I have always wanted to learn French for reasons
that don’t make much sense except to my brain. But primarily it is because my
brain doesn’t like being stumped by French phrases while reading books in
English. So, though Poirot taught me ‘Bonj jour’ and ‘mon ami’ which Jaya, my
older sister (who had taken French) impatiently translated (impatience being a
requirement among siblings), that was not enough for my brain. It sulked and
felt left out. Then I developed a love for European and French cuisine, so I
decided I had to learn French to cement that love. And mind you, French is to
be followed by a host of the world’s most popular languages in keeping with my dream of travelling the world... so there’s no lack
of ambition here. :P
It is not the first time that I am trying
to learn a language. In my teens my younger cousin, Hridhya, made a valiant
effort to teach me the Malayalam alphabet. She was all of six perhaps but a
hard taskmaster during our summer holiday stays at my maternal grandmother’s place.
It is due to her that I can now guesstimate and fumble my way through trying to
figure out the odd Malayalam word I see, taking all of perhaps a minute to
decipher each word. (Yeah, mostly I give up. But I intend to rectify that!).
Then, I made the attempt to learn the Urdu
alphabet taken in by its grace and poetry, and also the ‘tehzeeb’ (culture and
etiquette) of Lucknow as viewed in the Hindi movies of the 1960s. I used to
travel to work by train and I persuaded Sabiha, a friend, to coach me. She gave
me the letters of the alphabet and I realized I’d have to rote learn them (did
I mention how much I dislike rote learning?). However I did it but then over
time I fell out of the habit and now… I just remember how to write ‘seen’ or ‘s’
in Urdu, though I still have the notebook around. :P
So, when I decided to embark on my French
lessons, I decided to just try, keeping all expectations aside. The first
lesson happened and my brain froze aghast as it turned inside out trying
to pronounce what was printed in ways it has never thought of before. And then…
it went into hiding. If my brain could have pulled a Pyare Mohan Ilahabadi from
the 1975 film Chupke Chupke, it would have, with a bewildered, “c-u-t cut hai toh p-u-t put hai!” (Translated: If cut is pronounced as cut then why is ‘put’
pronounced as ‘put’?). Though technically French—not having borrowed from every
language in the world—is a far more reasonable language than English, my
English-trained brain was too busy cowering to reason with.
It kind of reminds me of the Stroop Effect
test we used to perform in experiments for psychology practicals in college.
These experiments were infamous in the college because we had to chase people
to get ‘subjects’ to test out theories. The moment they heard ‘practicals’, ‘experiments’
or ‘psychology’ most would run away. Mystified, I finally caught one for an
explanation and she told me ‘don’t you hypnotize people in your experiments?!’
*Facepalm*
Anyway, there was this experiment, the Stroop
Effect where we would present a list of words to our subjects, where each word was
the name of a colour but printed in another colour, e.g. red was printed in
blue. The subject’s task was to name the colour the word was printed in. This is
a difficult task because the brain finds it difficult to associate the mismatched
words and colours, thus proving the theory. And that’s exactly what my poor,
beleaguered brain went through in that first week of learning French, apart
from using my mouth to form all sorts of sounds it has never been used to. So
far, I persist with my learning and I have to admit it’s caught my interest but
will it take the same route as my attempts at learning Malayalam and Urdu? Only time
will tell. :D
Photo by Jacqueline
Brandwayn
❤️
ReplyDeleteThank you :)
Delete