Learning French… and the Stroop Effect
I’d 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. It stumped me no end when Poirot used ‘bonj jour’ (good day) and ‘mon ami’ (my friend) which Jaya, my older sister (who had taken French) impatiently translated (impatience seems to be a requirement among siblings).
But 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 other 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 in figuring out Malayalam words, taking about a minute to decipher each word!
Then, I made the attempt to learn the Urdu alphabet. The sheer grace and poetry of the language. 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 had me write down the letters of the alphabet in my notebook and that’s when 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 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 Hindi 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’? To be fair, unlike English French has hardly borrowed from every language in the world. But my English-trained brain was too busy cowering to reason with.
It sort of reminds me of the Stroop Effect test we used to perform in experiments for psychology practicals in college. These practical 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.
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 for. I’ve continued learning and I have to admit it’s caught my interest. However, my plans of world domination… er travel will have to wait a while, till my brain recovers enough to learn another language. :D
My blogs and memes are free to read. If you enjoy what I do and would like to support me, Pay What You Can :)
Comments