Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties (14 page)

Which is which? A feature of many but not all forms of meditation, one of these is a sound you repeat silently in order to achieve a state of boredom (but in a good way). The other you eat too much of. You think you know the difference, but let’s see.

ANSWERS:

YOUR SPIRITUAL QUOTIENT:

Perfect score: You are like the Buddha—at peace and fat.

T
he only time I feel that I have a fighting chance while speaking French is when I am in a non-France foreign country. Hearing all those non-English words, my brain snaps into action. “Default to foreign language,” it commands and presto, I am jabbering French to people who do not necessarily speak French. “
Très bien
,” I say, and “
Ou est le Métro?
” Otherwise, in France and for that matter in America, my French just isn’t French. The last time I tried to use it in public, I was in Paris. I’d left the book I’d been reading (Kafka’s letters to his girlfriend) in a movie theater and, returning the next day, put on my most mincing accent and asked the mademoiselle at the ticket
booth, “
Avez-vous ma liberté?
” For those of you who know even less French than I do—if such a person exists—their word for book is
livre
.

Let’s say English was not my first and second language. Let’s say I mastered another language. Could bilingualism be pernicious to my mental health? Oh, come on: It doesn’t really seem like such an unreasonable theory, does it? Couldn’t your neurons become all balled up if you keep switching languages, in the same way that constant travel can make you confused about where you are when you wake up in the morning?

The answer is no. In fact, the answer, pardon my French, is
au contraire
. The going theory goes that because bilinguals are constantly switching between languages #1 and #2, they become practiced at attending to two tasks in rapid succession, resolving internal conflict, thinking more analytically, and keeping track of a lot of information. This rigor might explain why bilingual preschoolers performed better than their monolingual peers on a test that challenged them to sort blue circles and red shapes into (digital) bins according to shape and not color—or why babies from bilingual families did better than those from monolingual families on an exercise in which they were first trained to associate the appearance of a puppet on one
half of the computer screen with an audio cue, and then retrained to look for the puppet on the other side of the screen despite the misleading audio cue.

Good for them, but is better puppet-watching skill any reason to learn another language? Here’s a more persuasive argument: The average age of dementia among bilinguals is 75.5 compared to 71.4 for monolinguals.

Seventy-one point four?! My God, I could be that age one day!

I decided to learn Cherokee using the online flash cards provided on Memrise, a free website that teaches memorization through crowdsourced mnemonics. Though mostly a language-training tool, Memrise can help you become a show-off in subjects ranging from hobo symbols to famous robots, pasta shapes to Austrian army ranks, medicine to trees of England. All that is required is spending a few minutes a day for several weeks absorbing and reviewing driblets of trivia. This technique of
spaced repetition
—i.e., learning new information in short spurts and then going over it again later and still later again—is a proven method for retaining memorized material.

Why Cherokee? Because I thought it would be easy and because I was confusing it with Navajo. (Navajo
was the basis of a code Americans used during World War Two to foil the Japanese. Cherokee also played its part in the war, but to a far lesser extent.) Today the Cherokee language is spoken by tribes in North Carolina and Oklahoma, and by me. Correction: I have never uttered a single Cherokee word. So far it hasn’t come up even once in conversation. This is fortunate because I would not know how to order in a Cherokee restaurant or tell a Cherokee taxi driver how to take me to Fifty-Seventh Street and Sutton. The Memrise course I chose did not include anything as advanced or helpful as vocabulary or phrases, focusing instead on the syllabary, a sort of alphabet in which each of the eighty-five characters represents a syllable instead of a phoneme.

The Cherokee syllabary was invented in the early nineteenth century by a Cherokee silversmith variously named Sequoyah, George Gist, and George Guess, who had been intrigued by the “talking leaves”—pieces of paper with peculiar marks—that enabled the white people to communicate with one another. Sequoyah’s syllabary is the only known instance of a writing system devised by someone who previously could not read or write. Some of his symbols resemble letters you know well, but that coincidence will only trip you up, like
trusting an old friend who is not acting himself.
M
, for instance, sounds like “lu” (think of a
lu
ge going down the mountains of the
M
), and
B
is pronounced “yv” (some users on the site have advised, though not I, that the more vulgar and suggestive you can make your visual or phonetic mnemonic, the easier it is to remember). Other symbols in the syllabary look like an outsider artist’s squiggly attempts to evoke an alphabet, for instance
, which is a stand-in for the syllable “ma,”
, which is “hi,” and
, which stands in for “hv.”

After presenting his creation to the Cherokee National Council, Sequoyah was accused of witchcraft. According to one report, Sequoyah’s first wife had burned a rough draft of his work, but
que sera, sera
(was that French or Italian?). Ultimately the Cherokee Nation adopted the syllabary and gave Sequoyah an award. In 1980 the United States government issued a stamp with his face on it. These nuggets will probably not make you smarter, but maybe this test will.

Here is the entire syllabary. Next to each Cherokee symbol is its English pronunciation. (Note that there is no symbol for “ch,” but not to worry, the Cherokee refer to themselves as Tsalagi, spelled
, and Chanukah can be spelled Hanukkah, i.e.,
.) Study the chart for three minutes.

Got it? Next, is a grid of symbols. Cite the items that are authentic Cherokee. Circle the items that are authentic Cherokee. Extra credit if you remember the English pronunciations of any of the symbols.