L493 - Hindi!
You know, for some reason, I hate it when I look at a text written in a strange script and I'm not able to read a single word. This led me to learn Japanese and later the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, as well as Korean and a little bit of Hebrew. Of course, I forgot a lot of it after a while without practice, but those are pretty easy and I could memorise them again if I wanted. The problem is, it's boring learning an alphabet when you don't study the language itself and can't form words and sentences in that language. And I'm not particularly interested in studying Russian, Greek, Korean or Hebrew... Not yet, anyway. I'd love to learn Arabic, because I feel as though everyone but me can read Arabic, but that's too tricky a language for me at this point.
Then, after being exposed to a considerable amount of Bollywood material (mostly songs, though) and doing extensive research on India, I began to get that same feeling about Hindi. I would look at the lyrics and get insane because I couldn't read it at all. After doing a little, basic research on Hindi grammar, I realised it was quite like Japanese (I'll explain why later) and it sounded like a very interesting language. What I really wanted was to learn Bengali, but there's hardly any material for it, and besides all my songs are in Hindi, so Hindi it is.
As I was learning the script (Devanagari) and my first words, I got struck by a strong feeling of nostalgia. This is just like the time when I began to learn Japanese. The fascinating, syllabic alphabet, the immense pleasure I got when I could finally form words and entire sentences, the grammar that is completely different from Portuguese and English... I haven't got this excited over an exotic language in years! (Swedish doesn't count; it isn't exotic enough.)
I wonder if I'll ever get as "good" at Hindi as I am at Japanese. Probably not, unless my brain receives a massive memory upgrade, but that won't stop me from having fun now. Then again, Hindi seems to be a lot easier than Japanese. For starters, it doesn't have ideograms, nor is it written in three different writing systems at the same time. You wouldn't believe how reassuring that is. The writing system is actually quite simple, as is the phonology. It has genders, though (masculine and feminine). The word order is SOV, like Japanese, so there are a lot of similarities in grammar between those two languages, like the use of postpositions/particles, adjective before noun, adverb before verb, honorifics after name, etc. Ah, yes, it has honorifics, too. Joy.
Some words are easy to memorise if you've read The Jungle Book. :D Like "hāthī" meaning "elephant" and "bandar" meaning "monkey". A few words were loaned from Portuguese, much to my surprise (I'm not sure how to spell them in Hindi, but they mean "bucket" and "key"). And saw for myself the evidence that Hindi may have common ancestry with European languages. The linguists call it "Proto-Indo-European". For example, the numbers:
Hindi
Latin
Portuguese
English
do
duo
dois
two
tīn
tres
três
three
cār
quattuor
quatro
four
sāt
septem
sete
seven
āth
octo
oito
eight
nau
novem
nove
nine
das
decem
dez
ten
Not sure if you'll be able to see the similarities, since some of them are rather subtle, but they're there. If that Proto-Indo-European language really existed, I'd love to study it. It looks very interesting.
Well, let's just see how long this Hindi hype will last. I rarely go longer than a month studying the same language. :P It's kind of frustrating, studying so many languages and not knowing anything about them in the end.
Then, after being exposed to a considerable amount of Bollywood material (mostly songs, though) and doing extensive research on India, I began to get that same feeling about Hindi. I would look at the lyrics and get insane because I couldn't read it at all. After doing a little, basic research on Hindi grammar, I realised it was quite like Japanese (I'll explain why later) and it sounded like a very interesting language. What I really wanted was to learn Bengali, but there's hardly any material for it, and besides all my songs are in Hindi, so Hindi it is.
As I was learning the script (Devanagari) and my first words, I got struck by a strong feeling of nostalgia. This is just like the time when I began to learn Japanese. The fascinating, syllabic alphabet, the immense pleasure I got when I could finally form words and entire sentences, the grammar that is completely different from Portuguese and English... I haven't got this excited over an exotic language in years! (Swedish doesn't count; it isn't exotic enough.)
I wonder if I'll ever get as "good" at Hindi as I am at Japanese. Probably not, unless my brain receives a massive memory upgrade, but that won't stop me from having fun now. Then again, Hindi seems to be a lot easier than Japanese. For starters, it doesn't have ideograms, nor is it written in three different writing systems at the same time. You wouldn't believe how reassuring that is. The writing system is actually quite simple, as is the phonology. It has genders, though (masculine and feminine). The word order is SOV, like Japanese, so there are a lot of similarities in grammar between those two languages, like the use of postpositions/particles, adjective before noun, adverb before verb, honorifics after name, etc. Ah, yes, it has honorifics, too. Joy.
Some words are easy to memorise if you've read The Jungle Book. :D Like "hāthī" meaning "elephant" and "bandar" meaning "monkey". A few words were loaned from Portuguese, much to my surprise (I'm not sure how to spell them in Hindi, but they mean "bucket" and "key"). And saw for myself the evidence that Hindi may have common ancestry with European languages. The linguists call it "Proto-Indo-European". For example, the numbers:
Hindi
Latin
Portuguese
English
do
duo
dois
two
tīn
tres
três
three
cār
quattuor
quatro
four
sāt
septem
sete
seven
āth
octo
oito
eight
nau
novem
nove
nine
das
decem
dez
ten
Not sure if you'll be able to see the similarities, since some of them are rather subtle, but they're there. If that Proto-Indo-European language really existed, I'd love to study it. It looks very interesting.
Well, let's just see how long this Hindi hype will last. I rarely go longer than a month studying the same language. :P It's kind of frustrating, studying so many languages and not knowing anything about them in the end.