akrish

No this isn’t about learning a programming language. This is about learning spoken languages…

My family hails from South India, and for both my parents and both sets of grandparents Tamil is the native language. And for as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to understand Tamil, but have been very inept at speaking (meaning pretty much that I can’t say a full sentence but can answer questions with a couple of words on occasion). This weekend my brother and I were struggling to speak Tamil to our mom, dad, aunt and uncle, and my friend Vivek who is pretty fluent was just breezing along. We all started thinking about why it’s so hard to speak when both of us can understand so easily.

One of the main reasons that we discovered was that verb conjugations are really challenging in Tamil. Both of us are fluent in spanish (after learning it for several years in school) and understand a lot about verb tenses and conjugations but we are still unable to understand the tamil conjugations. Part of it may be that when learning spanish, we are taught all the conjugations and them seem to be similar for pretty much all the verbs, whereas the way that we learn tamil is just from hearing bits and pieces every now and then, so we never have a chance to fully learn all of the conjugations. At the same time, from what I hear it seems that there are so many special case verbs that it wouldn’t really matter if I knew all the conjugations anyway.

Another reason was that Tamil is such an old language that there are so many different dialects and my mom, dad, Vivek, and my aunt all had different ways of saying the exact same thing. Somehow they all were able to understand each other and I was able to understand all of them as well, but this completely confused my brother and I when it came to trying to speak.

Also, similar to Spanish, there are different ways of saying things depending on who you’re addressing. For example, depending on who I’m talking to, the command sit down can be okachi, okazhu, or okazhungo if the person is younger than me, my peer, or my elder respectively. (Note: the “zh” is like a really strange sound that I’ve heard only in tamil. It doesn’t have a good translation to the English alphabet but most Tamil written in english does employ that to represent the character. It’s kind of a mix between and ‘l’ and and ‘r’ sound that both my and my brother find kind of hard to say. Read this for a bit more information). And using the first two constructs is very disrespectful if you’re talking to an elder, so you have to be careful.

As an example. We were trying to say something like “when I was young, I spoke tamil well.” I think my first take was “this (item) is a boy, he understands tamil.” I used 3rd person instead of first, used the wrong pronoun and of course the wrong verb tenses all over the place. I guess that’s not too bad because probably a lot of my family would understand what I’m trying to say (mostly because they can tell that I can’t speak well so they’ll pay more attention and think a little harder about finding some meaning). Eventually we were taught how to say the sentence, but my dad had a different way of conjugation “was” then Vivek did, so we pretty much stayed thoroughly confused.

As an interesting programming parallel. Our difficulty in learning Tamil can be compared to the difficulty someone has one first trying to write programs in a new language. Despite having read all the tutorials and seen a lot of code in the language, one still struggles to write programs until a firm grasp of writing the language has been acquired. Whenever I’m learning a new programming language, I always have to glance back at tutorials, look at reference books, and read function documentation for the first couple of programs that I write, even though I’m able to read and understand code in that language. When I’m writing code, I have to pay more attention to all the quirks of the language that I can just neglect without losing the meaning while I’m reading. Similarly with Tamil, I can understand very well because I ignore the quirks (verb conjugations, articles and pronouns, dialect-ual differences, etc.) but when I try to speak, I do have to get those things right, and I don’t know them well until I’ve spoken a lot.