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Showing posts from June, 2015

How learning comes in the way

Having learnt everything through English for most of my life - learning to read and write another language is proving to be an uphill task. Other conversational languages that I have learnt have been learnt via informal structures - so we learnt to speak these first before we learnt to write - so the learning process was different. But as I try to learn a new language (Sanskrit), English comes in the way. The grammar (or whatever little I know of it), the structure - all of it. This is perhaps true for anything else. If you have learnt something - unlearning that is an uphill task. Unlearning something and relearning something else (and these have to happen one after after the other) is a tough job. Whether it is a technique, whether it is instinct or whatever else... When we play a game for example, tackling every next level requires a bit of unlearning, followed by insight and then the solution! Unlearning is an important component of the learning process!

The joy of learning a language

Most of the times when we learnt languages at school, there is hardly joy in the learning process. There are very few a-ha moments. For example, when we learnt English, we hardly learnt to appreciate the language. The appreciation happened much later via PG Wodehouse. (Our syllabus did have a PG lesson though - and a chapter out of the Little Prince and one from Sherlock Holmes  - so we had one good lesson a year). But the concept of reading a novel or a good story was not there. Some worthy had replaced it with a pathetic book on moral science or some such crap. Net result - zero appreciation. Take Hindi - again, there were snatches of some good poems and writings - but overall, Hindi was a dreary learning effort and I was thankful that I would never have to learn Hindi ever in my life. Marathi - similar lines - the selections was better than Hindi, but the overall effect of learning these languages did not leave us with any appreciation of the subject. The other languages I