Men and women better qualified and experienced to say this than me have said it before, but some things bear repetition: second language teaching in English medium schools in our country sucks. Joyless, context-less, unimaginative and irrelevant content and methods have ensured that ‘second language’ has become a four letter word for parents and children alike. With the result, the national language and the regional language – Hindi and Marathi here in Maharashtra - are variously seen by school children as a scourge, a bane, a plague and a sentence. There is, of course, the snobbery attached to avoiding and rejecting everything that is ‘verny’, but there is more to this resistance to learning the languages than simple snobbery.
With the word ‘compulsory’ thrown in, there is little chance of anyone enjoying the learning process; and as soon as these languages turn ‘optional’, they are hastily dumped. Add to this the nasty political/nationalist/goonda edge put to the issue of local language learning, and you can be sure that no new learner can possibly enjoy or take pride in knowing the language. Even before children open their text book to the first lesson, they’ve already got a sense of the ‘Us vs Them’ flavour to the subject.
The simple fact is that whether you come from Kashmir, Kanyakumari, or Khartoum, it’s good to know the local language, anywhere that you are. Even if the benefits are not immediately apparent, there just can’t be any harm in knowing the language. But everyone treats language lessons like something worse than inoculation and quarantine.
I am no advocate of forcing people to be ‘proud’ of a language, but I remember feeling shocked and depressed when school children of an elite Mumbai school some years ago celebrated the end of their Hindi and Marathi exams by lighting a bonfire of their text and workbooks. Today too, you hear school kids using the word ‘Marathi’ and ‘Hindi’ in that particular disowning way. The visual equivalent is of someone pinching their nose and holding up a very smelly dead rat at the end of a stick. And the grotesque joke is that after they have struggled for years with their texts and teachers, they emerge having somehow passed but unable to string five words together. Sadly, the system also throws up a brutalized, much-maligned, and thus often sadistic brand of language teachers too (with honourable exceptions of course).
Whoever said ‘learn a new language, earn a new soul’ had obviously not visited one of our soul-destroying Hindi-Marathi ‘periods’. Firstly, no syllabus writer has taken the time, for the last 50 years at least, to turn kids on to the fun of knowing a new language. How can they think of it as fun if you press them hard against the archaic, pedantic and somber literature of some bygone era?
The only way to draw them in is if they can feel the fun and benefits in the here and now. Knowing Hindi and Marathi should translate into understanding songs better, jokes better, movies better, advertisements better, and from there on, understanding and communicating with the people around you – your granny, the neighbour, the shopkeeper, the conductor, the rickshawallah, the maid, the newsreader, better. Whether or not you want to then leap into the classics in Hindi and Marathi should be a choice made much later. Tragically, the way these languages are taught now, you can be sure these kids will be making mental bonfires if not physical ones, of all regional literature.
Why don’t we leave the literature alone at first and concentrate on teaching Hindi and Marathi like they teach it to foreigners? Appropriate and relevant content is all it takes. American students who’ve come into Pune not 6 weeks ago, through the ACM (Associate Colleges of the Mid-West) program, have already begun to read the script and find their way around in at least rudimentary Marathi. Which is more than you can say for a friend’s English and Telugu speaking 10-year-old son, who, believe it or not, bed-wets the night before his Marathi and Hindi days, and cannot speak a sentence after 3 years of it at school. Now if that’s not traumatic language learning, I don’t know what is. He is too young to know that there’s nothing intrinsically horrid about these languages. So he talks about the time he can dump them and take German or French. As if those languages, somehow, are kinder and easier! Which they probably will be, given that the way they are taught is much more acceptable and enjoyable.
Let us do away with ‘vyaakran’ as it is now taught. (Another of those words that induces bed-wetting and stammering.) As stalwarts like Chomsky and Tagore have said, what we’re doing with this kind of teaching is to rob the child of language to teach him grammar! And with all due respect to all the great literary figures of the Hindi and Marathi language, could we not give them a rest, and include more contemporary famous passages in our texts? Why not, for instance, some of the fun dialogues of Sholay?
“Kitne aadmi thay?” Gabbar will thunder out of their text books. This will not only draw kids to the edge of their seats during Hindi period, but the teacher can then play around with tenses – past and present - saying, “Notice kids, he is not asking ‘Kitne aadmi hai’ He is asking ‘thay’”
Then the shivering Kaliya answers: “Do aadmi”.
Gabbar sneers: “Aur tum teen.”
Here the teacher can get the kids to chant: “Ek, do, teen, char, paanch, …!” etc. And there, you’ve slipped them some Hindi numerals too.
The concept of rhetorical questions can be brought out by Gabbar’s chilling: “Aur tumne samjha Sardar bahut khoosh ho jayega, shabaasi dega?”
Hindi idioms, instead of being mugged in endless, meaningless lists, can come alive in examples like Kalia blubbering: “Sardar mainay aapka namak khaya hai, huzoor.”
Repartee can then be taught through that memorable line: “Abb goli kha!”
And so on and so forth. You get the point.
What a change it will be from those stodgy texts, the mind-numbing grammar, the bed-wetting and the bonfires. And the ironic inability to speak a single sentence in Marathi or Hindi after 5 years of ‘learning’.
With the word ‘compulsory’ thrown in, there is little chance of anyone enjoying the learning process; and as soon as these languages turn ‘optional’, they are hastily dumped. Add to this the nasty political/nationalist/goonda edge put to the issue of local language learning, and you can be sure that no new learner can possibly enjoy or take pride in knowing the language. Even before children open their text book to the first lesson, they’ve already got a sense of the ‘Us vs Them’ flavour to the subject.
The simple fact is that whether you come from Kashmir, Kanyakumari, or Khartoum, it’s good to know the local language, anywhere that you are. Even if the benefits are not immediately apparent, there just can’t be any harm in knowing the language. But everyone treats language lessons like something worse than inoculation and quarantine.
I am no advocate of forcing people to be ‘proud’ of a language, but I remember feeling shocked and depressed when school children of an elite Mumbai school some years ago celebrated the end of their Hindi and Marathi exams by lighting a bonfire of their text and workbooks. Today too, you hear school kids using the word ‘Marathi’ and ‘Hindi’ in that particular disowning way. The visual equivalent is of someone pinching their nose and holding up a very smelly dead rat at the end of a stick. And the grotesque joke is that after they have struggled for years with their texts and teachers, they emerge having somehow passed but unable to string five words together. Sadly, the system also throws up a brutalized, much-maligned, and thus often sadistic brand of language teachers too (with honourable exceptions of course).
Whoever said ‘learn a new language, earn a new soul’ had obviously not visited one of our soul-destroying Hindi-Marathi ‘periods’. Firstly, no syllabus writer has taken the time, for the last 50 years at least, to turn kids on to the fun of knowing a new language. How can they think of it as fun if you press them hard against the archaic, pedantic and somber literature of some bygone era?
The only way to draw them in is if they can feel the fun and benefits in the here and now. Knowing Hindi and Marathi should translate into understanding songs better, jokes better, movies better, advertisements better, and from there on, understanding and communicating with the people around you – your granny, the neighbour, the shopkeeper, the conductor, the rickshawallah, the maid, the newsreader, better. Whether or not you want to then leap into the classics in Hindi and Marathi should be a choice made much later. Tragically, the way these languages are taught now, you can be sure these kids will be making mental bonfires if not physical ones, of all regional literature.
Why don’t we leave the literature alone at first and concentrate on teaching Hindi and Marathi like they teach it to foreigners? Appropriate and relevant content is all it takes. American students who’ve come into Pune not 6 weeks ago, through the ACM (Associate Colleges of the Mid-West) program, have already begun to read the script and find their way around in at least rudimentary Marathi. Which is more than you can say for a friend’s English and Telugu speaking 10-year-old son, who, believe it or not, bed-wets the night before his Marathi and Hindi days, and cannot speak a sentence after 3 years of it at school. Now if that’s not traumatic language learning, I don’t know what is. He is too young to know that there’s nothing intrinsically horrid about these languages. So he talks about the time he can dump them and take German or French. As if those languages, somehow, are kinder and easier! Which they probably will be, given that the way they are taught is much more acceptable and enjoyable.
Let us do away with ‘vyaakran’ as it is now taught. (Another of those words that induces bed-wetting and stammering.) As stalwarts like Chomsky and Tagore have said, what we’re doing with this kind of teaching is to rob the child of language to teach him grammar! And with all due respect to all the great literary figures of the Hindi and Marathi language, could we not give them a rest, and include more contemporary famous passages in our texts? Why not, for instance, some of the fun dialogues of Sholay?
“Kitne aadmi thay?” Gabbar will thunder out of their text books. This will not only draw kids to the edge of their seats during Hindi period, but the teacher can then play around with tenses – past and present - saying, “Notice kids, he is not asking ‘Kitne aadmi hai’ He is asking ‘thay’”
Then the shivering Kaliya answers: “Do aadmi”.
Gabbar sneers: “Aur tum teen.”
Here the teacher can get the kids to chant: “Ek, do, teen, char, paanch, …!” etc. And there, you’ve slipped them some Hindi numerals too.
The concept of rhetorical questions can be brought out by Gabbar’s chilling: “Aur tumne samjha Sardar bahut khoosh ho jayega, shabaasi dega?”
Hindi idioms, instead of being mugged in endless, meaningless lists, can come alive in examples like Kalia blubbering: “Sardar mainay aapka namak khaya hai, huzoor.”
Repartee can then be taught through that memorable line: “Abb goli kha!”
And so on and so forth. You get the point.
What a change it will be from those stodgy texts, the mind-numbing grammar, the bed-wetting and the bonfires. And the ironic inability to speak a single sentence in Marathi or Hindi after 5 years of ‘learning’.
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