She's Baaaaack......with Five Stages of Learning Hindi!

bAnd in this corner, the woman clinging by her fingernails when last heard from more than a month ago, to her western dress (a topic for the next post)……but I digress.

The reason I’ve been absent is……Hindi lessons! Which have to be added on to fieldwork, conferences and lectures at the Malavyia Centre for Peace Research, my incredibly helpful and interesting hosts, and the bumblingly (given my tori tori Hindi) inefficient conduct of my everyday life. This takes huge chunks of time away from, among other things, faithful blog maintenance. Which occasions today's reflection on

the FIVE STAGES OF LEARNING HINDI (slightly altered from the five stages of grief, a not unrelated psychological condition):

1. DENIAL:

I don’t have to learn this language. It’s not related to any Romance language language I know anything about (forget that Sanskrit is a remote ancestor of them all) or German; A whole new language in nine months? With my ageing memory? You’re kidding; Besides, you can only speak it in India, and only certain parts of India; Anyway, enough people speak English; Plus the locals don’t even speak shddh (pure)Hindi, but a local dialect called Bhojpuri; I can survive fine with a phrasebook and a self-teaching text.

2. DEPRESSION:

(Bargaining comes next in the stages of grief, but like so much in India, here it’s reversed.) On the ‘enough people speak English’ part, totally wrong (only 5% of Indians are fluent in English according to the Times of India this morning). Or at least some of the people I most want to talk to don’t. Yuck. (This does not include, of course, my colleagues at BHU.) Here I am, a big pale cow of a foreigner wandering around grinning like an idiot at people, with money the only reliable lingua franca between us. This is terrible. If I were going to come to a city where I couldn’t talk to people, couldn't I have picked one with traffic lights and solid deodorant?

On the self-teaching text, hah. (It has this title for suckers: "Teach Yourself Hindi"--and another: "Learn Hindi in 30 Days"; I bought both.) You can’t ask it questions; it doesn’t tell you when you’ve made a mistake in pronunciation, word order, nothing. Phrasebooks are clumsy and about what tourists need, not on living day to day or actually learning a language. Plus all the Hindi-English dictionaries write the Hindi in Devanagari script (Sanskrit-based) rather than Roman script, so I’m out of luck there too.

3. BARGAINING:

OK, OK, I’ll take Hindi lessons. With the best teacher I can find. Even a few weeks will make me a more socially available and acceptable guest of the country. But I can’t learn Devanagari script too. Totally alien, much more complex and extensive than Roman letters, and I’ll have my hands full learning even a little spoken Hindi.

Wrong again! Devnagari tells you how to pronounce the words. Very well too, once you adjust to the completely unfamiliar syllabary and the dreaded conjuncts (signs—apparently infinite in number--IN ADDITION TO the vowels and consonants--they show how to combine consonants and vowels with consonants and vowels; then there's all those little abbreviated vowel and consonant signs). For example, there are four different 'd' sounds, and some ‘r’s sound like still other versions of ‘d’, the phonetics of which I can’t describe without writing a novel in Romanized equivalents. It's complex because of its origin in written Sanskrit, which made sure mantras got said exactly correctly so they would be effective; thus each character specifies the place in your mouth where the sound originates, throat, mid-mouth, or front--what to do with your lips, soft palate, teeth, and tongue and whether or not to aspirate the sound. Part of my everyday routine is to write sentences in Devanagari, which really helps in learning to read and speak.

4. ANGER:

Above observation repeated with increasing incredulity: There are four different 'd' sounds (with four different characters, none of which look anything like each other) in Hindi?? Not counting the weird ‘r’s (for which there are still more characters!)? Actually, every Devanagari character is a dipthong; Well, no, not a diphthong exactly, in fact, English speakers have to guard against making every character a dipthong—-see what I mean?—-but a very different arrangement of phonemes than in English). These sounds are impossible for a Western tongue! One common ‘t’ phoneme requires folding your tongue backwards in your mouth and touching the roof of your mouth with the underside of your folded back tongue, then shooting the tongue forward while voicing ‘t’ to make a sound that, as my teacher describes it, sounds like a champagne cork popping! Unfortunately, this is the sound for thik, which is used all the time to mean, good, fine, ok. You try doing it! There IS no sound like that in English! I’ll just say it like I would an English ‘t’ even if my teacher has me do it again and again. I CAN’T HELP IT IF THIS CRAZY LANGUAGE HAS SOUNDS NO NORMAL LANGUAGE (!) HAS. I CANNOT DO IMPOSSIBLE CALISTHENICS OF THE MOUTH!

The stupidity (and humor) of this is immediately evident. I remind myself that Indians can’t hear the difference between our 'v' and 'w', and their ‘v’ is this weird halfway cross between them where you don’t actually bring your lips all the way together. Indians have a terrible time hearing my name, which is reassuring, since I have a terrible time hearing theirs.

And then I master the champagne cork ‘t’. Smart girl. (Though not being able to hear the differences among a number of sounds doesn't go away. I’m getting better at it, since when I can’t reproduce them, folks can’t understand me.) The hardest challenge is understanding what gets said back to me. At a speed of 90 miles an hour even if I could hear the sounds in the first place. My look of panic is cross-culturally transparent.

5. ACCEPTANCE:

A friend told me she couldn’t get anywhere with Hindi til she started studying it 5 hours a day. I recoiled in horror. I don’t have 5 hours a day for Hindi with everything else that has to get done. It turns out she wasn’t exaggerating. (The same friend told me Devanagari was far better for understanding the Indian pronunciation since Romanized characters aren’t precise enough; I dismissed that-—bargaining—-but it’s true. Hardly a surprise that Devanagari renders Hindi sounds better than the Roman alphabet. Moreover, differences I can’t easily hear, I can see on the page and start to hear. I have lessons every other day or every three days, one on one, with the best Hindi teacher by reputation in Varanasi (he deserves it), the patient, kind and relentless (!) Virendra Singh. If I can’t study 5 hours a day, I usually manage 3, occasionally more. My progress over several weeks has been immediately visible in talking to the rickshaw boys, shopkeepers and vegetable sellers, and folks in general. You finally live in a place when you can navigate socially. What’s hard is talking to folks at temples and on the ghats. At the moment what I can do is extremely limited but it still makes a huge difference in social exchange and my sense of comfort. (Not to mention that I can read signs like No Pissing Here!)

It’s true I’m not learning Bhojpuri (O thank you), but pretty much everyone here understands Hindi, and Bhojpuri is close enough most of the time to get as much as I’d get in Hindi if folks speak dire, dire (slowly, slowly).

Just now it's the beginning of the wedding season, and I am the delighted possessor of an invitation from a BHU professor, whose daughter is getting married in December, that I can almost translate on my own!

Revised comments on female dress in India coming up, but now I have to go copy sentences....