'Hindi For Foreigners, English for Indians'.
This is the proposed title of a book I am working on, the draft is almost completed. It consist of mostly the lessons I prepared to teach foreigners. While teaching these lessons to the foreigners (mostly from UK and some from Arab) I learnt so many fascinating facts about the language which I had never thought and was unaware of and believe me they made me feel proud of knowing the language. My first mentee to learn Hindi was Phillip, a man from London who knew a bit of Bengali.He was in his 50s when he approached me to learn Hindi. For me it was the first experience to teach my mother tongue to a foreigner. I took it lightly and started preparing lessons for him, but to my surprise it was tough.. very tough....right form alphabets to phonetics to sounds, required a thorough preparation as Hindi is a phonetic language with aspirated and nasalized sounds whereas English is different in all these aspects. I searched, researched and learnt about it and the first lesson is done. As it was my first experience and probably one of its kind in Bhopal as there are no institutions that provides Hindi learnig classes, it was difficult for me to decide how much should I be charging for the classes and as always I discussed it with my family but not that happy with the response, my family underestimated the worth of their own language, their mother tongue and asked me to charge very low saying 'you are not teaching English, you are teaching Hindi', I was taken aback and told them the importance of Hindi in terms of its richness. I explained them that Hindi language is so very rich if you look at the script, the phonetics and the sounds and a special mention of the culmination of various other languages like Persian, Arabic etc.
And above all the feeling of pride that one must associate with the mother tongue. South Indians are a good example of that, they feel proud to speak the regional language of their region may it be Telugu or Tamil, they place it above the National Language. Don't want to indulge into that debate of imposing Hindi language over them but one thing that must be appreciated is the way they have developed themselves in terms of education and technology. There, the regional language has never been an obstacle in their growth unlike many under developed states of the country e.g M.P. where you find a huge gap of talent just because they cannot speak good English. From the elementary level, regional language is taugh in South and there is an absolute freedom to innovate and produce research papers in the local language whereas here I have seen it for myself , a lot of deserving candidates lag behind just because they are poor in English Communication.People here write 'poor communication in English' as their weakness and which is of course is the very accepted concept.
'Poor in Communication' is our weakness not 'Poor in English Communication'. We must be proud to speak Hindi and have a clear stream of thought in order to innovate, invent and evolve.
What matters the most is the sense of pride.
This is the proposed title of a book I am working on, the draft is almost completed. It consist of mostly the lessons I prepared to teach foreigners. While teaching these lessons to the foreigners (mostly from UK and some from Arab) I learnt so many fascinating facts about the language which I had never thought and was unaware of and believe me they made me feel proud of knowing the language. My first mentee to learn Hindi was Phillip, a man from London who knew a bit of Bengali.He was in his 50s when he approached me to learn Hindi. For me it was the first experience to teach my mother tongue to a foreigner. I took it lightly and started preparing lessons for him, but to my surprise it was tough.. very tough....right form alphabets to phonetics to sounds, required a thorough preparation as Hindi is a phonetic language with aspirated and nasalized sounds whereas English is different in all these aspects. I searched, researched and learnt about it and the first lesson is done. As it was my first experience and probably one of its kind in Bhopal as there are no institutions that provides Hindi learnig classes, it was difficult for me to decide how much should I be charging for the classes and as always I discussed it with my family but not that happy with the response, my family underestimated the worth of their own language, their mother tongue and asked me to charge very low saying 'you are not teaching English, you are teaching Hindi', I was taken aback and told them the importance of Hindi in terms of its richness. I explained them that Hindi language is so very rich if you look at the script, the phonetics and the sounds and a special mention of the culmination of various other languages like Persian, Arabic etc.
And above all the feeling of pride that one must associate with the mother tongue. South Indians are a good example of that, they feel proud to speak the regional language of their region may it be Telugu or Tamil, they place it above the National Language. Don't want to indulge into that debate of imposing Hindi language over them but one thing that must be appreciated is the way they have developed themselves in terms of education and technology. There, the regional language has never been an obstacle in their growth unlike many under developed states of the country e.g M.P. where you find a huge gap of talent just because they cannot speak good English. From the elementary level, regional language is taugh in South and there is an absolute freedom to innovate and produce research papers in the local language whereas here I have seen it for myself , a lot of deserving candidates lag behind just because they are poor in English Communication.People here write 'poor communication in English' as their weakness and which is of course is the very accepted concept.
'Poor in Communication' is our weakness not 'Poor in English Communication'. We must be proud to speak Hindi and have a clear stream of thought in order to innovate, invent and evolve.
What matters the most is the sense of pride.
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