THE ROAD TO FLUENCY STEP BY STEP                                        

                                             My personal experience with Hindi.    

                                                               .

When I was in India staying at an ashram, I had plenty of leisure time.  The Indians wanted to see me wearing their traditional Indian pyjama and kurta and encouraged me to buy some cloth at the local cloth store and have one made.

With this cloth I went to the tailor, whose shop was a sewing machine under a shady tree, and had him make me a pyjama and kurta..

Since I had Indian friends who spoke no English and I knew no Hindi, we could only smile at each other over tea.  However, I wanted to tell them that I had my outfit made by the local tailor sitting under the tree.

Because the tailor spoke Hindi as his native language as well as excellent English, I could ask him how to say, ‘These pants and shirt were made by the tailor who is sitting under the tree.’”*

He replied,  “Yeh pyjama aur kurta us darzi ne tayar kiya hai jo daracht ke niche baithe hai.”

This sentence went in one ear and out the other, but having nothing to do, I asked the tailor to repeat it phrase by phrase until I was able to say it myself.

Like a child being sent to the market by his mother with a shopping list in his head, I repeated this sentence over and over again as I walked to the house of my friends.

After greeting them, I very proudly  stood up and said, “Yeh pyjama aur kurta us darzi ne tayar kiya hai jo daracht ke niche baithe hai.”  Their surprise and delight was well worth the effort I had put forth in memorizing it..  This incident took place over thirty years ago, and to this day I have never forgotten this sentence.  The important thing to note is that this was, from the point of view of grammar, a complicated sentence. Since it was spoken by a native speaker, it was absolutely correct, and since I had memorized it exactly as spoken, I had reproduced a sentence worthy of a native speaker.  The next step in my studies of Hindi was to learn another perfect sentence, and then another, and then another.  By proceeding in this simple fashion, I automatically began to intuit the structure of Hindi through a natural process of osmosis.

An interesting aspect of this experience is that whenever I wish to tell my story of how I began my studies of Hindi, I am surprised to find that I first remember the sentence in Hindi after which I quickly translate it into English to make sure that the jeans and the shirt are in the right order.

When I read how the great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe learned language, the bells in the church rang loud and clear justifying this natural approach at which I had arrived many years previously.

"Thus I had learned Latin, just like German, French, English, only through practice, without rule and without system.  Anyone who knows what the state of school instruction was at that time will not find it strange that I neglected the grammar as well as the rhetoric;  everything seemed to come naturally to me.  I retained the words, their formations and transformations in my ear and in my mind, and I employed the language with ease for writing and talking"

                                                                                                                                           Goethe

                                                * "Aus meinem leben II, vi. Goethes werke, Cotta'sche bibl.d.welt-literature, 20. 218      

                                                                                                                                              Tom Curtis © 2006

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