Curious Creature

Learning a new language can open a lot of doors for you. And not just career wise but it opens a whole new segment of literature, art and cultural experience.

Also learning English is not an option but a necessary. Otherwise you’ll be left out on a lot of knowledge out there. I learned this the hard way.

Throughout the school I was one of the brightest student. And partly because of that after my 10th unlike others who choose to do their +2 from the same hindi medium school I applied for which was considered one of the best college in the city. When my name appeared in the first merit list, that was one happiest self of mine totally unaware of the nightmares awaiting.

I still remember the hopelessness I was feeling after the first physics lecture of my 11th standard. I could not understand a single thing the professor was speaking. As soon the lecture ended I ran out of the building and sat under a tree totally lost. I had no one to talk to. I didn’t know that if anyone else was feeling the same or it was just me. In school I was considered best in English and here I was falling flat on my butt.

I realised how naive those teachers and I was who belived in that delusion. Now in retrospect I see how my teachers and my schooling failed me. The way schools evaluated us it was easy for someone like me to ace the exams with minimal efforts without even realising that it’s going to come back and bite me.

Anyway after a lot of struggle and a steep drop in my grades somehow I completed my I.Sc. Meanwhile I tried everything that was suggested to improve my English. Reading newspapers, Practicing from different grammar books or mugging up the dictionary. And none of them helped me much. And let me tell you that trying to read English newspaper with only elementary knowledge of the language is one of the most depressing task out there. You will start with a lot of enthusiasm but there won’t be a single sentence you can understand without looking up the dictionary. After few days the process will feel so tiresome that you will give up reading altogether. Then for few weeks you will just go through the pictures and be done with it. And within a month you’ll be ditermined to unsubscribe to the paper

So the question is how should one learn the language?

I won’t lie, there’s no shortcut that I have found and Learning a language takes its sweet time.

What I did was to changed the approach. Instead of reading newspapers, I started with children’s books. I went and brought out my box of primary school books. I read them all and it didn’t took me more than few hours. Surprisingly I understood it better than when I used to read it everyday. The problem was my primary school teacher never taught us to understand it. They were teaching us in way that will help us only to score better in the exams.

Then I started participating in online communities like Yahoo answers. The benefits of these communities are that there always will be people who know less than you and it will help you develop you confidence. But bigger advantage is that unlike newspapers people there uses simple Language (although website like Quora is filled with people using convoluted language and jargons), which is not always grammatically accurate but they are easy to understand. And you learn new words and new uses of already known words as the meanings change a lot according to the context. No dictionary will ever teach you that.

After that I started to watch dubbed movies with Hindi audio and English subtitles. And as I said this is one of the best way to learn new words and their use. I kept at it for months untill I was a little more confident on taking up the new challenge.

Next I started to watch those movies in their original English audio with English subtitles. Soon I realised the normal speed of the video was too much for me. When you don’t know a language it feels like everyone is talking very fast because our minds need times to process the information, and a foreign accent doesn’t help either. So started to watch those movies at slower playback speed. There’s this features in almost all media player which allow you to increase or decrease the playback speed. Gradually as my grasp increased on the language I kept moving the speed towards the normal.

Now I can understand it all with or without the subtitles. Another thing movies help you with is the pronounciation. Although it differs vastly in different accents it’s something. As you will progress you will realise that you can even tell how different actors and characters from different countries sound. You will be able to tell if a actor is Britsh or American or Irish only by his accent.

And most important you will have fun doing it. You will realise how much talent and effort of the actors gets wasted when you watch it in dubbed sound. Those actors put a lot of effort through voice modulation which gets lost somewhere in the process of dubbing. No disrespect to the voice artists they are doing a great job it’s just when you watch a scene in actors own voice you can’t go back.

Take away points –

• Learn the basic grammar first.
• Then start with children’s book. Read them thoroughly and make sure you understand them without taking any help.
• Participate in online communities like reddit, Quora, Yahoo answers. This will help you increase your language comprehension along with learning a lot of other thing.
• Watch English movies with subtitles on. Start with Hindi audio if you are not comfortable with the English at first.
• If you have confusion about some grammar rule look it up on the internet. There’re a lot of communities to help you out. And this is the best way to learn unlike going through a thick grammar book at once. Same goes for the vocabulary.
• I’ll be lying if I say I learned English without teacher. Having a teacher does help but only for basic grammar. It’s doable on your own but a teacher can fast track things and also provide a structure and discipline which is needed whenever you go on a new endeavor.