An incentive to learn!

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All the exhibits at the Musee du Quai Branly were labelled in both French and English (no other languages, rather oddly), but in most cases there was also a paragraph of further information in French only, so we tested our translation skills on these. I studied French for a few years at school a long time ago, and Big One even less but much more recently, but with the aid of Bing to translate the occasional word we managed to work out what they were telling us without too much trouble and had a lot of fun doing so. Sometimes we would make an educated guess at the meaning of a word or phrase, then look it up and find we were right, which was very satisfying. Sometimes we would make a rather random guess and then find we were right again, which was highly amusing (for example a ‘chauve-souris’ - a bald mouse – I laughingly suggested might be a bat – and then we found it is!) By the time we left (when the museum closed) we felt as if we had had a thorough mental work-out, but were left with a great feeling of achievement. The whole experience was so much fun that we were full of enthusiasm a couple of days later when we visited the ‘Grand Galerie de l’Evolution’ of the Natural History Museum, but sadly that was not as much fun. In some cases we struggled to translate the name of some creature only to find we didn’t recognise it after translation, so then we’d have to look up the Latin name anyway to find the English name that we knew. In other cases we worked hard to translate paragraphs explaining things like the migration of plankton over a 24-hour cycle, only to find that we already knew the information anyway, so it didn’t seem worth the effort. After a while we just gave up and just walked around looking at things. Just goes to show, I guess, that with the right incentive you can do anything! The picture shows a whistling vase from the central America exhibit. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2024.