I did say in my first story, how due to envy, I got introduced to languages. But waaaay before that, I had had some exposure to a lot of languages, not foreign though. Being in an English medium school, you have to learn English from the start. Then obviously you know your mother tongue. In India, there is vast diversity in terms of culture, people and languages. If your father is in a job where he and the family have to move a lot, you do get a lot of experience, meet new people, make new friends and learn how to adjust. In different regions, you get to learn a different language. In my case, I got to learn one in my 3^rd class (which would probably be Grade 3^rd of Elementary School in East Asian countries) because my father got transferred to a new region. Then, generally, in north India (I don’t know about other regions and there may be variations in this region as well! It depends!) you are given a choice between 2 languages – Sanskrit, which is considered to be mother of all languages and the one which I learnt before in my 3^rd grade. So I chose Sanskrit (and did really well too! Thank you, thank you). So now four languages were added to my account – English, Hindi, Sanskrit and last one Punjabi (this one belongs to the state called Punjab).

In my 10^th class (this will be !st year of high school in East Asia) I started with Japanese but I only had one small book. I never had a look on the kana charts earlier in my life. In those days, internet used to be a rare commodity, so I didn’t have it. The kana charts given in the book looked suspicious. Some syllables in the end were missing (which was because they didn’t exist but hey, I didn’t know that!). And it was only a phrases book and I wanted to start from the basic. But even so, my curiosity wasn’t gratified. Nonetheless, I copied it in hopes of learning a new language and did learn some words but 10^th class, here, is a major class. I couldn’t give my new found “hobby” enough time. Next two years are the most important from career making point of view. Preparing for various entrance exams for getting admission in the best colleges takes hard work of your two years.  Can’t even think of other activities. Before college admissions, I did get time and took up French. Learnt some. But again there was no proper guidance. I never got to understand how to start things. Vastness of material available on net confuses you more.

Then college life started. And here I got to see different kinds of stuff. Travel books basically give you phrases which will be useful while roaming around in the concerned country. Phrase books include some more, related to daily life. Then there are grammar books. But they seem so high leveled sometimes that you want to give up. There are a lot of websites, books telling you how to learn a language, other kind of books, audio lessons, youtube tutorials etc. etc. And if you get into the trap of watching dramas and movies of the language you wanna learn, with the desire to grasp something in an entertaining way, then my friends, you get deviated from your goal. Trust me, I’m one of them.

In the next post, find out the answer I came up with for all my troubles.

And today’s song is: