Learning a Foreign Language!

Most of us recollect many a funny incident in the process of learning any foreign language. For us Indians English is the first foreign language we ever had to learn. It was easier for a student to learn English in the big cosmopolitan cities. For one thing the medium of instruction would be mostly English and practice made it perfect. Besides that every other person would use the language, as English was the first status symbol you acquired when you moved up in the social ladder. It showed anybody within earshot in a public place instantly that you were ‘college-educated’. They had to speak English to communicate with the sizable population of the city whose mother tongue might be any one of the fourteen official languages of India. Though these occasions were few and far between, they provided the practice, which was all that mattered in mastering a language.

Life in small towns, as I had already said, made it very difficult for the students to learn English, with none of the above opportunities at hand. What was taught in the classes stayed in the classes, as all of us, including the teachers, talked in our mother tongue. Our English teacher would talk in English only when she taught. There was no conversational English lessons (now they have revised the syllabus, I think). We would simply learn all the comprehension questions at the end of the lessons by heart and pass the ‘language’ exam.

Any other reading material was confined to the books we could borrow from our school library. But they stocked only the Classics as they were the ‘recommended’ books for young students of the ‘High School’. So, instead of any Enid Blyton or Nancy Drew mysteries that we could have read without much difficulty, we were given the Tale of Two Cities, Mayor of Casterbridge, Treasure Island, Gullivers Travels etc.,- of course in the abridged versions- during the ‘library’ period. I read them all and used to exchange my quota of books with my classmates until I had exhausted the meagre collection of English books in the library.

When we went to higher classes, we got the original novels, by which time we knew the storylines and could get to read the book with all its ‘hard’ words and try to enjoy the richness of the words and nuances of meaning in the unabridged versions.

In the small towns where reading contemporary bestsellers in the English language had been unheard of, we had developed a vocabulary where all the words were ‘pure’ and classic, with their meanings stuck in the century in which they were written! Thus we could use ‘gay’ for being happy and not know the different meaning it evoked in the present day world.

The group of classmates who shared my love for reading the library books lost no time in using any new word we came across in the course of our reading. This led to a sort of competition. We tried to use new words and phrases in our ‘composition’ notebooks whenever we were given assignments to write about a chosen topic. As my father read an English newspaper in the morning (which was again the sign of an educated man!), I got to know more words by sight and occasionally would ask my father its meaning so that I could use them in the next occasion.

I was nine years old when I was given an assignment to write an essay on Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of our Nation. It happened that just that morning my father had been explaining that there are different ways of expressing the same thing. The next day I got severely admonished by my teacher when she read aloud my essay where I had written Gandhiji kicked his bucket in 1949! I had picked up the slang my Dad had quoted in explaining the synonyms of ‘dying’ out of context.

I didn’t know that there was such a thing as slang in any language. (Whenever there was a possibility of our hearing any ‘wrong’ words in our language, for example-in a heated exchange between neighbours etc., our mother sent us all inside and we never could get familiar with those words all our childhood!). Only when I started reading the (then) best-selling crime novels by James Hadley Chase and other such thrillers, (borrowed from my city-bred friends in college) I could realize what an outrage it must have been!