"18 century literary French"? Okay, I've been thinking it for a while, but this confirms to me that his understanding of linguistics is fucked (if the BS about accents didn't already). You can't learn to SPEAK a language solely from reading it. You may learn prescriptivist grammar, vocab, etc, but you cannot learn to SPEAK it unless you actually, y'know, speak it. First off, you wouldn't get pronunciation right, and second off, there's this flawed idea that written language is more 'pure' or accurate than spoken, when spoken always comes first in a language, with the written language following.