Whisper to their souls to go

This Saturday I'll be off again to West Africa, arriving in Accra on Sunday and then in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire by Tuesday. That's right, my research will be taking me to a new country, just west of Ghana, and I'm certainly excited by the prospect of seeing if the money I spent on the first two levels of Rosetta Stone French will actually pay off. (I'm also excited to see a new country.) I should be in Abidjan for 2-3 weeks, and then I'll be back to Ghana until mid-April working on another research project.

Of course, a new tour of Africa necessitates new gear--my more astute readers will note that this post comes right after the post-holidays sales...

First, Rosetta Stone, to enable me to communicate/ask where the bathroom is in French while in Cote d'Ivoire. RS is a clever program. It comes with speech recognition and all sorts of fancy pictures to aid one in learning a language. So clever, in fact, that I am convinced that the software is pre-programmed to identify which syllables in French will be most difficult for me to pronounce; ironically, many of these are true cognates, on which I shall elaborate below.

Nonetheless, RS is not entirely fool-proof, and I have found some gaps in their translations.

For example:

Les eleves d'ecole primaire aiment les sciences. = [look for the Asian kids]

Ce temps est le pire. = The weather is really bad. [look for the flying cows from Twister.]

Il joue du piano le mieux. = [look for the Asian kid]

Some exercises are less obvious, such as those that show you a picture and have you speak the caption. This exercise is hard in that the possibilities for the caption (as with New Yorker cartoons) are endless:

[Photo: Man eating alone at restaurant]

Me: "Uhhhh, l'homme dine a la restaurant ... ?"

[minor third chimes indicating incorrect answer]

Me: "Uhhhhh, l'homm--"

[minor third]

Me: "What the ..."

Answer that flashes on screen: "La femme est en retard." [The woman is late.]

Seriously? Wow.

Most of the time my microphone picks up what I say and it registers it correctly on the screen. There are however some glaring deficiencies--partly my own, but in my opinion partly the software's--with certain (mono-)syllables of the French language. Primarily,

bleu = blue
voiture = car
chaussure = shoe
d'Australie = from Australia
professeur = professor

For some reason, I often can't hit the right frequencies for these words. And this is where one gets ... Rosetta Stoned.

Speaking exercise, you will here three sample sentences. Please repeat the final sentence:

(1) La fille veut un chat. [The girl wants a cat.]

(2) Le garcon chante bien. [The boy sings well.]

(3, my turn) Le professeur d'Australie veut acheter une nouveau voiture bleu. Il ne porte pas des chaussures. (non sequitir? you get the point) The Australian professor wants to buy a new blue car. He does not wear shoes.

It feels something like this:



In actuality, RS has been great for teaching me French in the past six weeks, and I would recommend it. Especially with all those hidden gems.

I'm currently in packing mode right now. Much of today was spent figuring out how to re-treat my mosquito net with permethrin. I thought that would be a simple task. But, no, those instructions are remarkably difficult to find online. All these formulas you have to abide by ... and they don't really sell permethrin at high concentrations in individual-sized amounts. I mean, if it's that hard for me to figure out how to re-treat a net, then what's it like for the people in Africa who need it day in and day out? I ended up concocting a watered-down version with Sawyer's Permethrin solution for clothing, which has left my garage with hints of toxicity. Apparently it's also highly toxic to cats, and since none of my neighbors' cats have died on my lawn (yet), I think we'll be fine. Will it work in Africa? Perhaps, at least for a little while, right?

Je ne sais pas.