I’ve been learning Hindi for about
nine months now, and my language skills are long past the embryonic stage,
confined to the secure womb of the house, and are definitely ready to be pushed
forth into the wider world – just as I’m getting ready to leave. Typical.
It’s been an interesting journey,
mostly inside my head (though I have been accompanying the fictional Pratap and
his slightly dubious adventures, with titles such as ‘What Pratap did in Nepal’
and ‘Suresh – more than just a friend?’), as it has been the closest I’ve ever
been to being conscious of learning my own mother tongue. I’d consider myself
to be pretty proficient now, I understand most daily conversations provided
that they’re not too mumbled, although I do still speak like a toddler which,
linguistically speaking, I suppose is what I am.
Five months ago, when I first came
out to the subcontinent, I was more than happy to just point at random objects
and say ‘cow’, ‘mountain’, ‘doggy’ and so forth, and stare blankly at anybody
who tried to approach me with anything vaguely resembling an adult
conversation. An onslaught of Hindi soaps later and I had progressed to
understanding something along the lines of ‘She .. blah blah.. to auntie… the
milk… hindi-babble… third person future tense verb.’ It is somewhat frustrating
that my brain can smugly reveal a grammar construction, but not actually recognise
what the word means, though vocabulary acquisition takes time and is all part
of the process. But what this total immersion thing does mean is that I can
actually follow a conversation at native-speaker speed (though not always village
speed which, as well as being somewhat mumbled, comes at machine gun pace). None
of this ‘The… cow… is… in… the… field…’ nonsense. (Cows are coming up a lot
today, as I’m currently watching a rather aged one plodding up and down the
road, wandering what would happen to it if it keeled over and if maybe I could
sneak some carpaccio before anybody noticed.)
But I’ll be honest, I’m lazy when
it comes to speaking. I often wander into the kitchen to declaim to our cooking
lady a sentence that has nothing to do with anything but I’ve spent five
minutes working on and am rather proud of, but I haven’t exactly been
conversing as much as I perhaps should have been since I’ve been working from
home rather than in the villages. It’s just frustrating not being able to put
what I’m thinking into words, and besides, I’ve got the additional excuse that
there are usually other non-Hindi speakers around. In the streets, particularly
in touristy areas, I’ll often launch into a faltering spiel and just get blank
stares or a ‘What’s she saying?’ in return. I used to be fairly offended by
this, my accent may be rubbish and my grammar is all over the place, but
generally I’m 75% there – give me a chance! But then I realised that because it’s
so unusual that a white girl has made the effort, it’s totally unexpected and
just doesn’t register. The people around that know me (or at least know of me –
I have actually been approached by strangers to ask if I’m the girl who speaks
Hindi) are much more receptive.
The other problem is what I’m going
to term ‘language invaders’. A friend of mine who was studying French and
Chinese told me once that her brain has two modes – English and Foreign. I now
totally understand what she means. My brain will chuck in morsels of Spanish or
German, and even occasionally dredge up some Polish to fill a vocabulary gap.
Once I am comfortably in Hinglish mode, getting out of it is nigh on impossible
– an Indian guy who had lived extensively in Germany asked me the other day how
much German I spoke. I blinked at him for some time then came up with ‘Ich verstehe
más als ich kann sagen.’ Come on brain, you can do better than that. My respect
for bilingual kids continues to skyrocket.
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