting international seminar on subsistence has been held in Bielefeld: Universitat Bielefeld, Soziologische Fakultat, Postfach 8640, D-4800 Bielefeld.
[14] SCHUMPETER, Joseph A. History of Economic Analysis. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954. p. 270: "In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member: its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution." HOBSBAWN, E.J. "Poverty" in Encyclopedia of Social Science. Pauperism arose historically beyond the border of the functioning primary social group ... a man's wife and children were not ipso facto paupers, but widows and orphans, who stood in danger of loosing their berth were perhaps the earliest clearly defined category of persons with a call upon public assistance.
[15] Medieval attitudes towards poverty and towards work. The attitude that people had towards the weak, hungry, sick, homeless, landless, mad, imprisoned, enslaved, fugitive, orphaned, exiled, crippled, beggars, ascetics, street vendors, soldiers, foundlings and others who were relatively deprived has changed throughout history. For every epoch, specific attitudes to each of these categories are in a unique constellation. Economic history, when it studies poverty, tends to neglect these attitudes. Economic history tends to focus on measurements of average and median calory intake, group-specific mortality rates, the polarisation in the use of resources etc ... During the last decade, the historical study of attitudes towards poverty has made considerable progress. For late antiquity and the Middle Ages, MOLLAT, Michel. Etudes sur l'histoire de la pauvreté. Serie "Etudes", tome 8, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, collects a selection of three dozen studies submitted to his seminar. POLICA, Gabriella Severina. "Storia della poverta e storia dei poveri." in Studi Medievali, 17, 1976. pp. 363-391, surveys the recent literature. On the cyclical experience of poverty in the Middle Ages see: DUBY, Georges. "Les pauvres des campagnes dans l'Occident medieval jusqu'au XIII siecle." in Revue d'Histoire de l'Eglise de France, 52, 1966. pp. 25-33. Some of the most valuable contributions have been made by a Polish historian: GEREMEK, Bronislav. "Criminalité, vagabondage, pauperisme: la marginalité à l'aube des temps modernes." in Revue d'Histoire moderne et contemporaine, 21, 1974, pp. 337-375, and, by the same author Les marginaux parisiens aux XIV et XV siècles. Paris: Flammarion, 1976. Translated from the Russian, a delightful book is BAKHTINE, Mikkail. Rabelais and his World. Transl. by Hélène Iswolsky, M.I.T. Press, 1971. In French: L 'oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, transl. by Andree Robel. Gallimard, 1970. He describes how the poor projected their self-image in carnivals, festivals, farces.
[19] LADNER, G. "Homo Viator: medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order." in Speculum, 42, 1967, pp. 233-59, masterfully describes this attitude: the pilgrim, homo viator, placed between "ordo" and "abalienatio" was a fundamental ideal for the Middle Ages. CONVENGNI DEL CENTRO DI STUDI SULLA SPIRITUALITA MEDIEVALE. Vol. III. Poverta e richezza nella spiritualitti del secolo XI e XII. Italia, Todi, 1969, gathers a dozen contributions about the attitudes towards "poverty" which complete the collection of Michel Mollat.
[20] COUVREUR, G. "Les pauvres ont-ils des droits? Recherches sur le vol en cas d'extrème nécessité depuis la "Concordia" de Gratien, 1140, jusqu'à Guillaume d'Auxerre, mort en 1231. Rome-Paris: Thèse, 1961, is a full study of the legal recognition of rights that derive from poverty during the high Middle Ages. On the legal, canonical expressions given to these rights, consult: TIERNEY, B. Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Applications in England. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1959
[27] HUFTON, O. The Poor in XVIIth Century France. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
[28] TAWNEY, R.H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926. p. 254ff. argues that in England an hardening of the attitude towards the poor can be noticed in the late XVII century when poverty is first identified with vice. MARSHALL, Dorothy. The English Poor in the XVIII Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History. London, 1926. p. 20 ff., finds this hardening of attitudes only at the beginning of the XVIII century, but not earlier as R.H. Tawney. See also: MARSHALL, Dorothy. "The Old Poor Law, 1662-1795." in CARUS-WILSON, E. M. Essays in Economic History. Vol. 1, pp. 295-305. GEREMEK, B. "Renfermement des pauvres en Italie, XIV-XVlIo siecles." in Mélanges en l'honneur de F. Braudel, I, Toulouse 1973.
[29] KRUEGER, Horst. Zur Geschichte der Manufakturen und Manufakturarbeiter in Preussen. Berlin, DBR: Ruetten und Loening, 1958. p.598.
[30] Moral Economy. On the proto-industrial crowd: THOMPSON, Edward P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Random House, 1966, has become a classic. BREWER, John, and STYLES, John. An Ungovernable People: the English and their Law in the XVII and XVIII centuries. Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979, gather materials for the first major factual critique of Thompson. In England, at least, criminal rather than civil law was used by the elite to repress the crowd. Thompson's basic insight about the existence of a moral economy is confirmed by the new study. See also MEDICK, Hans. "The proto-industrial Family Economy: the Structural Functions of Household and Family during the transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism." in Social History, 1, 1976, pp. 291-315, so far the clearest statement on this transition that I have seen. Complement this, especially for new bibliography, with MEDICK, Hans and SABEAN, David. "Family and Kinship: Material Interest and Emotion." in Peasant Studies, vol. 8, no 2, 1979. pp. 139-160.
[31] Four issues on the division of labour that must not be confused. These four issues are intimately related, but cannot be clarified unless they are separately discussed.

1. It becomes increasingly obvious that there is no proven correlation between education for a specialized function and the technical competence for the performance of this function. Further, the basic assumptions on which a socialist critique of a capitalist division of labour were built, have ceased to hold. See the introduction to GORZ, Andre. Critique de la division du travail. Paris: Seuil, 1973. In German: "Kritik der Arbeitsteilung" in Technologie und Politik, no 8, pp. 137-147; and GORZ, Andre. Adieux aux proletariat: au delà du socialisme. Paris: Galilee, 1980. Les forces productives développées par le capitalisme en portent à tel point l'empreinte, qu'elles ne peuvent etre gérées ni mises en oeuvre selon une rationalité socialiste ... Le capitalisme a fait naitre une classe ouvrière dont les intérêts, les capacités, les qualifications, sont fonction de forces productives, elles-mêmes fonctionnelles par rapport à la seule rationalité capitaliste. Le dépassement du capitalisme ... ne peut dès lors provenir que de couches qui representent ou prefigurent la dissolution de toutes les classes, y compris de la classe ouvrièrè elle-même ... La division capitaliste du travail a détruit le double fondement du "socialisme scientifique" - le travail ouvrier ne comporte plus de pouvoir et il n'est plus une activité propre de travailleur. L'ouvrier traditionnel n'est plus qu'une minorité privilegiée. La majorité de la population appartient à ce néo-prolétariat post-industriel des sans-statut et des sans-classe ... surqualifiés .... Ils ne peuvent se reconnaître dans l'appelation de "travailleur ", ni dans celle, symétrique, de "chômeur" ... la société produit pour faire de travail ... le travail devient astreinte inutile pour laquelle la société cherche à masquer aux individus leur chômage ... le travailleur assiste à son devenir comme à un processus étranger et à un spectacle.
   
2. A new trend in the history of technology is represented by KUBY, Thomas. "Über den Gesellschaftlichen Ursprung der Maschine." in Technologie und Politik, no 16, 1980, pp. 71-103, (English version in forthcoming The Convivial Archipelago, edited by Valentina BORREMANS (1981). Summary of a forthcoming important study on Sir Richard Arkwright, the barber and wigmaker who in 1767 constructed the first spinning machine that could make cotton yarn suitable for warps. His invention is usually seen as a linear progress beyond Hargrave's spinning Jenny - at that time already power-driven - that could make yarn only for weft. Division of labour was not a necessary implication of technical improvement needed to increase production. Rather, increased productivity could not be exacted from workers without organizing technical processes in such manner that they also reduced workers to disciplined cogs attached to a machine. For a splendid introduction to the history of thought on the relationship between freedom and techniques see ULRICH, Otto. Technik und Herrschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Also MARGLIN, Stephen, "What do bosses do?" in Review of Radical Political Economics, VI, Summer 1974, pp. 60-112; VII, Spring 1975. pp. 20-37, argues that the XIX century factory system developed not due to a technological superiority over handicraft production, but due to its more effective control of the labour force that it gave to the employer.
   
3. A third aspect under which the division of labour is currently discussed is the culture-specific assignment of tasks between the sexes. See next note 32.
   
4. The economic division of labour into a productive and a non-productive kind, is a fourth issue which must not be confused with any of the first three. BAULANT, M. "La famille en miettes." in Annales, no ,1972. p. 960 ff. For the process see MEDICK, Hans. op. cit. previous note. It is the economic redefinition of sexes in the XIX century. I will show that this "sexual" character has been veiled in the XIX century.
   

[32] Division of labour by sex. No two non-industrial societies assign tasks to men and to women in the same way, MEAD, Margaret. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. New York: Dell Publ., 1968, especially p. 178 ff. Clear, to the point, and with good bibliography are: ROBERTS, Michael. "Sickles and Scythes: Women's Work and Men's Work at Harvest Time." in History Workshop, 7, 1979. pp. 3-28, and BROWN, Judith. "A Note on the Division of Labour by Sex." in American Anthropologist, 72, 1970. pp. 1073-1078. For illustrations from the recent English past see: KITTERINGHAM, Jennie. "Country Work Girls in XIX century England" in SAMUEL, Raphael, ed. Village Life and Labour. London-Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. pp. 73-138. A survey: WHITE, Martin K. The Status of Women in Pre-Industrial Societies. Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. For bibliography, consult WILDEN, James. The Family in Past Time: A Guide to Literature. Garland, 1977; and ROGERS, S.C. "Woman's Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory." in Comparative Studies of Society and History, 20, 1978, pp. 123-167. This cultural division of labour by sex must not be confused with the economic division of labour into the primarily productive man and the primarily, or naturally, reproductive woman, that came into being during the XIX century.
[33] The modern couple and the nuclear family. The nuclear family is not new. What is without precedent, is a society which elevates the subsistenceless family into the norm and thereby discriminates against all types of bonds between two people that do not take their model from this new family.
The new entity came into being as the wage-earners family in the XIX century. Its purpose was that of coupling one principal wage-earner and his shadow. The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place. HAUSEN, Karin. "Die Polarisierung des Geschlechtscharakters: eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerb und Familienleben" in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, Neue Forschung. Hrsg. von W. CONZE, Stuttgart, 1976. pp. 367-393. This remains true even today when in many cases all members of a household are both wage-earners and active homebodies. It remains true even for the "single's" home equipped with "one-person-household-ice-box".
This new economic function of the family is often veiled by discussion about "nuclear family". Nuclear family, conjugally organized households, can exist and have existed throughout history as the norm in societies in which the coupling of subsistence-less people would not have been conceivable. VEYNE, Paul. "La famille et l'amour sous I Haut-Empire romain." in Annales, 33 annee, no 1, janv.-fevr. 1978, pp. 35-63, claims that between Augustus and the Antonines in Rome, independently from any christian influence, the ideal of a nuclear, conjugal family had come into being. It was in the interest of the owners to make this kind of family obligatory for their slaves. In its aristocratic form, it was taken over by christians. DUBY, Georges. La société au XI et XII siècles dans la région maconnaise. Paris 1953, and HERLIHY, David. "Family Solidarity in Medieval Italian History." in Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy. Kent State Univ. Press, 1969. pp. 173-179, see the early European family typically reduced to a conjugal cell into well into the XII century. Then, a process of consolidation begins that is concerned mainly with land-holdings. Canon law has little influence on it. See also PELLEGRINI, Giovan Battista. "Terminologia matrimoniale" in Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano per l'Alto Mediocevo di Spoleto, 1977. pp. 43-102, which introduces into the complex terminology, or set of terminologies, which are necessary to understand medieval marriage. See also METRAL, M.O. Le mariage: les hésitations de l'Occident. Préface de Philippe Ariès. Paris: Aubier, 1977. For the XVII and XVIII centuries I found useful ARIES, Philippe. L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'ancien regime. Pion, 1960, and LEBRUN, François. La vie conjugale sous l'ancien regime. Paris: Colin, 1975. LASLETT, Peter. Un monde que nous avons perdu: les structures sociales pré-industrielles. Flammarion, 1969. Engl.: The World we have lost, find conjugal families typical for England much before the industrial revolution. BERKNER and SHORTER, Edward, "La vie intime": Beitrage zur Geschichte am Beispiel des kulturellen Wandels in der Bayrischen Unterschichte im 19 Jh." in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Sonderheft 16, 1972, find nuclear families typical for South-Germanic peasants at a certain stage in the life-cycle when the old have died off. It seems probable that the extended family is primarily "the nostalgia of modern sociologists".
What makes the modem family unique, is the "social" sphere in which it exists. The O.E.D. gives among nine meanings the third as: "group of persons consisting of the parents and their children, whether actually living together or not", as a meaning that appears in the XIX century. Family-quarrels, 1801; family-life, 1845; unfit for family-reading, 1853; family tickets for admission for half the price, 1859; family-magazine, 1874.
HERLIHY, David. "Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701-1200." in Traditio, 18, 1962. pp. 89-120. (Fordham Univ. N.Y.)
[34] The family as an institution of "police". In the subsistent family, the members were tied together by the need of creating their livelihood. In the modern couple-centered family, the members are kept together for the sake of an economy to which they, themselves, are marginal. DONZELOT, Jacques. La police des familles. Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1977. Engl.: The Policing of Families, transl. by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1979, follows and elaborates FOUCAULT, Michel. La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, by describing this as "policing" by which the so-called social domain is created ... the domain to which we refer when we speak of "social" work, "social scourge, "social" programmes, "social" advancement. According to J. Donzelot, the history of this domain, and the process by which it comes into being, namely "policing" can neither be identified with traditional political history, nor with the history of popular culture. It represents a bio-political dimension that uses political techniques to invest the body, health, modes of living and housing, through activities which all were, originally, called policing. Doncelot's attempt to describe the formation of the "social sphere" will be better understood after reading DUMONT, Louis. "The Modern Conception of the Individual: Notes on its Genesis and that of Concomitant Institutions." in Contributions to Indian Sociology. VIII, October 1965.; also Micro-fiches, Presses de la Fondation des Sciences Politiques. The French translation: "La conception moderne de l'individu: notes sur sa genèse en relation avec les conceptions de la politique et de l'Etat à partir du XIIIe siècle." in: Esprit, fevrier, 1978. L. Dumont describes the simultaneous appearance of the political and the economic sphere. See also Paul Dumouchel's, op. cit. comments on Louis Dumont.

So I wrote a piece about the pronoun debacle from the perspective of someone living in Japan who speaks Japanese, because there's a totally separate but interestingly similar pronoun thing that goes on here. I would like to share my thoughts here, and see what you think:
[line to original - http://theanglojapaneseexperience.blogspot.jp/2018/03/is-japan-politically-correct.html]
The West
I was lying in bed smoking a cigarette. My desktop was cluttered with mugs, all of which were covered with deposited ash. It was 2014, and I was a 1st year university student. I had a buddy. His name was Jeth. Jeth lived in the apartment next to mine. If both of us had our windows open, we could shout across to each other. This was one of those moments. “Hey, dude, there’s this radical education event going on tonight,” he hollered, “fancy popping by?” “Sure,” I said, flicking my butt into a pool of tea, “it’s not like I got anything better to do.”
The thing was held in a big, opulent room. A group of maybe 30 sat around a large, oaken table. I recognized some. University students, mostly. “OK,” announced a guy with a pony-tail, “I guess we better begin.” We turned to look at him. “Now, I must stress - it’s not like I’m the leader of the group or anything, it’s not like I’m organizing things. This is a non-hierarchical meeting. Anyone can speak at anytime. We’re going to do this in a free-flowing manner, teaching each other, educating one another, and inspiring. Before we begin, though, I just want to say, for anyone who feels like they’re being threatened and intimidated, anyone who feels uncomfortable at anytime, well, the room opposite this one is a safe space. We have a trained counsellor on hand to deal with your problems. Please do not be afraid to step out.”
We proceeded to introduce ourselves. Some members of the feminist society. A Marxist dude. Or three, or four, or ten. The socialist society. LGBT. There was a pattern emerging, a pattern that didn’t, eh, let’s say - specifically include me. Well, hey, we were all young, and we were all against the damn establishment, right? So who cares if I’m just another moderate white guy, hey, fuck those bloody Tories!?
The first speaker. He was the president of the LGBT society. He wasn’t happy. The police. Yeh, the police. They’d been harrassing the transgender community for centuries! There was, like, this nightclub in New York, like, in the 1920s, and guess what, no, wait, it’s too much, I mean, I just get so angry, those PIGS, those FUCKING PIGS, they...A cried started to cry. A twinge, something like empathy. It was all good and well to play radical, but her Dad was probably a policeman. The speaker hesitated, and went on. She continued to weep, silent. I felt sorry for her. Her Dad was probably a good Dad, even if his job sometimes forced his hand. It wasn’t fair to be so bigoted like that, you know?
The speaker concluded. He turned to her, meekly. “Sorry…”, he said. She wiped a tear from her eye. “I know, I mean,” she blubbered, “it’s just that pigs don’t commit institutional violence. It’s not fair on them, it’s really not fair”. The speaker dropped his gaze. No. I felt it coming. No. I was gonna laugh. No. Here it comes! But I managed to suppress it, somehow, and walked to the exit. Little did I know that this phenomenon was about to become real big.
Thankfully Japan doesn’t have any of that crap, eh? The women are women, and the men are men - or, well, kind of meterosexual men who don’t like leaving the house, but still men. Sort of. Anyway, three years of university had me real psyched for a life in the Far East. People would be chilled, you know, like, they wouldn’t obsess over gender pronouns or Halloween costumes. It’d be like the ‘50s. I could share my opinions freely, without fear of reprisal. Japan was a nation-sized time capsule, and I was about to heave the treasure up.
The East
There’s this curious thing about Japanese people. It’s not something the untrained eye catches. To the doughy-eyed tourist, Japanese people are polite, well-mannered, and friendly. Very friendly. You walk into a bar and a smiling old man asks where you’re from and buys you a drink. Pretty neat, huh. Only their interactions with Japanese people are taking place in English. Exclusively in English. And, you know, there’s something about the English language. Maybe it’s the influence of America, I dunno. But the English language is real conducive to casual modes of behaviour.
Japanese, as we know, has various layers of politeness. English does too, kind of, but it’s not the same. Nobody ever chastised me for conjugating a verb wrong. Well, no one but my French teacher. And that was bloody French! Anyhow, Japanese requires you to alter first- and second-person pronouns, verb endings, and title appellations, and to change the words you are using (for instance 食べる can mutate into いただく) depending on who you’re speaking to. And who you’re speaking to can change real fast. You could be shooting the breeze with a similarly ranked co-worker, and then your boss walks in. Suddenly you’re speaking a whole new language. It’s tough man, let me tell you.
When I started to study Japanese, I swiftly learned this. Ah, crap, I thought, I can’t be bothered to remember all this shit. So I cut a corner. Many corners, in fact. I decided to focus solely on the Japanese I was most likely to use in my day-to-day life (i.e. casual Japanese). I thought that I’d nail the keigo down later, you know, as the icing on the cake, the fairy on the Christmas tree. It was, for now, an irrelevance.
Well, the first kink I encountered was about six months in. I had booked a hostel in a charming, out-of-the-way seaside town called Aoshima. It was run by a couple of surfers. They looked like the sort of people who take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs. I told them that I had a reservation. “Hey, reserved a bed for tonight,” I said. “Reserved,” they said, correcting my verb end. “Reserved”, I said, correcting myself. As you can see, it doesn’t really translate into English. To reserve is, put simply, to reserve. Right?
That was episode was potentially paranoia. You get a lot of that in Japan. Only more was to come. I had opted for using “boku” as my go-to first-person pronoun. Japanese is kind of cool like that, in that you can accessorize your image by opting to refer to yourself with a different “I”. “Boku” seemed up my street. It was neither too polite, nor too casual. Just riiight. Until, that is, my vice-principal motions me into his office one day. He was holding a USB. “Is this yours?” he asked. “I think so,” I said. Only something real weird happened. The “I” transformed. I didn’t use “boku”. Without even thinking, I ratched it up a politeness level to “watashi”. I was turning Japanese.
Recently, I was getting dinner with three Japanese ladies. A 50-something woman, her 25 year-old daughter, and another 29 year-old woman. They had been teaching me Japanese at the volunteer centre. Now, Takeyama, the 29 year-old, has become my regular tutor. She was stuck in a dead end sales job working some real nasty overtime, and decided to quit and become a Japanese teacher. A nice lady. Anyway, I was asking them what the best place they’d ever visited was, when I referred to Takeyama without the correct title appellation. Everyone went silent. “You must attach -san,” the older woman said. You learning something everyday on this little archipelago!
What I realized, in my micro examples, was that you had to be real careful about the way in which you spoke to Japanese people. All the time. I told an old geezer “wait a little” in casual Japanese, and he slammed his palm on the table. “Do you know who fucking old I am?” he screamed, “I’m fucking 80”. You don’t speak casual to someone your grandparents age. Worse, my friend used the casual pronoun “ore” to his boss. Yikes. “WA-TA-SHI”, the guy apparently repeated, “you use WA-TA-SHI”.
Where did this all come from? Clearly, not an Equality & Diversity committee. No. It arose through thousands of years of cultural and linguistic exchange, an elaborate manner in which social status could be tacitly acknowledged without being explicitly stated. It especially applies to the relationship between juniors and seniors. If someone is older than you, you speak honorifically. Filial piety is pretty cool, I suppose, but it did get me to thinking.
Is there a meaningful distinction between the pronoun debacle waging in the West and Japan’s own insistence of linguistic exactitude at all times. I mean, in Japan, the repeated wrong use of a first-person pronoun could cost you your job. It’d certainly cost you your social status. There have been some reports in the British media about a teacher who used the wrong third-person pronoun, and got disciplined. It was pretty crazy. But at least he didn’t get scolded for using the wrong first-person pronoun.
One crucial difference is the manner in which these things have evolved. Japan’s language rules, etiquette, and encouraged patterns of behaviour emerged slowly, and don’t look likely to change soon. The West’s language rules - it’s Overton Window of what is socially acceptable in any given situation - has been shifting like mad. It is, in a word, arbitrary. Beliefs that would have been scorned at by the mightiest progressive a mere 7 or 8 years ago are now enshrined into law.
But, hey, you know, they say that political correctness is “enforced politeness”. And that whole “enforced politeness” stuff, I’m starting to get it. When I leave work, even though I’m hauling ass outta that door at the time my contract stipulates, I have to say “sorry for leaving early”. It’s a pain, but it helpfully underscores the gear-grinding toil of my Japanese co-workers. It’s a miniature sign of appreciation. So I get it. But it’s a lie. It’s a “compelled” lie, in which I pretend the contract I signed doesn’t really mean anything. It is, in other words, a white lie. And maybe calling a teenage boy a “she” is kind of like that. Maybe.
I’m neither smart enough, nor sufficiently well-versed in Japanese history or social norms to get to the bottom of this. But it seems like society enforces a code of conduct, and that it oftens goes for speech. The question is how innocuous this is. Telling people not to swear doesn’t forfeit their capabilities of expressing their opinions. It is not political censorship. Telling people to to alter their first person pronoun use, well, ditto.
And yet, you know, the Japanese people that tourists see. The ones who seem relaxed and friendly and chilled-out. Those people are speaking English. They’re freed from the confines of their own speech. I mean, my Japanese friend wakes up after a night drinking freaking out about the way he conjugated his verbs to a senior. That ain’t good. It seems, undeniably, that tying people in too many knots isn’t good for their relationships with other people. For society. So speech policers in the West, however well-intentioned, better take a look here before they go any further. It’s a pretty weird road to take.