Reflections on Learning How to Read

Whoo, it's late, so sorry if this isn't as long a post as you would like (mom). I promise I'll write more on Thursday, and maybe even put up some pictures of actual Inida! Right now I'm still kind of babying our new camera, meaning that I haven't taken it out at all, since I'm scared that it will get stolen. I'll have to take it on a trip to the market tomorrow ro something. Anyway.

This is funny. Jarrod is on the phone with Dr. Ahmed, our Indian friend, saying "I study and study, and sometimes I feel like I'm not making as much progress as what I'd hoped I'd be making..." Which just so happens to be what I wanted to write about today!

Last Monday we went to meet our language instructor, Madame Protima Dutt, at her office. She then walked us to her house, sat us down, and gave us our first lesson in Bangla. Since then, we've had three other lessons with her, and one drilling lesson just today with one of the junior teachers.

It's been hard work, and as Jarrod says, it feels like we are getting nowhere, but we have to remember that we've been studying seriously for only a week. We already know a lot, really: the days of the week, the numbers 1-20, along with every tenth number up to 100 after that, how to tell a cab driver "left, right, straight, stop here", a few colors, the major body parts, some words from nature and around the house...

I think the trouble is that we don't know how to use the language yet. Just this evening we began to learn the personal pronouns for the objective, possesive, and subjective case (meaning: I, my, to me, etc). I believe we're going to begin learning verbs soon, which should add a whole new dimension to our skillz.

But here's the thing: It's not like learning German or Spanish. To make things even more difficult than learning a new language already is, we're having to learn to read again. I touched on this a few posts ago, when I was still in America learning the letters, but it really hit me when Madame Dutt was grading our exercises where we had written Bangla words written in Roman script, in Bengali script. So for example, the word for "ear" is "kan", which we would have to change to কান. Fun, huh?

I noticed that Madame Dutt was just flying through the grading, making checks and corrections like nobody's business, which was really impressive, but then I thought about it. If I was teaching an Indian how to write Roman script, and the exercise were backwards, I could just as easily fly through correcting misspellings in a list of words like tree, flower, nest, fruit, soil, etc.

What I'm trying to say is, you don't remember how difficult learning to read and write was back in elementary school, perhaps because it was so long ago and now it comes so easily. But try learning a new script when you're 23 years old, and the difficulty of it all sort of comes back to you. Well, it doesn't exactly come back, but at least you can take pity on the little kids going to school every day and tediously copying letters in their wide-ruled exercise books.

I remember when I was in fifth grade, we had reading buddies in first grade. I always thought it was kind of pathetic how all the first-graders would sound out their words like, "Buh...bah...baaat. Bat." And I would be thinking in my head, "Bat, it's bat. Duh..the word is BAT!" But I totally do the same thing here (the first-grader thing, that is). If I'm sitting in an auto rickshaw in traffic, I glance at a sign and try to read it, but it takes time.

Yes...it takes time, there's my lesson for the week. Maybe a year from now I'll be able to look at a page of something written in Bangla and be able to read it as easily as I can read what I'm typing on the screen in front of me, but I just need to be patient and keep working on it. Too bad there's not a Treasure Mountain Bangla version*.

--Emily

*Apparently I learned to read from a really awesome computer game called Treasure Mountain. I was too young to read what the dwarves were saying, so I guess I just sort of taught myself? This is what my parents tell me.