I am on vacation at the moment visiting my parents and other family. I was delighted to be able to visit a cousin who has moved back from India with her family. Her daughter is a year and a half old and is extremely cute.
I had met her when she was 1 month old, but it was a big difference to see her now.
She speaks both English and Hindi and so I had a great time trying out my Hindi on her. I think the level I've gotten to is about a three year old, so it was perfect! I wish I could spend more time with her.
I was pleased that I understood all her Hindi and she understood mine.
Definitely renewed and refreshed my desire to get fluent and I'm ready to put in some more intensive studying again.
It is ridiculously frustrating that I've been studying a language for two years, and steadily studying it, and still can only say very basic things.
However, languages are not easy to learn, particularly for someone who has only one language.
I think perhaps I need to let go of the goal of speaking and focus on a goal of understanding. If I take the pressure off myself to produce something and just be happy with how much my ability to understand is improving, maybe someday, after a lot of listening, I'll begin to be able to speak.
I've wanted so badly to be bilingual, and I chose this language because it's one that would have practical purpose in my life!
I will attempt some more simple sentences at some point soon, but I'm going to try not to get angry with myself when they're wrong!
My Hindi learning has slowed way down. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm across the long haul of getting fluent. I'm at a point where I can understand the gist of a lot that I hear, but that's about it and it's not good enough!
Sometime I would like to do is start writing a few posts or parts of posts in Hindi for practice. I tried doing this through lang-8, a website designed for you to write in your target language and get corrections, but I feel frustrated there that I can't explain myself in English. I don't trust the corrections I'm getting because there is no "why" included.
So I'm going to occasionally post little stories and things in Hindi and if you know the language, feel free to correct my usage in the comments, and it would be really helpful to say something like "the reason for this correction is that 'ki' is only used for..." etc. But I trust you guys to be making changes based on real need, rather than on cosmetics.
When I do Hindi posts, I'll plan to also do English posts with them.
So, here we go...
अब जो गर्मियों में यहाँ है, मैं बाहर व्यस्त हूँ. पिछले शनिवार मैं दोस्त के साथ चिड़ियाघर के पास गए. मैं धूप की कालिमा है.
कल रात मैं अच्छा आदमी के साथ रात का खाना खाया. मैं भी कल उसे देखती हूँ.
I had made it my New Year's Resolution to be fluent in Hindi this year. January is coming up soon and I'm not there yet.
It's easy for me to feel discouraged and crushed by the weight of how much I have left to learn, but when I think about how far I've come, I've been doing pretty good!
I started learning Hindi a year and a half ago, in the summer.
I can now:
-read the script extremely well -follow the basic context of cartoons -understand most of the words in Bollywood songs (though not always how to put them together) -say basic conversational things
Things I need work on: -genders. I have a lot of trouble with putting the correct gender endings on things or knowing which word creates the gender of the sentence (i.e., which word to use to determine mera v.s. meri) -complex sentences. I'm starting to see how these work, but am not able to generate them yet
Last night I was at my Hindi class and feeling frustrated with myself when I realized that even though I'm struggling with the oblique case and when to use it, just a couple of months ago I didn't understand what the oblique case was!
I have new motivation and a test for my skills possibly coming up. My parents are talking about maybe making another trip to India early next year. Last time they went, I had to work. This time, nothing is going to stop me from going!
...what I've been up to. Actually, you might. Because you know how crazy I am.
I've just returned from Virginia, where I attended a "Hindi Day" celebration and gave a speech. A speech in Hindi, a language I am not yet fluent in, in a room full of strangers.
It was really fun. I'm fond of public speaking, but doing it in a language I don't fully know was a first!
And it turns out that not everyone was a stranger. Another student giving a speech was a young man I met at my Hindi meetup group a while ago. It was on his recommendation that I signed up for classes at this school, but I had no idea he was going to be there. He and I hung out afterwards and visited the upstairs temple with his family. We arrived right in time for an aarti.
It was a beautiful temple and had a very spacious, open, and peaceful feel to it. However, I probably won't be going back, since it is a little over an hour's drive from my apartment when there is no traffic at all.
It was worth it for this, though. I didn't understand all the speeches, but I caught the gist of most of them and I ate wonderful food and I took prasad.
It has been a beautiful evening and now I am heading to bed!
I have been away from the Internet for a whole two days! Oh my goodness. So, that's why I didn't respond earlier to the comments on the last post. I think there is a lot of material there, so I'll need to go through carefully and bring some of the discussion into new posts.
The reason I've been away from the Internet is Rosetta Stone. You all know that I am a huge fan of theirs. I've been happily learning Hindi with them for the last year and I love the way that I am able to feel the language on a very deep level because they don't use translation and my brain goes through the work to puzzle out what each thing means. (Proof that it is working, a new person friended me on Facebook recently and left a comment on one of my photos in Hindi and I was very proud to realize that I understood it and was able to respond. I still have a long way to go before I'm fluent, but I'm making good progress).
Rosetta Stone has a Facebook fan page and I am there frequently, making comments and helping out new users. Apparently, Rosetta Stone took notice of this. They called me up and asked me if I would like to go to New York as a guest for the launch of their newest product. They invited two other people as well (and one of them is also a Hindi learner! He is learning Hindi so that he can communicate with his Indian fiancé's family. He started learning it as a surprise for her, isn't that sweet?).
The new product is another big leap forward for Rosetta Stone. As a company, they are constantly researching new learning methods, listening to customer feedback, and trying to make the very best language learning product possible. Five years ago I had their first offering and it had some problems. Last year I discovered that they had been working on it and continuing to improve it and they had come out with an amazing new version, version 3, that solved all my issues. Now they have version 4 launched.
It has the same great course that version 3 had, easing you into learning and helping your brain to figure out what things mean based on series of closely related pictures. Now they also have a way to play games with other learners of your language, chat with native speakers, and have live coaching sessions entirely in your target language. They also have an iphone app as well as mp3 files so that you can learn where ever you go.
These last couple of days I have been in New York, being treated like a total celebrity. They gave me a free copy of the version 4 Hindi! I can't believe how they are paying back the love that I have for them :)
One of the things I really like about the company is that everyone who works there is passionate about language learning. Every person I met, I asked what language he or she was learning. Every single one of them is learning a language with the Rosetta Stone software. Many of them started using Rosetta Stone before they worked there. Their staff are anthropologists, linguists, programmers, game developers, all sorts of amazing skills are being brought to this product!
This new version will allow me to ease my way into actually speaking with people and I can't wait to get started, which is a great new motivation, since I've been feeling run-down and have not been practicing my Hindi like I should. This pic is posted on the Rosetta Stone twitter feed.
************************ I came to another conclusion while on this trip. I decided that I am going to stop wearing a bindi every day. I think I'm being too obsessive about it and that it can be off-putting to people to see that and it's making me seem harsh and unapproachable.
I would like to learn to better regulate how I fit in with those around me and to choose what I wear based on what impression I want to create.
I will now wear a bindi when I feel like it or when the occasion is appropriate.
I didn't know that a post praising peace would be controversial. I'm sorry, I didn't intend to get people riled up. Obviously, these are my personal opinions and they may or may not be valid or grounded in reality, but you come here for my beliefs and here they are!
Anyway, something light for today.
When I was at work yesterday I happened to glance at some engineering magazine that someone had brought in. It was laying face down so that I saw the ad on the back and I was so excited that I tore the back cover off and took it home with me:
That is Hindi! It says "Do you speak Matlab?" The best part is that I knew what it said immediately, instinctively, without even closely examining it. I just knew it. Just like that. What an incredible feeling. It is a very simple sentence, of course, but I take whatever little victories I can in language learning.
****************************************************** For sometime in the future I've asked my father to write a post for this blog. It will probably be a while because I did not give him a deadline, he's a very busy person. But I wanted to offer his perspective because, unlike me, he sees no difficulty at all in blending Advaita with Christianity. He also feels no conflict between being a spiritual man and being a scientist. I think he has a really great perspective that I would love to share with you all.
I can't talk much about the details, but I've been offered a chance to test out a new product from Rosetta Stone, whose products I adore. It will be for Latin American Spanish and last 1-3 months.
I'm excited to test out how much I have learned about learning language from my Hindi adventure. Hindi will take a back burner for these few months while I see just how much Spanish I can pick up in that time. Spanish would certainly be a useful language to know and though I haven't had any interest in it since I was eight years old, I may as well see how far I can get since it's being offered to me for free.
Lack of vocabulary is the main thing holding me back in Hindi right now. I'm picking up bits of grammar as I read and reread Teach Yourself Hindi, so what I need is just a lot more words to work with.
My vocabulary right now is about 500 words and I'm working intensively on vocabulary growth. Each new word has expanded my understanding of the movies and tv shows and books so much.
I've read that a native speaker usually has a vocabulary of 10,000 words, using about 3,000 of them on a daily basis (we all have our favorite words and phrases that we turn to again and again, though we understand other people's favorite words and phrases). So, I have a long way to go before I'm going to be able to fully understand and communicate.
I'm trying to learn 10 new words each day, which feels a little overwhelming to me, but seems to be on the low end for the impressive people on How-To-Learn-Any-Language.com
I think this little break will help me get a clearer perspective on just how much Hindi I have learned and I can return to it refreshed. I have not yet decided whether I will keep up with a little bit of reading and watching in Hindi while I'm doing the Spanish. I don't know if that will confuse me but I also don't want to lose the progress that I've made in Hindi.
I've reached that point in language learning where each new thing learned feels like such a tiny drop that it will never help! I read somewhere the idea that the first ten words you learn in a language are so exciting and you feel like you're making great progress, but then when you're going from 520 words to 530 words it feels like no progress at all, just a drop of water in the ocean. It's hard to stay focused and motivated when you feel like you're at a standstill.
For fun, for anyone who knows Hindi (or is learning) I found this free Hindi Scrabble Game to download. It's very challenging for me, since I know so few words. It's really a cool program and I wrote to the man who created it to thank him. I hope that he'll have success with this and make other games in Hindi. Hindi Scrabble Game
One of the things that makes me so excited to learn a new language is that I know that languages are not just codes of one another. It's not that you memorize the word for this and the word for that in another language, then put it together and you're done.
Languages are connected to thought and to culture. The way a language expresses something is indicative of its way of seeing the world. A new language means a new way to see the world. You Are What You Speak
Some people who are multilingual talk about being comfortable with different things in different languages. For example, emotions they prefer to speak about in their native language. Last night I was watching an Indian movie and a couple of fathers were trying to discuss a marriage in English, but one says, "You want to talk business? Talk business in Gujrati."
I've been reading lately the idea that one of the challenges to becoming billingual is a deep-seated fear that as we use the new language and leave our native one behind, that we feel we are losing a part of our culture. As The White Indian Housewife said in her blog entry after reading Dreaming in Hindi:
I just don’t want to learn Hindi anymore, or even speak it much. My mother in law accuses me of having forgotten my Hindi. I haven’t though. It’s just reluctant to come out! This has disturbed me and left me wondering why. However, much to my relief the book offers some explanation. As the author says, when we learn a language, we learn an entire culture. There comes a point where that culture starts taking over. And in order for that to happen, you must give up some of your own culture. Learning a new language also changes the way your brain thinks and operates. I think my problem stems from the fact that I’ve been in India for quite a long time now (it will be five years in December!), and I’ve adapted so much to Indian culture that I’m fighting to retain my own culture. In the beginning, I almost tried to become Indian to fit in. I took it very seriously. Now that fitting in (as much as possible!) comes quite naturally to me, I’m starting to feel like I’ve lost a part of myself.
I guess I'm not far along in Hindi yet to notice anything like that. So far, I love Hindi and I love speaking it. Of course, I don't live in India either, so there isn't much danger of me losing touch with my Americaness.
Two concerns I do have are that 1) I keep being told that text book Hindi is not what people really speak which makes me worry that I'm wasting my time and makes keeping my motivation up very difficult and 2) some of the blogs of moms raising bilingual children in a non-native language talk about the fear of not fully connecting to their children because they are not sharing their native tongue with them and are only relating to them through a second language. I reassure myself that 1) once I have text book Hindi down, it will be easy to modify into colloquial and 2) I can stop this bilingual idea with my kids any time if it is not feeling right. Also, I will be speaking English with them outside of our home.
But the fear of losing my own sense of culture? Not there at all. Then again, one of my problems has been that I don't feel like I have a culture.
I have seen some people arguing for and against the idea that there is an American culture. I suppose that there is. Maybe I'm too close to it to see that it exists. I don't feel any connection to it, in any case.
Here are two perspectives on white American culture. The first is from MissTam4 at Ravelry.com, the knitting website. This is something she said in response to talking about children who are half white and half black relating to the culture of their white parent:
I’m white. I couldn’t possibly care less about being white or if my kids are white. I have no “culture” to speak of other than the normal “American” type culture that we all have (whatever race we are, as Americans)...As white people, we really do not have a “culture” or any kind of “solidarity”. The only solidarity white people have as a group is, frankly, the desire to exclude all others. Unless your husband has a specific national culture that he wants to pass on, (e.g. his family is recently immigrated from somewhere and the culture of that country is still strong in his family) there really isn’t anything TO pass on to his children regarding their whiteness. On the other hand, if your family is like most black families I know, YOU have a rich and wonderful American sub-culture to pass on to your children. It gives them a sense of belonging and solidarity and history that white folk simply DO NOT HAVE. .. I’m American. I’m white. So what? The only culture or history I have or care about is the same stuff every kid will learn in school- Columbus, Pilgrims, Revolutionary War, Abe Lincoln, McDonald’s, blue jeans, apple pie.
Gori Girl has a wonderful essay about cultural identity and whether Indian culture is any richer than American culture. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but here is one relevant bit:
Let’s get one thing straight: cultures – all cultures – are constantly changing. And by culture here, I mean “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a society” – i.e. culture is the sum of all learned human behaviors in a particular society. What one generation learns from the previous will change as a society adapts to different conditions. The rate of the change that a culture goes through will generally vary based on the internal and external conditions or pressures a society faces, such as technological innovation, changing resources, and contact with other cultures. For example, most Americans today would not be able to survive for very long in the wild, but the pioneers in the early days of our nation certainly could and did. As “frontier America” transformed into towns and cities knowing how to live off the land became a less important skill than those that allowed you to work in an office or factory in town...It’s not that culture continuity requires that a culture stays the same – that’s impossible – just that certain central aspects of a culture, such as particular beliefs or traditions, remain. To return to the example of “living off the land” in the US, while most Americans can’t survive out in the wild, there remains an ethos of individuality in American culture: a belief that a person should be able to stand on his own two feet without help from others or the government, just as pioneers were required to do.
I wonder, if I did manage to integrate myself into an Indian way of life within America if I would start missing something or feel like I had given up part of myself.
Personally I am of the school of thought that American culture is not very rich. Not yet, anyway. We are still a very young country and our culture is still developing.
Many ethnic groups in America do keep their own wonderful traditions and I know that I strongly felt the lack of that growing up. I was jealous of my best friend's Jewish traditions.
Part of the problem may also have been that I don't relate to a lot of the things that might be considered American culture. As I've said before, participating in Indian culture has felt like coming home to me, has felt so natural and so right.
EDITED TO ADD: Another perspective on this that I just found at a blog called Big, Bad, Blonde Bahu Blog She talks about her Catholic culture and her distaste for people saying that India is better because it has more culture.
Last summer I was walking through the mall with my best friend and I saw a Rosetta Stone stand. My friend was interested in learning Arabic for her work and I had an older version of Hindi that I had done a little bit of work with and liked (I didn't know at the time that there was anything new!). We went over to the stand and the demo that was going looked different, and much much better than the software that I had. The salesman informed me that the program had recently been updated and I was very impressed with what I saw.
The old version had some problems with it. It taught you early on really weird and somewhat useless things. I got really good at saying "The bird is flying" in Hindi, but all the sentences you learned were structured like that. There was no speaking about ones self, no greetings, no where is the bathroom? Also, they had listening exercises, reading exercises, and speaking exercises, but they were separated in such a way that you would get going in one of them and you'd just keep going, so you had to back all the way out to try a different method. Also when I first bought it, they only had Hindi in level 1 and the "popular" languages in levels 1, 2, and 3.
The shiny new Rosetta Stone solved all of these problems and was much more beautiful to use as well. I discovered that they had three levels of Hindi now (and levels 4 and 5 in the popular languages!).
I didn't have a job at the time and it was very expensive. My friend was put off by the expense and also by the fact that she needs to learn the Syrian dialect of Arabic, not the standard Arabic. I, however, could not resist. I bought all three levels and put it on my credit card.
I've never regretted doing that.
I love Rosetta Stone and I sing its praises to everyone I meet! I was never good at languages as a kid and switched from Spanish to Latin in the 6th grade because the pressure to speak in Spanish class was so overwhelming and I didn't know what to say. I continued, badly, with dead languages. But I still loved language so much. I have two degrees in writing. I took linguistics classes in college and loved them. I dreamed of being bilingual someday. Rosetta Stone started me on that path.
It has been almost a year since that purchase. A couple months ago I had almost made it through level 3 when my computer died and I had to call customer service to transfer to another computer. Instead of asking how to get my progress back, I decided to start over from the beginning to help reinforce what I was learning.
As my first post on Hindi told you, I also use a huge variety of other products, from books and youtube videos to flashcards, computer games, and movies to supplement the Rosetta Stone learning.
It's very hard to rate progress in a language. Lately I've been reading a lot of blogs about people learning other languages, trying to be bilingual or, more often, trying to learn many languages and their advice on how to proceed. Through them I discovered this chart of language knowledge:
level description
A1 Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce him/herself and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where he/she lives, people he/she knows and things he/she has. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.
A2 Can understand sentences and frequently used expressions related to areas of most immediate relevance (e.g. very basic personal and family information, shopping, local geography, employment). Can communicate in simple and routine tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters. Can describe in simple terms aspects of his/her background, immediate environment and matters in areas of immediate need.
B1 Can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. Can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the language is spoken. Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest. Can describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons and explanations for opinions and plans.
B2 Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
C1 Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.
C2 Can understand with ease virtually everything heard or read. Can summarise information from different spoken and written sources, reconstructing arguments and accounts in a coherent presentation. Can express him/herself spontaneously, very fluently and precisely, differentiating finer shades of meaning even in the most complex situations.
This will help me clarify my goals and see where I am. After a year of somewhat intensive study (although I have a lot of other things going on too) I am at the A1 level, though probably about to break through into A2.
A little disappointing, but I knew this endeavor was going to be difficult. I think having this chart will allow me to set more concrete goals to reach for, so I can speed up my progress. One of the key motivators is my desire to raise my children in two languages. I've also been reading a lot of blogs of mothers raising bilingual children, even some of them doing it in a language that is not native to them. There are links below. I calculate that it will be a year and a few months before I can start trying for a baby, so that's my time frame for getting all the way to the top of the chart! (Okay, a B2 level would probably be fine for the early learning and I could continue my progress as the kid is growing).
The main way I had been gauging my progress is by playing my favorite Bollywood movie (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam) without subtitles and seeing how many words I recognize. I did that first this past summer after doing a little bit of Rosetta Stone and I'd say I recognized about one word in twenty-five. I'm currently somewhere between one word in ten and one word in five, so I have come a long way! It's still frustrating to feel how far I have yet to go, but a year is really not that long in terms of language study.
When I know a word, it really sticks out in the movie. I know that once I really understand Hindi it will all be clear as a bell instead of now where it sounds like "mumble mumble mumble kutta mumble..."
I'm taking some study techniques from the blogs I've been reading. One is to keep a language journal to record what I studied each day to keep me accountable and to help me see my progress. Another is to do an active/passive week thing to keep from getting burnt out. One week I'll study with Rosetta Stone, grammar books, flashcards and really try hard, and the next week I'll learn passively by watching movies, listening to music and just being absorbed in the language to remind me how much I love it. A lot of people on these sites also use Anki flashcards to learn. I went to the website and downloaded it and I've been very impressed. It uses adaptive recall just like Rosetta Stone, so you rate how easy a word was to get and the easier ones will come back up less frequently. You should watch their youtube videos about how it works. Really neat. Someone has created a huge deck of the vocab from Teach Yourself Hindi and it is in devanagari script (although the font they're using is rather difficult to read).
I practice saying Hindi sentences to the dog and for the last few days I've been trying to translate my thoughts in my head into Hindi. I'm still pretty shaky on verb tenses and noun case endings, though!
As part of preparing for children, I'm going to try to memorize this lullaby:
[Darn! Another video removed. This is a very beautiful lullaby. If you can find "So ja Chanda" it is really worth hearing!]
Quite a while ago now Katie asked me in the comments about the pronunciation of the Indian words I use. I call them Indian because some are Hindi and some are Sanskrit. They are closely related, but not at all the same. India has many, many, many languages as well as many dialects. Some use the devanagari script of Sanskrit and others use completely different scripts and some use a variation of devanagari.
Sanskrit is not my specialty. I learned the alphabet and some prayers when I was growing up and I took one semester of it in college, which I barely got through. The grammar in Sanskrit is very intense. If you're familiar with Latin, it's much more complicated, with more declensions, etc. It also has something called sandhi, where words run into each other. It's sort-of like a contraction in English, how you can put "It" and "Is" next to each other and turn them into "It's." In Sanskrit, almost all the words run together in this way and there are rules about how they combine, depending on the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second word. My mom is currently taking a Spoken Sanskrit class and I can't even imagine how that works.
Hindi, being a modern and still living language, is about the same complication level as English. No sandhi, but it does have gendered nouns and case endings on words. Like the vast majority of languages in the world, it is not dependent on word order and it uses a sentence construction with the verb at the end of the sentence.
Hindi (and Sanskrit) have sounds that do not exist in English. I studied linguistics in college, particularly the development of language in children and something interesting I learned was about how we make distinctions between sounds. If you sound an "ah" out loud and then continue to sound as you shift it to an "ooo," there are a near infinite number of sounds in between. Your brain decides where to draw the line, where to consider something the same sound and where to transfer the meaning to a new sound. It will sound to us like there is a sudden shift between about four or five sounds in that sequence.
A famous example is Japanese people learning English. In their language there is no distinction between an "l" sound and an "r" sound. Our brains learn how to draw these dividing lines by the time we are one year old. By that time, we know the sounds of our language and it becomes increasingly difficult to hear distinctions that other languages draw. So, as distinct as "l" and "r" sound to an English speaker, they will be completely unable to hear the difference between a dental "tha" and a retroflex "tha" (and I have to show them with the same characters because the Roman alphabet does not make that distinction. This has to do with where the tongue is in the mouth when the letter is sounded).
In Hindi there are four different "n" sounds, four different "t" sounds, and (I think) five different "d" sounds. They also distinguish between an aspirated and un-aspirated sound. This is called the "puff of air." It is extremely hard for English speakers to hear the difference because it is not a morphemic difference to us. What that means is that if you say the word "kite" with no extra air on the "k" or if you say it with a puff of air on the "k" (which we almost always do, our language being very lazy in terms of sound production), they are the same word, there is no meaning difference. However, in Hindi, that word might mean two totally different things.
My online Skype teacher was trying to get me to say a word with an un-aspirated "p" in the beginning. Every time I tried, she kept telling me I was aspirating it, but I couldn't tell how not to. The reason is, in English every word that starts with "p" gets aspirated, but words that end in "p" do not. If you say the word "pull" and the word "stop," can you hear that there is a difference between the "p"s?
That is probably going to take me a long time. I have to really practice to make my mouth more acrobatic. I am starting to be able to hear the different sounds when pronounced by others, though not always. Producing them myself is proving extremely difficult.
There are characters in Hindi that don't exist in Sanskrit, because there are new sounds that Hindi has incorporated based on borrowed words from Arabic and English. It's easy, as monolingual English speakers, to think that all languages are taking so many words from English, it must be the best language. It is not actually like that at all.
First, because different languages have been favored at different points in history and during that period, that language gets incorporated into lots of other languages. Also, because all languages borrow words from lots of others. There are words in the English language that came originally from Sanskrit (yes, the language trees are related). There are also French words and German words. For example, think of the word "fiancee." To us native English speakers, that is an English word. That's exactly how a word like "komputr" in Hindi is a Hindi word, though the sounds come from English.
When my cousin first went to live in India, she started learning Hindi (and Kannada) from the household servants. One girl help up a plate and told her, "In Hindi we call this 'plate.'" She did not know it was called the same in English! I don't know off hand which words in English started in Indian languages, but I'll keep my eye out for some. (UPDATE, Basu pointed out two great examples: Jungle and Pajama. Those are both Hindi words that have been taken into English)
There is a movement now to incorporate more Sanskrit derivative words into Hindi. Also, I think the classes springing up in temples around the country for Spoken Sanskrit are a similar phenomenon. It appears to be a rebellion against Arabic (and therefore, Muslim) words in Hindi. I think that tinkering with a language is very unnatural and will probably not stick. How words get created is a very organic process. I also hate to see the world dividing along religious lines like that. But anyway, that is off topic.
I want to show those of you who are not familiar with Indian languages what Hindi looks like. We'll see if the characters come out in a way that you can see them:
मेरा नाम आम्बा है (This says "My name is Aamba). The script is so beautiful that I can't imagine why anyone would want to write out Hindi words in Roman characters. (I also find it extremely difficult to read Hindi words written in Roman characters because there are so many sounds that English doesn't have, they get represented in different ways in different places).
In religious circles people will often say that the line that runs across the tops of the letters represents God, always present in all things (this, however, does not explain why some letters have a gap: धू थ ). Every character has an automatic "ah" attached to it, unless it comes at the end of a word. There are little markers that indicate when it changes to another vowel, and if two consonants are next to each other, part of the first one is removed and squashed into the second one. It is a very phonetic language, and unlike English, every character makes only one sound. Thus, once you learn the alphabet, you can pronounce any Hindi (or Sanskrit) word even if you don't know what it means.
When I was growing up, there were several Sanskrit words that were just a part of my everyday English vocabulary in the same way that "karma" is a part of many people's English vocabularies.
If you want to try to pronounce a Hindi or Sanskrit word, it's a good idea to err on the side of long "a"s. "Ahh" is a very common sound. In order to get the emphasis and the rhythm, you would really have to listen to speakers. If you try Bollywood movies, you'll hear how the language sounds. If you are unfamiliar with Bollywood movies, I recommend Swades as a good one to start with (that is, surprisingly, actually pronounces "Swa-desh").
I recently got some flashcards (Tuttle's Hindi in a Flash) and on them each word has related words and phrases, including expressions. I am delighted to be learning some idioms and expressions. An example of how different languages look at the world in different ways is that in Hindi you drink soup and you drink cigarettes. Interesting, eh?
I love language, clearly. I love how language shapes the way we think and how we see the world. The journey of expanding my brain with a second language has been amazing. This June some time I'm going to do a post on what I've learned in one year, since that's when I bought Rosetta Stone and started that journey. I had better stop now, since this post is already extremely long!
Someone just sent me this video on writing devanagari letters:
Thanks for the kind comments, everyone. I'm finding such inspiration here and so when I feel down or frustrated about this, I can come here and re-read everyone's encouragement. It's wonderful.
I know I said I would do a post about Marrying Anita, but this new book has swept me away! I went to the library to renew the first one and I found that they had a copy of Dreaming in Hindi.
It's an excellent book, about a white American woman who decides to learn Hindi in mid-life. She joins a program for learning in India for a year and she documents her fascinating experiences there, as well as mixing in all the latest linguistic research on second language acquisition.
Some food for thought for me: "I'm perpetually bemused by how entwined this language is with Hinduism. Sometimes I think I can't being to speak it without a thorough grounding in the religion...They say there's no conversion rite into Hinduism, but there is: learn Hindi."
"The Canadian psycholinguists Wallace Lambert and Robert Gardner had just come out with their observation that people learn languages from one of two broad motivations: either they're doing it to make a living, or they have some compelling desire to slip into another community. Sometimes this second aspiration stems from the fact that they feel masked in their own. 'Why do people want to adopt another culture?' Alice Kaplan writes. 'Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them.'"
Though it is only vaguely about Hindi and more about the change in one's mind and culture from experiencing someone else's language, I did learn some Hindi tid-bits. I can't believe that I never noticed that the word for "to have" is the same as "close to." The author pointed out that there isn't a sense of ownership in the Hindi language. I had the "Mera pas jacket hai" (I have a jacket) and the "Ladki ke pas ghar hai" (the girl is near the house), but I had never noticed they were the same words! Light bulb moment. And those feel great, particularly since they aren't happening as much as when I first started.
And one more tip it has given me for learning Hindi. One of the tricky things for me is the gender of words. English being a language without gendered words, this is a very difficult thing to pick up and the genders have to just be memorized. The author talks about a study where they had German and Spanish speakers describe certain objects. These were objects that had opposite genders in each of the languages. They found that for masculine words, the people described the objects in masculine ways and the same for feminine. I wonder if I could force this sort of thing and help to memorize words by thinking about the objects in ways that call to mind a particular gender to me (i.e., think of a key, feminine, as delicate and small...) This would be my own ideas and attachments about gender, obviously, just to help me remember.
I've spoken before about temples, called Mandir. Home worship is also an important part of Hinduism.
Hindu homes have shrines in them and these are often called the heart of the Hindu home.
Some go to Mandir every day, others go only to request particular things or to have a particular ritual done. These rituals are called pujas and there are simple ones that can be done at home and there are very complex ones requiring certain ingredients and mantras. There are different pujas for different occasions and for different deities.
At home the puja will usually consist of ringing a bell, lighting incense, circling a light in front of the deities (called arti), and offering fruit, flowers, and/or a mix of rice and tumeric. Sometimes the deities are bathed in water or in milk or other substances and clothed. Red kumkum powder is put on the forehead of the deity with the thumb of the right hand and the same is applied to the forehead of the devotee. Often bhajans, worship songs, will be sung or played.
A house's shrine may be an entire room, or a niche in the wall. There are small metal temples sold that one can use to house murtis (statues of the gods). The gods themselves will be ones that are connected to the region or the family. Individuals are encouraged to find a god who inspires them in particular.
I have yet to see a shrine that did not include Ganesha. He is the most beloved god and is called "the remover of obstacles." He is prayed to before starting anything new.
Puja is performed everyday. The food that was offered is shared with the members of the family. It is called prasad and is considered to be blessed. This food is consumed before any other food of the day. Also, the flowers that are offered in the puja cannot be sniffed ahead of time. The flowers' first fragrance belongs to the gods.
Tradition has it that the puja is performed at sunrise by the ladies of the household. Before it begins, they must be bathed and cleanly dressed. I will admit, I don't get up that early to do it! (Although my parents for the last thirty years have meditated for 30 minutes at every sunrise and sunset, these times of day are supposed to be filled with spiritual energy).
Cleanliness is very important in Hinduism. The right hand, considered more clean, is used for eating and for other things. Shoes are removed before entering a sacred space such as a Mandir, and because of home shrines, shoes are removed when entering a Hindu home.
Another religious practice done in the home is the blessing of new things. The home itself and big purchases like cars are blessed by a priest, who comes to the home for the ritual.
I am lucky enough in my new apartment to have a separate space for my shrine. Our one bedroom apartment came with two closets, a walk-in one and a small one. I commandeered the smaller one and set up my murtis, pictures, incense, lights, etc. I have a CD of bhajans to play. I close myself in that closet each day and perform my own simple puja.
UPDATE ON LIFE: This weekend my boyfriend and I are flying to my parents' house for my birthday. I will not be wearing my bindi. I plan to deal with that with them at my brother's graduation in May. I will, however, have the chance to practice some Hindi with my mother's Indian friends. Very excited for that.
I've started doing www.livemocha.com for Hindi learning as well. One of my friends likes it better than Rosetta Stone. I still prefer Rosetta Stone, but I think LiveMocha is a great next step. It has you write and speak exercises, which get reviewed by native speakers. For some reason, though, they feel the need to bash Rosetta Stone and that upsets me. I love Rosetta Stone so much, and I'm very protective of it! LiveMocha is free, at least for the earlier lessons.
Also, my boyfriends family has been made aware of my religion. I've heard this third hand, but apparently, after he and I left at Easter, someone asked what religion I was. His mother planned to just say she didn't know, but his stepfather jumped in to say I was Hindu. Apparently, his grandmother's eyes got huge. They have to find out eventually and probably better for them to start getting used to it now rather than later. His immediate family is very open minded about it and his mother even gave me a gift certificate to India Sari Palace for my birthday!
I love my Hindi meet-up group. The people there are so friendly and fun and welcoming. I don't do a whole lot of Hindi speaking, but I feel encouraged by the parts of it I do understand. I have a real feel for the language now.
Last night we had dinner with the group and my boyfriend impressed everyone by being able to write his name in Hindi script. The little scrap of paper got passed all around.
Before dinner, my boyfriend took me to India Sari Palace, a clothing store that was on the way. It was so much fun. I bought two new suits and I scoped out the wedding lenghas and jewelry sets!
One of the other great things about the Hindi group is that it is fantastic for networking. Whatever you're interested in, someone always knows a website or an organization or another person to help you.
One of the girls there told me that she was going to India this summer to teach in an orphanage. Then she suggested that I should come.
At first this seemed crazy, but throughout the night I kept thinking about it. It is actually a fantastic opportunity. I have waited for years for money and time to be together for me to manage a trip to India. My parents visited without me a few years ago and I was crushed that I couldn't go because of work. It has seemed impossible because I don't know anyone there anymore. My cousin who lived in Bangalore for ten years is now back in the U.S. I want to go to India so badly, and yet I couldn't figure out how.
She said that with this organization they take care of where you live and what you eat for two weeks and they pick you up and drop you off at the airport. I would at least know her, so I wouldn't feel completely alone in a new place.
The money would be tricky, I would probably have to put it on my credit card and pay back later. But I have a very flexible job at the moment. I am also in school and I am signed up for a summer class, so I might have to drop that or see if I can make up the work.
I have been wanting to do some volunteering and I have lately been going baby-crazy, so helping at an orphanage would be perfect for what I want to do right now.
I'm anxiously awaiting more information from the girl I met last night. It feels like an opportunity has been dropped right into my lap and I would regret it forever if I didn't do everything possible to take advantage of it.
In other news, it's Easter today and I am going to my boyfriend's family wearing a suit with a bindi. Should be interesting... :)
Last night my boyfriend and I went to a Hindi meetup group meeting. It was awesome. Meetup.com has gotten me through a couple of moves to new states. Here it got me a writing group, a knitting group, and this. I've never seen anything like it before. It's a group designed to be a place where you can practice Hindi.
There are hundreds of members and a lot of variety in ability with the language. For some it is their first language and others are just learning. There are people from India and people who are first generation in the U.S. and there are other white people too.
A lot of socializing and networking happens that is not in Hindi. I didn't do a lot of speaking last night, but I discovered that I understood a lot of the Hindi I did hear. I understood the basic introductions and various snippets of conversation. What a great feeling.
The other great experience was that people asked what drew me to learn Hindi and Indian culture (I was wearing a salwar suit, though not a bindi). I explained a little bit about my background and everyone was really accepting.
In fact, it was exactly the easy acceptance that I've been craving. No one seemed to be even the slightest bit offended, just happy that I appreciated their language and culture.
The experience of learning a new language has been different from what I expected.
At first it was astounding to look at my computer screen, at a sentence in another script and another language, and to know that I understood it. It felt like magic.
Slowly that feeling faded. The sentences I could read got more and more complicated, but I started expecting that I could understand them and now I get frustrated easily when I'm not getting something.
The basics have become so second nature to me that it almost feels as though I've learned a new way to say something in English. In the same way that, for example, the word "dog" just means that particular animal to me and it feels as though it really should, as though that is somehow it's true name and anyone would understand that this particular animal is "dog." I feel exactly the same way about "kutta" now.
Some of the words and sentences seem so obvious that I cannot keep it in my head that there are people who don't understand them.
I swing wildly back and forth between feeling encouraged by the amount I've learned and discouraged that I still can only say simple declarative sentences and questions. I'm working on breaking through the barrier of being able to say more complex things. I have to keep going one step at a time and not analyze too much how far I am in the process of learning.
A few weeks ago I was in the Indian grocery store and the man behind the counter answered the phone. He asked, in Hindi, what the person's name was and I understood it so perfectly and naturally that he may as well have been speaking English.
I'm so excited for the time when all of Hindi feels that way!
At this point I am able to understand a lot more than I can produce. I have even watched some Bollywood movies without subtitles and gotten a substantial amount. Watching them with subtitles, I'm focusing on listening to what they are actually saying and I know a lot of the vocabulary.
I used to feel like I wanted to know every language there was. Now I feel very satisfied with two. If I can get completely fluent in Hindi, I will be all set. And I'll get there because I am quite determined.
I'm so grateful to have the supportive group of people to practice with too, because at some point the learning has to leave the grammar books and software and come into the real world.
I made it my new year’s resolution to be fluent in Hindi this year. I am one of those people who has a very hard time learning language and I never learned much in school. In high school I studied Latin and in college, Sign Language and Sanskrit, but I have never been able to make much use of any of them.
As I started to try to live my life by following my heart, I knew that I very much wanted to be bilingual. I started looking for a language to devote myself to. The trouble I was having was that I wanted to learn them all and I couldn’t focus!
Finally I realized that learning Hindi would be a great step toward being integrated in the Hindu/Indian community. There are so many hundreds of Indian languages and dialects that picking one is overwhelming, but Hindi is the language of movies and news and many Indians speak it as a second language, if not the first.
I feel as though being fluent in Hindi will somehow prove to people how serious I am about this path. The dedication it will take to get this new language will show my dedication to Hinduism and I will not appear flakey. That’s some of the psychological stuff floating around in my brain, anyway.
I started with Rosetta Stone and I am extremely happy with the results I’ve gotten. I’ve become such a proselytizer of Rosetta Stone products. A few years ago they had a system that was not as good and I had that, but this summer I discovered they revamped everything and addressed all the problems in the old system (things like not learning how to say anything about one’s self, not learning basics like greetings, etc.). I am working on level 3 now (which is currently the highest level of Hindi) and what it has given me is the feel for the language.
I have a lot of vocabulary, I can read the script well, and I also have a sense for what “feels” right or wrong in a sentence. It came into my brain in such a natural way that I hear the rhythms of the language in my dreams and there has been no “work” at memorizing. I am able to have simple conversations now and I'm getting close to understanding more complex ideas. I’ve begun to supplement it with other things now, and I have several children’s books and DVDs in Hindi that I’m learning to read/understand.
It is my great hope that I will be able to raise my children bilingual, so it is my goal to have the language solidly down by the time I become pregnant. My boyfriend, who loves Bollywood movies, has also begun to use my Rosetta Stone, so someday we hope to have it be a language our whole family can use together.
Advanced: http://pustak.org/bs/home.html (website in Hindi, selling Hindi novels and books) http://www.indiaclub.com/shop/Children.asp (books in Hindi, including translations of The Little Prince, and Harry Potter) http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/ (the BBC news in Hindi)
Hindi: a spoken thesaurus (a podcast of conversations between Robert Snell, a leading expert on Hindi, and an Indian woman about esotaric parts of grammar. I don't understand a word of it, but it's something to aim for)
More New Links (ongoing updated) Appu Series -DVDs for kids about body parts, the planet earth, animals, and nursury rhymes in Hindi and a DVD in English that I have about why we go to the temple. Almost a Frequency List Auditory Dictionary
And now that I've figured out how to embed videos, something really cute that will get stuck in your head!
Edit: It seems that the video has been removed :( Too bad, it was an adorable nursery rhyme cartoon. Here are a couple of cute kids attempting to sing the same song:
