Lingo tricks!!!

(Source: http://www.indianmirror.com)

One session on language and I can see what a funny thing it is. Well, I thought I spoke English very well. Until I realized that I did not remember what a consonant was. I still have difficulty in remembering what an adverb is. But then, I can speak well..so who cares, right? Wrong! It just goes to show that not everything I was taught in school got registered in my mind. So during the session, not only did I try to get the hang of what was being said, but I was also making random memory trips back to my school.

The session on language also confirmed my belief that the English language is a rather useful one. The Roman script turned out to be quite useful in providing a common channel to more or less understand many languages. So basically, कुर्सी in Hindi was written as kursi, ಬಾಗಿಲು in Kannada was written as baagilu and so on. So whether we spoke Gujarati, Marathi or Malayalam, we all could read each other's languages. It is a different thing that we had to look around for their meanings.

I'm sure we all think that Indian languages are all as different from each other as the people who speak them. However, another insight I got from the session is that every Indian language is really structured in a similar fashion. We were given an exercise to see that for ourselves. Basic sentence structures like making a negative sentence or making a question are almost the same in all the languages. Question words like 'what' came either in the beginning or in the end of a phrase. For example, काय खात आहात  तुम्ही ? (Marathi) and What are you eating? both have the question word in the beginning. The same applies for a negative sentence. The negative word - 'not' - usually is just before or after the verb in a sentence. For example, ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಹೋಗು ಬೇಡ (Kannada) and its English translation Do not go there both have the word 'not' immediately before or after the verb 'go'.

For a beginner's lesson to how language can be tricky, I have learned quite a lot. It is important to understand a language, and in order to do that, it is important to un-learn the things we have been taught. I am not sure if children aged 3-5 can naturally learn sounds on their own as was said at the session. But I do know that sounds help. We teach them the important of sounds in pronunciation. But let us also teach them their importance in spellings and plural words. Hence, going by the sound of it, that 'closiz' this post for me.