Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Hindi meri matrabhasha hai

We recently started teaching (recently means about 4 months) to some small kids who do not go to school. We teach them basic Maths, Hindi and English.

And today I realized it’s a lot easier to teach Hindi than English. With Hindi if you know the alphabets and maatrayein, you can make words and sense. But in English, you have to know words to make sense. For example, if you have to write “Ladakaa”(boy) in Hindi, you can teach Ladakaa = La + Da + Ka + aa. You just teach the kids to split the word into smaller parts and then write each one of them. But how do you make one learn to write “Boy”, well… Boy = B+O+Y. that’s it… no reason, no breaking into smaller parts… hai to hai types

I suddenly felt like singing “Jai Bharati” and proud to be an Indian and “Hindi hai hum watan hai Hindustaa hamara”… but then I also felt sorry that I haven’t read as many Hindi authors as English, that my blog and writings are in English and that slowly I am becoming more comfortable in English than in Hindi

I will try to change that. I hope to someday read Maithili Sharan Gupt, Mahadevi Varma and Sumitra Nandan Pant out of interest and not out of compulsion like in school times. But if I fail, I’ll take that guilt to grave.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hindi is not an easy language
first of all there are so many swars and akshars and then many of them are not included in varnmala for eg shruti wala "shra". Then matra's are really hard to understand. and how to use kriya's in napusakling karta is never mentioned.
I m not saying english is easy. "Meri bhasha waise bhi english ho ya hindi kamzor hi hai". But all I want to say is if you will make them understand the concepts of vowel and sounds it would be easy for them in english too (not saying that make them understand etymology)I think each language has it's own flavour.

so just bcoz hindi is our birth language it seem's easy

hey and learning of numbers in hindi is much harder than english for ex: after pacchas there is ikkawan and now how will you make them under stand that it is 51

earthwire said...

I agree, no language is easy :D

In Hindi agreed counting and gender are difficult. For that matter almost all who dont have hindi as their mother language have difficulty in gender. But even without proper gender it is possible to make sense of a written hindi sentence. Or may be I find hindi simpler :)

Anonymous said...

Hindi is quite an interesting language and ofcourse is one of my favourites.I really wish if I could teach all the Indians talk Hindi.Most of the Indians are not aware of the importance of our Rashtrabhasha.In foreign countries,people have maintained their.But Indians think in terms of refionality rather than Nationality.This is matter to be thought about and to be solved as wel.

Anonymous said...

I didn't realize the importance of the hindi language till I had kids. I am a voracious reader when it comes to english books, and now would like to read some good hindi books. Haven't read a hindi book for over 20 years. Anybody have any suggestions ?

earthwire said...

Apologies for the delayed response.

I agree, the national language should be promoted more in all the regions. Probably a three language system, Hindi, English, regional language till standard ten would be best. And after that if we still feel ashamed to use Hindi, then its our fault!!! If people can understand and appreciate Bollywood, they can certainly speak Hindi as well.

I have read Premchand and liked it a lot... But I havn't read novels, I read short stories... you can check the link http://munshi-premchand.blogspot.com/ and buy the book if you want.

Unknown said...

Most of the Indian languages are phonetic languages (i.e. they use alphabets/scripts where in the way to pronounce a character is fixed and the way in which sound intonations changes due to presence of vowels is also fixed.. no surprises. Similarly this simple rule is extended beyond characters to word level). The best of all languages, considered to be most scientific in terms of representation is Hangul (Korean). Next I believe are Indian Languages. Second component to learn a language is it's vocabulary.
Hindi has pretty decent and small vocabulary. That last component is the grammar. I believe the phonetic languages make it easy to learn as it is easy to recollect pronunciation of words based on their root words. To certain extent, most of the European languages using Latin alphabets are not phonetic. Seeing a word, you can't really tell without understanding different cultures as to how the words are to be pronounced. In case of phonetic languages it is easy as surprises are minimal. Exceptions are rare.