He asked Abhir, "Do they teach you English in school?" following it up with "You speak very well..."
Knowing that all Scandinavian countries' language of communication in school is their mother tongue, we weren't much suprised at his observation. When in Finland, it was one of our major concerns that our children would be lost in one of the state owned schools where the mode of communication would be Finnish.
The Finns are a language proud country...and it was a lesson to us as Indians who give English more importance than we do our own mother tongues.
What he didn't know is that until a few months ago, Abhir could barely speak a sentence in English. His Hindi was extraordinarily good and he would time and again zap my parents with his usage of words. So we weren't very concerned about his English. He will pick it up sooner or later, we'd think.
As I heard Daniel (our guest) speak to Abhir, I was reminded of our son's rather cute adaptations of words in a language he is just familiarising himself with.
"I goed there today"
"I am going to hit the eyeses of this monster"
"I doed my home work"
" I want to drink glucose today. I didn't drink it tomorrow"
7 comments:
Good...
I am of the opinion that language and moreover the right use of language is extremely important.
I have seen that my niece picks up Malayalam from home very well, and as you say quality language too.
But when it comes to English, what seems to happen is that she tends to think in Malayalam and then translate to English, which is very evident at times when a sentence is constructed.
I hope that she will lose this correlation and start thinking the sentence in English itself. think maybe this occurs as Malayalam has become more or less her primary thought language.
I do not think that its superior to know English, but I believe that it might be better to start early and it will be good for them in the long run as they will eventually go to an English Medium School.
Maybe he will come up with the new version of the language. :o)
We have to consider that our English advantage makes us a global outsourcing hub and works to the advantage of our economy.
Yeah! don worry chechi!! He will learn the language soon, and meanwhile,, Enjoy the baby talk And how much I enjoyed the "wow" moments!!!
Hi,Ritu-well,I'm quite glad that our country has importance given to Hindi as well as English!I find it quite freaky that in countries like,say Japan, they refuse to speak anything other than Japanese,even at worldwide forums!
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Perhaps this multi-lingual touch is one of the factors responsible for Indians being sucessful abroad!
so true that we indians have almost adopted english as the most dominant langauage in our lives.. Eyeses of the monster .. hee hee .. Soooo cute !!!
Cute, Abhir saying all those sentences :). I didnt realise how easily we learnt couple of Indian languages growing up. As I was reading your post I realised we are quite lucky to know all those languages including English.
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