{"id":2825,"date":"2014-01-20T11:09:14","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T10:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bodhicharya.org\/manyroads\/?p=2825"},"modified":"2014-01-20T11:19:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-20T10:19:10","slug":"learning-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bodhicharya.org\/manyroads\/learning-language\/","title":{"rendered":"LEARNING A LANGUAGE"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Me with a rather distracted-looking Kumari in Patan<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0THE NEPALI LANGUAGE<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I remember clearly a programme I was watching on TV in the 70s.\u00a0 The living goddess Kumari<\/i> <\/a>was being paraded through the streets of Kathmandu.\u00a0 Nepal in those days was still emerging from the cultural heritage of the 18th<\/sup> century; and to see a young, pre-pubescent girl deified as a virgin goddess and being worshiped was really, for me, beyond the wildest dreams of Kew\u2026<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

In the late seventies I had the chance to work as a volunteer in Birganj, a busy, bustling town on the border with India, unbearably hot in the summer months and sub-tropical in the winter.\u00a0 Outside of the confines of the campus where I taught post-graduate students the art of teaching English, there was very little opportunity to communicate with the locals except in their own language, Nepali.\u00a0 So I ventured out onto the streets and the bazaar and learned a kind of bastardised version of the language, a mixture really of Hindi, Bhojpuri and Nepali.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n


\nOnly when on leave in Kathmandu six months after the beginning of my sojourn did I discover from a local shopkeeper that my language was a mish mash<\/i> of the local tongues in Birganj:\u00a0 Thas no Nepali, <\/i>he laughed, thas all mix up mix up.<\/i><\/span>
\n But the real faux pas <\/i>happened when I returned to the classroom and decided to show off my skill in the local language with my students.\u00a0 You must learn English,<\/i> I instructed them, little realising that the transposition of the first letter of the verb to learn <\/i>had metamorphosed my meaning to, \u00adYou must fornicate with the English, <\/i>but in a much less formal context. <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

While I continued to wonder why the students were laughing at me throughout the lesson, my mistake was discreetly pointed out to me by a sympathetic student at the end of the session.<\/span><\/p>\n

Altogether, I was there for two and a half years and enjoyed trekking to remote areas and villages.\u00a0 Slowly, the language barriers fell away and the simplified speech of the locals made it easy for me to communicate as little use was made of tenses and gender.\u00a0 This was a relief because in formal Nepali there are seven forms of pronoun, depending on whom you are talking to, with corresponding positive and negative and male and female verb endings which change with the tense used, the saving grace being that none of the verbs are irregular as in English.<\/span><\/p>\n

Did I enjoy the experience of learning a foreign language?\u00a0 Well, I went on to do a post-graduate scholarship course in Nepalese culture with my Guru, Professor Chudamani Bhandu, a lexicographer, from whom I learned there are 122 languages \u2013 not dialects \u2013 spoken in Nepal as the mother tongue.\u00a0 Most\u00a0 of the students I was teaching were at least tri-lingual and I can only say I was relieved to know that Nepali or Gorkhali\u00a0 as it is also known is the official language of the country.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But my time in the Department of Culture at Kirtipur Campus in Kathmandu was not wasted as I went on to translate Laxmi Prasad Devkota\u2019s poetry, a poet who is considered to be the bard of Nepal.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have been back to the country many times and find that I can still communicate with the locals.\u00a0 I\u2019ve tried my hand at other European languages but for some reason in France they think I\u2019m German and in Germany they think I\u2019m French \u2013 oh, and they don\u2019t understand a word I try to say in French or German.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The main things I\u2019ve found out about learning a foreign language are start young, begin with the skills of listening and talking and live in the country<\/i>!<\/span><\/p>\n

This short article was originally written for <\/span><\/em>\u00a0The Clarion,\u00a0a\u00a0<\/em>University of the Third Age\u00a0magazine.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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        \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Me with a rather distracted-looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[135,136,55,137,133,54,134],"class_list":["post-2825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-stories","tag-birganj","tag-chudamani-bhandu","tag-kathmandu","tag-kirtipur-campus","tag-kumari","tag-nepal","tag-patan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nLEARNING A LANGUAGE - 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