My tryst with languages…..
Apart from basic schooling where we first learnt to read and write, my father took efforts from his end to provide us with necessary material to improve our vocabulary.
When we were very little, on our yearly visits to our native place, we joined our cousins during their evening study hours in an attempt to learn Malayalam. I must say Malayalam is one dyslexic language. Many letters are mirror images of each other. Eg Pa looks like Va which in turn looks like Ha which can be modified to a Fa. The vowel Ae is a mirror image of Ra and Sa is an inverted image of Da. After futile attempts in this endeavor(though I could speak well) and having to learn more languages in school, my dad decided to get us newspapers in all languages(English, Malayalam, Marathi). We were expected to read the newspapers diligently everyday, something my brother and I almost never obeyed.
The papers would remain as it is, fresh from the press even the sheets of advertisements stuck in between the pages untouched. My uncle stayed with us then. He, on returning home would pick up the Marathi paper in exasperation, holding on to one corner of it(his displeasure obvious on his face) and then slam it down giving us a much needed telling. We kids laughed it off and soon enough since we didn’t appreciate it, the newspaper subscriptions were put to a halt.
My brother was good at Hindi in school and I was terrible at it. I was more comfortable learning Marathi and hence Marathi became my second language. My brother went on to ace Hindi Kovid exams(yeah Kovid supposedly means ‘enlightened’ in Hindi) while I struggled with basic grammar. I still do not get why inanimate objects need to have a gender. Does a bus look feminine from any speck of imagination? It is this huge monstrosity that screeches and bellows down the street. A bullet train could be feminine ,sleek and beautiful. So, that is how it was. If I could not fit it into my imagination, it did not register. I was lost like some person floating in outer space.
I loved Marathi. I was okay at it (both reading and writing). However, I learnt to speak fluently only during my medical school years. Patients there didn’t speak Hindi and certainly not English. So, learning the language became a compulsion of sorts. I would say, ‘Necessity is the mother of all life skills’. Someone once suggested, “If you want to learn a language , watch more content of the same.” An other birdie told me, ”While learning a new vernacular language(in this case, Bengali), do not try and convert from English to Bengali, convert the conversation from your mother tongue to Bengali”. Not sure how this tip works. Yet to try it.
My brother and I went ahead and learnt some Sanskrit( a good 2 years or so), more so for our board exams. We had two exceptional tutors for the same and yet we both have no working knowledge of it. Bro cannot speak much Marathi but went ahead and learnt Tamil during his undergrad years and I picked up some Bengali during my postgrad years. As far as keeping in touch with languages is concerned, kudos to OTT platforms. They help with the cause well.
So yes, I am a multilinguist. Guess most Indians are. More like a Jackie of all trades and master of none.
