Update on my (slow) progress with Hindi

I’ve been in India for almost three months now and I often get asked by my friends if I have improved my Hindi. My hindi-speaking friends from Mumbai and North India are especially interested in my progress and I always reply with the same basic phrase “Mujhe thodi hindi ati hai” (“I know a little hindi''). I’m not adventurous enough to continue the conversations in Hindi itself but I have made some progress for sure. Let me tell you a bit about some of the challenges I am facing and how I make use of the language.

To begin with I must clarify that my Indian family is Bengali and therefore their first language is Bangla, spoken mostly in the Indian state of West Bengal and in Bangladesh with around 300 million native speakers. Bengali is thus a very important language so… why am I studying Hindi instead? That’s a question I’ve been asked by someone in my family, which was a joke but might have had an undertone of reproach beneath it. I promise I will take up Bengali as soon as my Hindi is fluent at an intermediate level :)

Why Hindi then? First of all, my closest family members in India live in Delhi, which is not only the capital of India but the very origin of the language, whose standardised version was based on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi. It is difficult to define the exact number of native speakers of Hindi as it depends on what we consider a language and a dialect. The estimates often include languages such as Bhojpuri, Mewari, Marwari and others as dialects of Hindi and this way the number of native speakers goes up. I am still not fluent in Hindi but I did not understand a word of Mewari and Marwari when I travelled in Rajasthan.

Moreover, often Hindi and Urdu (now the lingua franca and the national language of Pakistan but originally from North India) are treated as different registers of the same language, called Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu and the number goes up significantly. If we also add the immense population of non-native speakers who know Hindi, we arrive at more than 600 million speakers.

I will briefly go into this theory which is often considered controversial due to the political connotations it has. To simplify it, Hindi and Urdu use different scripts: Hindi is written in the devanagari script, shared with many other languages including its main ancestor Sanskrit, while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script. At a colloquial level Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible. I still remember my friends Jiand and Sanya having long conversations using Urdu and Hindi respectively.

However, the higher register in Urdu employs many Arabic and Persian words and expressions, which makes it more difficult for Hindi speakers to understand, not to mention a beginner like me. As a fan of Pakistani music I often find myself unable to understand the lyrics, while I have fewer problems with Bollywood songs from India, for example. Still, the mutual intelligibility of Hindi and Urdu makes them extremely useful as a lingua franca in most places around the Indian Subcontinent.

Therefore my reason for choosing Hindi is mostly practical as it is the most commonly-spoken language in India and it is also useful elsewhere. Moreover, I spend much more time in Delhi than in Kolkata, where my family roots are from. In spite of this practical reason, I also like the sound of the language and enjoy the cinema and music in Hindi.

I started studying Hindi six years ago but my progress had been very slow until only recently owing to the fact that I normally learn languages by speaking them from scratch and not so much by studying the grammar and memorising the vocabulary. Obviously I need the grammar and vocabulary to use the language but I only really assimilate them if I speak it frequently, which I haven’t done even until now. I am very slowly starting to use simple phrases and sentences now and then, for example with the autorickshaw drivers or when buying food in a market.

This is a very unusual timidity for me as I am normally very confident with the European languages I know even at a basic or lower intermediate level. When I started learning Spanish by translating songs and studying a dictionary back in 2004, I began to communicate in it much before I became fluent. I never got discouraged by my grammatical mistakes or incorrect pronunciation. On the contrary, I was more motivated to rectify all the errors and I learnt very quickly. When I travel to Portugal, Italy or Galicia I speak the local languages even if my level is perhaps lower intermediate, and I manage to communicate.

What is the difference with Hindi then? The first difference is probably in me: I am almost twenty years older than in 2004 and perhaps less adventurous. More importantly however, all the other tongues I speak are European and especially from the Romance branch of Indo-European languages. Even Polish (Slavic) and English (Germanic) share a lot of the grammatical structures and vocabulary with the South European languages that I have learnt, therefore it has been fairly easy for me. Hindi is another story. The grammar seems familiar, the “logic” of the language reminds me of the other languages I know - after all they have a common ancestor. The vocabulary is the main challenge as most words are completely different. For that reason it takes me a long time to assimilate the newly learnt words.

I also think that most Indians are not used to foreigners who display interest in their languages and therefore, despite their best intentions, they often don’t make it easy for a beginner to make progress. Often when I start a conversation I cannot understand the other person as they speak fast and use colloquial words which I haven’t learnt yet. It’s extremely frustrating for me when I have to switch back to English and accept that my Hindi is still not good enough. I admit I get a bit discouraged after such situations. Perhaps I should have more patience and simply ask my interlocutors to speak slower and explain themselves in other words.

One of the main challenges in my study of Hindi has been the existence of consonants which are not found in European languages, especially the retroflex consonants produced with the tongue curled back and touching the palate. Those are the typically Indian-sounding ds, ts and others: ट, ठ, ड, ढ, and ण in devanagari. These five (and perhaps seven) are sometimes called cerebral consonants although I don't think you can really touch your brain with your tongue ;) The common occurrence of these consonants makes it extremely important to learn how to read the devanagari script before you start speaking, especially for foreigners who can easily confuse the consonants with the ts, ds and other ones they know in their own languages. My pronunciation of these sounds is correct, however I need to read a word to know how it is pronounced as the transliteration into the Latin alphabet is not enough.

Another reason why my progress has been slow is that I didn’t use it at all when I was in South India, where local languages belong to a completely different family (Dravidian) and Hindi is not spoken. In Kerala I learnt some Malayalam and Tamil words but made no headway at all in my knowledge of Hindi. Now that I am back in Delhi, I started speaking the language again and asking my family members for help. I need to make the most of my time here because quite soon I will be travelling in non-Hindi speaking areas: Kashmir, the North-Eastern states of India and Nepal. Fortunately, even there I should be able to communicate in Hindi and make use of what I have learnt so far.