Serendipity and Learning

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!

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 language...