I was brought up in a household where two languages (Telugu and English) were used equally often hence I was able to freely switch between the languages in my day-to-day conversations. I’ve been taught English formally in school ever since I was a little kid so I didn’t give much thought how I did it or how easy/difficult it was. However, I never knew how to read/write in Telugu, so when I was 13 years old I decided to finally learn how to read and write Telugu and I picked it up as a language class in school. Even though Telugu was my mother tongue I found it extremely difficult to learn the script and to use more advanced vocabulary. I often didn’t understand what was being taught and eventually stopped learning it. I just told myself that it just wasn’t in me to delve deeper into reading and writing Telugu.
I had a somewhat similar experience with Hindi. Being a Telugu-speaker, I always ended up messing up Hindi pronunciations. In the case of me learning Hindi, I formally learned the language for 9 years and could read and write it easily. My vocabulary was also very good considering the fact that I could read Hindi literature and poetry and easily understand it. However, I could never speak it right. Even though I am extremely confident about my Hindi knowledge, I just couldn’t hold a conversation. I just told myself that it wasn’t in me to nail the Hindi pronunciations.
About 2 years ago, I was determined to make sure I knew my mother tongue (Telugu) and to make sure that I could speak the language that made so much sense to me (Hindi) and I read Benny Lewis’ book titled Fluent in 3 Months. I understood that the backward classroom education which made me simply focus on hacking the grading system didn’t properly aid my language learning process. I would simply cram words and memorise answers to various questions one day before my test and then forget everything the next day. I could never really follow along the fast paced classes which didn’t have any visual or hands-on component beyond seeing/writing on the black board. It made sense to me then about why I couldn’t read and write Telugu and speak Hindi. I am a visual and tactile learner and I needed to try to learn by focusing on those strengths. That’s when I decided on two things: I would hang out with my Hindi-speaking friends and their families more and use Hindi as my primary language, and I would write a letter to my mother every week and make sure that any errand that required me writing something down, I was going to write it in Telugu. This way I was able to understand the North Indian culture more and seeing my friends interacting with each other and their family members and trying to do so myself resulted in a huge improvement. Similarly, writing letters or making a grocery list and going over my mistakes with my mom really helped me not only read and write Telugu but also helped improve my vocabulary.
From these experiences I understand that the best way for me to learn a language is to set some time aside every week to engage in visually stimulating and hands-on activities to learn something new related to the language itself and the culture of the native speakers of the language, and then find a way to include it into my daily life to retain and develop what I learned.
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