My struggle with Hindi

I didn’t know much Hindi when I arrived at university where most of the South Asian community spoke it at least somewhat. During high school my family was 100% focused on getting my English real good so I can get that bread later on in life. At home we even stopped speaking Telugu, which was uncomfortable for my mom. We even dropped any pretense of watching Indian movies - Hindi or Telugu.

During college I barely had the time to learn languages since computer science was kicking my ass every semester. Frankly, in college I barely had the space to breathe until perhaps end of junior year, but that’s for another post, one that I’ll never write. I only picked up Hindi ‘really’ once I started taking classes in Boston around 2014. I had deep down resolved to go back to India one day, and to be prepared to do it alone since I didn’t really want to experience it through the eyes of my parents for the first time after 18 years. I re-taught myself the Telugu script my first year out of university. I had this feeling that “Now that I got the prize - the Google job - I can go and build all the other pieces of my life.” - a feeling that still persists.

Devanagari script has a lot of recognizable similarities to Telugu if you’re paying close attention - the ligature mark (the one on the bottom) for ‘l’ in Telugu (ట్ల ) looks a lot like the ‘l’ character in Hindi (ल). This didn’t make Devanagari that much easier though, to be clear. I still can only read it haltingly and with lots of context clues.

Hindi grammatical structures often mimic ones in Telugu perhaps because Dravidian languages were the substrate for Indo-Aryan ones or perhaps because of India being a linguistic area. The most common ones that mess me up are post-positions, like prepositions in English, but after the word instead of before. Both Telugu and Hindi use post-positions. Rather than saying “on the table”, the construction would look more like “table on”. But Hindi post-positions are false friends with Telugu ones - ki, ko, ku mean related but different things in the two languages and I almost always default to using them the Telugu way. Turns out this is one of the main features of Dakhni, a dialect of Hindi/Urdu native to…my home city. Many Dakhni speakers likely developed the dialect by first speaking Telugu, then learning Urdu and defaulting to Telugu semantics in the absence of corrective authority.

Vocabulary can sometimes be easier than expected since Hyderabadi Telugu, in particular my mom’s, uses many Urdu/Hindi words in place of Telugu ones. Even common phrases all over the Telugu-speaking regions such as ‘parwah le’ (no worries) are partially Urdu - parwah is the Urdu word for worry. I’ve still yet to dedicate the time to learn vocab in a structured way, but in common parlance it is often good enough to just drop in an English word like office. Or I sometimes take the Telugu word and drop a syllable or two (aksharamu -> askhar), it seems to work out OK!

The biggest struggle for me though is understanding people - official announcements at a slow pace are perfectly fine. Once we get into common interactions, even with taxi drivers, I start to get lost. Practice is hard since there are so many other things to do in life, and truly with infinite time, I would just want to learn all the languages. It’s like putting a puzzle together. For now, I think I’ll just stick to struggling with YouTube videos every other week.