नमस्ते! मैं हिंदी सीख रहा हूं I'm learning Hindi.

Namaste! नमस्ते! I thought I'd share with you my latest language adventure: I'm learning Hindi! Allow me to explain why I am learning Hindi and perhaps I can share with you some of the challenges I encounter as I go on this journey. My company has taken on a number of clients in India and I will be working on all of these Indian projects. Of course the language of business in Indian is always English and I had used just a few simple phrases in Hindi with the clients and they had been extremely encouraging. I suppose it reminds me of the way some Chinese people fall over and gush with praises the moment a white person uses a few words of Mandarin - it just led me to think that if they are impressed with a few phrases and sentences, imagine how much credibility I would have if I can achieve at least conversational standard Hindi? Besides, look at me: I'm the wrong kind of Asian: I'm mostly Chinese, I feel I need to do this to get some more credibility if I am going to be dealing with investments in India. I've not even been to India and that's a question I've been asked a lot too - somehow the answer, "but at least I've made it to Sri Lanka!" hasn't quite satisfied my Indian friends.

Why Hindi then? It is the most widely spoken language in India - spoken by approximately 53.6% of the population whilst English is a distant second with just 12.2% of the population of India being able to communicate in English. Other languages are spoken by less than 10% of the population, with Bengali coming in third with just 8.9%. Ironically, some of the investment projects my company will be handling are in areas where Hindi is not the main language spoken - for example, in Goa, where the local language is Konkani, a language spoken by 7.4 million people. Nonetheless, Hindi and English are still the two lingua francas used throughout India and it makes complete sense to learn Hindi. I don't want to just treat India as just another market I have to deal with at work - if I am going to have to deal with investments in India, I want to be truly enthusiastic about all things Indian and embrace that new aspect to my job and I could think of no better way than to learn Hindi. Besides, our Indian lawyers are Hindi speaking - well, they would usually speak to each other in a mishmash of Hindi and English (that is quite common amongst the educated upper classes in India) and there's a part of me that wants to understand what they are saying. I do speak many languages already, so why not learn one more? 

So how has Hindi been so far? It has been difficult to say the least. I am in the early stages of learning a language where nothing makes sense and there's a huge amount of rote learning. I am simply memorizing a lot of vocabulary whilst paying little heed to grammar at this stage. Now, here's my approach to learning any new language: I absorb huge amounts of information like a sponge in the early stages, I don't know if you remember this game show from years ago. I'm sorry I forgot the title but let me describe the game: there is jigsaw puzzle covering a photo of a famous person. The contestants have to answer questions (like on general knowledge or it could be a maths test) and each time they get an answer right, they get to remove one more piece of the jigsaw. So the contestants would usually try to reveal the eyes, nose and mouth in the photo, the most important parts to help them make sense of the photo. In the early stages of the game, it is nearly impossible to figure out who the person is - you might be lucky if you could even determine the gender of the famous person. But as you remove more and more pieces of the jigsaw as the game progresses, there comes a point where suddenly it becomes extremely clear who the famous person is because you can see enough of the photo.

For me, I'm still in the very early stages of the game whereby I have managed to remove about one or two pieces of the jigsaw so far. I've got a long way to go, it will be many months before I will arrive at the moment where I can suddenly figure out everything and it becomes very clear. I am confused and lost, nothing makes sense - it is like what I am memorizing a phrase like, आप से मिलकर ख़ुशी हुई (āp se milkar khushī huī), I don't even know what the individual words mean - I then have to cut and paste each individual component of that sentence into Google translate to break it down for me. Nonetheless, there is at least some Hindi vocabulary that I am already familiar with - mostly loanwords already widely in use in English and some food items along with some random words like 'dhoby'. And of course, even in India, few people actually speak a very pure form of Hindi without any English at all - they love mixing in a few words of English in everyday speech because English is the prestige language in India, it shows that you are educated and sophisticated. So even when I watch a Bollywood movie, there is a fair amount of English mixed into the Hindi which of course, makes it a lot easier for me as I instantly understand the English which allows me to make sense of the rest of the sentence.

I had an early test of Hindi last night, I didn't think my Hindi was enough to be any good but I watched the Bollywood film 'Bodyguard' last night and of course, I do so with English subtitles. The film itself was cheesy and had some over the top action sequences, but it also featured my favourite Bollywood actor Salman Khan. Bollywood films still have an intermission - that's because they are usually so long (at least two hours, sometimes three) that they must give the audience in the cinema a toilet break! After the intermission, the subtitles went out of synch and there was no way I could fix it on my computer. So the actors would speak and the English subtitles would appear about 3 or 4 seconds later. At first, I was frustrated and almost wanted to find an alternative website to stream that movie - but then I realized, all I had to do was pay attention and listen: I could understand a lot more than I thought I could. Between my existing Hindi vocabulary and the English spoken, I was able to make an intelligent guess as to what the actors said and then the English subtitles would appear a moment later. I was surprised how much I managed to figure out and how often I was right. But please, it would be many years before I'd watch a Bollywood movie without subtitles, but I think it goes to show that one should never ever be afraid to make the most of what little they have of a foreign language they are learning.

So yes, in case you haven't realize, I intend to learn Hindi without actually attending a course or having a teacher. Quite frankly, I am completely cynical about teachers - my father is a Chinese teacher and I grew up hating Mandarin because he was a terrible teacher. Besides, I'm prepared to see how far I can get on my own and I believe it does boil down to a natural synergy my brain may or may not have with Hindi. I have struggled with languages like German, Chinese and Korean because my brain doesn't really have any affinity for those languages, but with French, Spanish, Italian and Welsh, I found them remarkably easy.  So really, you can't draw any conclusions from that like - oh therefore is Welsh easier than German, or is French easier than Korean, no. If anything, Welsh is probably a lot harder than say Spanish since it shares far fewer similarities with other European languages I do speak like French and English. There really isn't a hard and fast rule about why or how you would find one language easier than others. There's still a part of me rebelling against having been forced to learn Chinese for so many years by my father and hating every moment of it but I digress.

I am focusing on conversational Hindi for now - I will tackle the reading/writing aspect of it at a later stage. I'm not sure I actually need to learn how to read/write for two reasons: firstly, the language of business in India is English, certainly all the paperwork I have to deal with is in English and never ever Hindi. Heck, even some of the internal documents I have seen from my Indian clients are written entirely in English and not once in Hindi; I suppose it is for the practical reason that not everyone in the company may be a competent Hindi speaker but they are able to read a document in English. Secondly, even in India, most signs are written in English along with Hindi and/or the local language, so I would need to speak Hindi to say, ask for directions or buy something in a shop but I don't really need to read it as much. The chances of me ever finding myself in a remote corner of India where there is absolutely no English or English speakers around me - well, that's still pretty remote. And finally, yes the system is complex and I am kicking the can down the road by focusing on the easier aspects of learning the language to make sure I make some progress quickly without running out of steam by trying to memorize a complex writing system. I will tackle that challenge soon, when I feel I need to but just not now.

Whilst I find it fun, there are also several aspects of learning Hindi which I find frustrating. Firstly, there is a method of writing Hindi in English known as the Devanagari transliteration method - it is the equivalent of Hanyupinyin in Chinese. And like Hanyupinyin, it poses the same problem: not everything is pronounced the way it is written, it has its own rules rather than simply using the default English pronunciation. So for example, a common word in Hindi is बहुत which means "very/much", so to put it in its most common usage, the word for thanks is danyavad but to say "thank you very much" you add बहुत before the word danyavad to show just how extremely grateful you are. The word बहुत is transliterated as "bahut" but it sounds more like "bo-hot". And then there's that famous song from Slumdog Millionaire 'Jai Ho' - the Pussycat Dolls sang it as 'Jay Ho' and at first I thought they were mispronouncing it, but guess what? Jai in Hindi should rhyme with say, pay and may and not fly, tie and pie. I suppose the same principle applies for Hanyupinyin: these systems are not created as a learning tool to help English speaker but rather are merely using the alphabet to represent complex the language. Confusing? Oh it is a nightmare and that's just the English transliteration for you. Great start eh?

Furthermore, whenever I deal with any European language, there is a huge pool of shared vocabulary that I can always count upon. Take the word 'pants' for example - that's one word that is shared amongst so many European languages. In French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Greek, Macedonian and Serbian, it is some form of 'pantalon' which could be pantalons, pantaloni, pantallona, pantalone, panteloni or pantalones. The words 'pants' and 'panties' in English is just a shortened version of that. So even if I were to delve into a new language like Bosnian for example, my knowledge of other European languages would allow me to understand plenty of shared vocabulary. Likewise, when I study Japanese and Korean, there are plenty of loanwords from Chinese. But Hindi? Good grief, apart from English, the loanwords in Hindi come from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and other Turkic languages - none of which I speak of course. It is easy for me to absorb a vast amount of vocabulary with any European language but with Hindi, this process is painfully slow in comparison. Need I state the obvious? I realize I am not going to pick up Hindi particularly quickly, but I am going to stick with it for now and see how far I can get. My work and my love of Bollywood should be able to sustain me in this journey. For now, I just hope I don't succumb to the notorious chapter 3 syndrome. 

What has the reaction been to me learning Hindi? Well, that's a very long story. It has mostly been very positive of course, but there's a long story about a very negative remark from one person and I will save that long story for my next post. Have you ever learnt a language for your work? Have any of you tried to learn an Indian language? What have your experiences been? Have you visited India before? Leave a comment below, many thanks for reading, bahut danyavad!