LEARNING LANGUAGES

Learning was the most lucrative part of motherhood. I had a deal with my husband before planning a child, that he handles the medicine department and I handle the education department. I was and am, plain curious about how learning happens and concerned about how it should happen. And the first step to any learning is language.

So to start it early, I had borrowed some small and big words' flash cards from a friend who had attended a seminar where they told that introducing children with these, when they are as young as two months, makes them better learners. I don't exactly remember the way she had put it across to me, but I had completely bought it. Being a highly enthusiastic self proclaimed educator, I followed the advice but within a few days I found it unrewarding and eventually pointless. My two month old was more into wetting bed and lifting his head than learning the spellings, like obviously. Later, when A started babbling I thought, words written randomly in big letters is ideally not the way learning should start neither by focusing on going the A, B, C way. I shouldn't bother about how many words or letters of the alphabets he can remember before his second or third birthday and focus on talking to him like I am talking to someone who knows and understands free flowing sentences.

What followed was interesting. A did not speak a word till he was two. All he knew was the most essential word "mamma" and sign language to convey himself across. And as you know how the competitive world can influence you, I was aghast by other kids younger than him use quite a lot of words and ended up with people suggesting me speech therapists and more talking than I was doing. I reasoned that he is just plain lazy and comfortable with sign language but secretly I assumed that there was a fundamental difference in the way we progressed than did the others and so things are going to move differently for us.

Although, in the background this guy was putting together in his mind not only words but correct grammar and expressions to form sentences and within a week of commencing to talk (that was after turning two), he was making whole big 4-5 word sentences with correct grammar. We all were taken by surprise and amazed by what a human mind is capable of. I wonder how mind unpuzzles the complex concept of speech without making notes or asking for revisions.

When a child is exposed to more than one language the delay in speech is obvious and nothing to worry about. But, exposing A to many languages was a task, because for me, family means marathi, friends means hindi and acquaintances means English. I had that sorted and compartmentalized in my brain rigidly. So, we had to figure out some other way. When I was growing up, knowing languages was hardly a concern to my parents and I learned my languages from the surrounding in a very organic way. So, then why should I bother putting A for language and phonetic classes. I did try to force myself to talk to him every day for an hour in hindi and an hour in English, like we were forced in school. Honestly, it never worked then and did not even this time around. I remember, I tried to learn Tamil from a book that promised me just four weeks to a fluent Tamil. I was bored sooner than I thought. But given that the first five years learning happens faster than ever, we had to try it but in a healthy and effective manner. I mean, not through television or videos on phone or just plain words books but something that imparts foundational lessons.

And so, we brought the languages in, in the form of books (as that was also something I wished to bring in sooner than later). Story books in English and poetry in Hindi, is what we tried. Until A got quite fluent with the mother tongue, he never sat still for other languages but once he was settled with Marathi, he had no problem with other languages! He could sit longer periods for the story books. We built our capacity from one liners to lengthy paragraph books. Eventually, he started asking me about equivalent words for his Marathi words in other languages. I took it as a cue to start short conversations in different languages but he didn't seem much interested, nor is he now (His way is "all at once" or "nothing at all" way, I assume). But I got taken aback when one day suddenly he understood my conversations with other people, in not just Hindi and English but also Gujarati. Boom.....

Human mind.....!!!
Talking about language, I got speechless...!!