Image: Seine from Notre-Dame de Paris
Language studies keep your memory and cognition sharp, provide a meaningful way to socialize and just straight out boost the feel-good hormones. [1].
In a study funded by the Spanish government (Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [MINECO], learning the meaning of new words showed significant fMRI activation in the ventral striatum (VS), a region associated with reward processing in the brain. [2]
Also, seemingly learning a language can increase the size of your brain. Hopefully, not continuously! [3]
In 2020, I did extensive amount of computer science studies, not to mention there were curfews and travel restrictions everywhere. In retrospective I think my brain really needed some balancing activity and French practice was a fantastic way for that healthy stimulation (Big thanks to my dad for the idea). I was tidying up some of my notes from the pandemic 2020 the other day and I came across lots of French material. Pages of French words that I used to know and didn’t want to forget.
So, I created this wordcloud of French vocabulary from my worn-out notebook. It’s a personalized list of words I noted during my Zoom meetings with Pascal Poirson who’s a friend, businessperson, former CTO and an amazing mentor/coach. (There might be a couple of typos.)
Now I don’t have to worry about saving some old physical notes and also this word cloud is a pleasure to look at. I would think it also provides a stronger memory connection than just creating a text document since it caters to the visual memory as well.
Python Code ( Wordcloud)
And here is the Python code I’ve used for the visualization above, in case you’d like to create your own word cloud.
I love this Python library called Wordcloud. (Back to computer science) It provides a programmatic and aesthetic way to represent notes, labels, tags, summaries etc. which is perfect!
text=text_fr+text_fr2
print(len(text))
stopwords = {"le", "je", "ca", "en", "un", "les", "tu", "sois", "son", "ils", "bon", "se", "la", "soi", "suis"}
wc = WordCloud(background_color="white", max_words=1500, mask=None, min_font_size=8,
width=800, height=500, colormap="viridis", stopwords=stopwords)
wc.generate(text)
wc.to_file("Desktop/output14.png")The original Python tutorial can be found here: Python word cloud tutorial.
Thank You
French language, culture, and the people made my life richer and more meaningful throughout the years and I’m thankful for that.
Pascal particularly has been incredibly pleasant and resourceful as a friend, language exchange partner and business mentor/coach. His consultations were subtle yet very impactful long term. If you’d like to enquire for his coaching & consultation services in your navigation of business growth, talent management, tech implementations, strategic planning and change related topics, you can reach out to him and his team through Group DT-CF’s website.
Voici un petit post de remerciement!
References
[1] Emotions and Instructed Language Learning: Proposing a Second Language Emotions and Positive Psychology Model: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02142/full
[2] The Role of Reward in Word Learning and Its Implications for Language Acquisition: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)01207-X
[3] What happens in the brain when you learn a language?: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/sep/04/what-happens-to-the-brain-language-learning