Learning Hindi in Varanasi

Varanasi

Here are S's thoughts on our last week:

today we are in varanasi, in central India. varanasi is basically the center of Hinduism, which is an exceptionally tolerant religion, so in some ways it seems appropriate to have spent Christmas here.

we've spent the last week taking intensive hindi classes. for those interested, what follows are a few notes on some of the languages we've encountered so far:

according to wikipedia, hindi is actually the 3rd most spoken language in the world after mandarin chinese and english. for a native english speaker, it's definitely not easy to pick up - when trying to learn hindi you will come to appreciate how closely related are english and the romance languages. ultimately though, english and hindi come from the same language family, as opposed to say Chinese, which is entirely different. for an english speaker, chinese has some advantages in that there are no tenses or verb conjugations, or gendered nouns and adjectives, which makes things a little easier. on the other hand, having no shared past, in addition to the tones there are all kinds of sounds that are not only very difficult for us to reproduce, but they are almost impossible for us to hear in the first place. i can't tell you how many times we'd be in a situation in china where someone would say a word or a sentence to us, and we'd try to repeat it back to them and completely fail. to our ears, we'd think we were reproducing the exact same sound - but to their ears it was like we were trying to say 'tree' and it was coming out 'dog'. so even with a roman alphabet transliteration of the chinese word, we still couldn't really make ourselves understood. and this doesn't even begin to take into account the difficulties of learning the chinese writing system, which surpass description.

you don't really have too many of these problems with hindi. yes, the writing script is different, but it's still based on a learnable alphabet. and yes, there are different sounds that are difficult to reproduce, most obviously the aspirated consonants and the nasal vowels, but at least we can hear the things that we are getting wrong. and being distantly related, you still have the same basic structures of tenses and conjugations (i go, you go, i went, you went etc.), so it's somewhat familiar. it also has all the same confusing aspects of the european languages like gendered nouns and adjectives and confusing irregular conjugations over way too many tenses.

the biggest difference is that hindi is a subject-object-verb language (I you love), as opposed to english which is subject-verb-object (I love you). more confusing is that with intransitive verbs you conjugate the verb based on the subject (as in english) but with transitive verbs you conjugate the verb based on the object (which you don't do in english). it has no prepositions, instead employing a very confusing system of postpositions - there are more of them and they are much more specific than in english. the syntax of the sentences is also much more rigid and specific. whereas in english you can say either 'yesterday, i went to the beach' or 'i went to the beach yesterday' without changing the meaning of the sentence, you don't have the same freedom in hindi, which is actually very difficult for an english speaker. there are also other issues like there is no verb 'to have', which is instead replaced by 3 non-verb constructions based on whether the thing that is had is a person, an object or an abstract concept. the upshot is that you can basically never translate sentences directly from english to hindi. so whereas when learning french or spanish, it's possible to correctly guess a spanish phrase based on your knowledge of english, that really isn't possible in hindi. in some ways this is good, because it forces you to start thinking in hindi right away, but in other ways it's bad, in that it precludes any intuitive leaps while learning the new language.

the week was intensive, and i think we picked up a lot, though we definitely need to practice. hopefully we get better over the next two months as we travel around the country. vickie made much more progress than I did, due to a better memory for vocab and a far greater willingness to practice with strangers.

anyway, we'll spend a day or two more here in varanasi, then head to allahabad. after that we will make our way southwest towards bombay.