My enthusiasm is still going strong, thankfully, and I'm making real progress with the language overall. What I've found is that my knowledge of other languages is seriously helping me with learning Hindi. No really. I thought it would be an island onto itself. Skeptical? Here, I'll prove it to you.
Postpo-huh?
In English we have prepositions, right? The book is IN the room. The kids are climbing UP the wall. You spin me RIGHT ROUND baby RIGHT ROUND. We also have conjunctions, like and, but, or, etc. When we put them in the sentence, we put them before the thing they're modifying, hence the word PRE-position.
In Hindi and Japanese (and Korean, but don't tell them I said that) the preposition comes after the word it modifies. Compare the three languages:
English : The book is on the table.
Hindi: Book table on there is.
Japanese: As for book, table on there is.
You'll also notice "is" goes all the way to the end of the sentence. I had no problem getting these grammar points, which was kind of cool!
Ah the Taegukki, the flag of South Korea! Aside from the whole grammar spiel, Hindi and Korean have some common themes when it comes to pronunciation! Again, who'd huv thunk it? Korean and Hindi both have a whole slew of "Aspirated Consonants." Hindi has more, but the Koreans are no slouches.
Not again, Jonathan. What's with all the grammar junk?
Well, you're not going to get very far in a language if you can't put a sentence together and don't know how to pronounce things so other people understand you.
Aspirated means that it's got some air to it. Confused? Okay, try something out for me. Say this out loud to yourself:
Tap testers say wet water is better.
Say it a couple more times. All of those "t"s in English are the same. In Hindi and Korean, they're not. The "T"s in "Tap Testers" is an aspirated T. Hold your hand up to your mouth when you say "Tap Testers" and you'll notice a burst of air. Now say "wet water." Nothing. The "tt"s in better? Kind of sounds like a "d" doesn't it?
Now try to say the whole sentence with aspirated "t"s. It'll sound funny, but the meaning is still the same. English speakers don't care about aspirated consonants vs. not. In Hindi and Korean, the meaning would change entirely if you use an aspirated "t" vs. a non-aspirated "t."
This is NO SMALL THING. When I was teaching in Korea, I tried saying I had 18 students. The word in Korean for eighteen is sheep-pal. Sheep means "10" and bal means "8." I mispronounced it badly and I used an aspirated "p" instead of a hard p.
Instead of saying "I have eighteen students" I ended up saying "I have @#$@#$ing students."
Yeah, that raised some eyebrows.
I did some reading and found out that Hindi is an "Indo-European Language." Linguists basically think that Europeans, Persians, and people living in the northern part of India all spoke one language, and then the language split off as people migrated. I looked up the language family Hindi was in because when I started learning words, I saw WAY too many similarities with Spanish, German, Greek, English, etc. Apparently, other linguists way back when agreed with me and they did the whole research thing to figure out that most of the worlds major languages are related to each other. For example, when I was counting in Hindi I was like.
"Ok. Ek, do, teen, chaar, paanc, chah, saat, aat, nau, das. Wait a sec, "teen" sounds just like "three" in English, "Aat" sounds like "Acht" in German, Nau sounds like the Greek prefix as in "Nonagon," "Saat" sounds like "Sept" in French, and "das" sounds like "Diez" in Spanish.
Way too much deja vu in just ten words.
So far, the project is going as well as it can. My books have yet to come in (thanks Amazon!) so I'll just have to wait to really get into it and still continue my self study.
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