Salut! My name is Jen and I have an immense love for the French language and Psychology. My love for French, as juvenile as it may sound, stemmed from Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries series. The heroine Mia Thermopolis, would sometimes end her “diary entries” with her homework for that week which always included French. I admired her character (an extremely relatable young woman, who was naive and worried a lot) and how she ended up becoming a sophisticated and intelligent young lady able to rule the land of Genovia. So, in my quest to become more like Mia Thermopolis, I decided to take French class in high school and fell in love with it almost immediately.
As for psychology, I was born and raised by two psychiatric nurses. My parents would often tell stories of the strange personalities they encountered at work over the dinner table–it was inevitable that I would become highly interested in the subject! I also really enjoy Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest which takes place in a mental ward full of characters with different disorders. It is one of the best novels I have ever read (and a great movie too)! I used to want to grow up to work in an institute surrounded by patients with extreme cases of disorders but just recently, I changed my mind to working with children with developmental diseases such as autism or down syndrome.
Now, what is this blog about anyway?
I want to share with you my journey to French fluency; I’ve been taking it for six years now and it’s only really beginning to sink in. I’m also going to Paris for four weeks this coming January for a class and hope to be able to speak with ease instead of the usual <<je pense que…uhh..je pense que c’est très..>>. In addition I want to explore how my brain is even learning and processing this foreign language, among other things. I plan on sharing what I’ve learned about the brain and what we can do to fully utilize our mind’s potential (say, for that test you have next class!)!
Interested so far? I hope so!
Let me know what your passions are and where their roots lie!
à bientôt!
Le Petit Cerveau 