Just before my Yoga class today, a group of expats was discussing languages they know and how much of Kannada and Hindi they have picked up during their stay at Bangalore. These men and women were from Canada, Australia, and Germany.
While the discussion centered around a couple of phonetics, I wondered how much different one language is from the other.
- In a part of Germany, the sounds of ‘t’ and ‘d’ are alike.
- In Canada, there is no ‘dh’ sound so this gentleman’s kid makes him practice ‘dh’ ten times a day but he can’t figure out the difference between ‘d’ and ‘dh’.
- In India, where many languages are spoken – Hindi has different sounds for ‘t’, ‘th’, ‘d’, and ‘dh’ however, in Kannada, there are just two ‘dh’ and ‘th’.
Being an audience to this conversation, I realized how learning the accent is harder than learning the language, how children pick these nuances faster than adults can even get the difference and how our world is such an amazing melting pot of so many cultures, languages, food and what not.
Have you attempted learning a new language and realized what I heard today?
Writing for #MicroblogMondays today and this picture from my Kannada classes notebook has been tagged to Mundane Monday #60
happiness and food 
The German thing is true. An example is gesundheit. The “god bless” that we say when someone sneezes?
I had tried learning a bit of Spanish via Duolingo. It is pretty easy, but the accents are really weird!
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This is so true. I speak English as my first language, took 5 years of French and got pretty fluent in it. The accent was definitely the hardest part though! Then, I married a Filipino and have since tried to learn Tagalog but it has definitely been the hardest to learn. Just the fact that many words have two ways to say it based on the accent! It’s slow going but I’m getting it. 🙂
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As a doc who worked in 3 different states, I have had to try to learn quite a few languages and even more regional dialects. Needless to say, I failed miserably.. some things are just beyond me. And surprisingly, languages is one of them.
So don’t expect any regional poetry from me on the blog anytime soon 😀
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Like in pure Tamil my name becomes ‘Amshu’ 🙂
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Really? Interesting! Wonder what Parul will become? 🙂
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Hey Parul, I have always loved French as a language.. tried learning it a couple of times but left it mid way…love the way they curl their r and ls. also ‘est’ is almost silent .. they just seamlessly go from one word to another..
I learnt Sanskrit when I was in school .. but the only thing I remember now about it is how it was so complex and so much!! as in to learn 🙂
perhaps you are right the accents are tough to learn – in a lot of languages the way you say a word determines its meaning and impact ..
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Its funny to think how some languages do not have any sounds at all, sounds we have been hearing around us all the time. If people who I work with have to pronounce my name correctly, I will have to change my spelling to Sum-puh-the from Sampada :D.
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I guess languages are easy – the accents are harder 🙂
Tiny nuances that really can differentiate a fluent speaker from a learner/beginner.
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I speak Tamil, Telugu and Hindi and often wondered about their differences. Especially there are some sounds like ‘zha’ in Tamil that don’t even exist in other languages.
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Really! Learning accents is difficult than learning the language. I haven’t tried any western languages yet, but picking up the accent of south Indian Languages is easy for me.
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So interesting! Accents are super hard. I think on this amazing study where babies babble in all sounds, but then tune their sounds to match the language around them, dropping the sounds they don’t need for that language. Fascinating stuff. I haven’t tried a new language in a very long time but envy those for whom it comes easily!
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I think languages can be learnt, but not the accent – that takes time to develop, and still sounds fake in most cases. But over a long period of time, even the accent starts to rub off on you.
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Speaking to people from various countries, I have been able to pick up on a lot of their quirks. This is especially true for the non-English speaking population. What I try to do is be as true to my own accent instead of trying to sound like them. They pick it up like pick up theirs. But its fun.
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No! I am still fumbling through. I haven’t picked marathi also.
But I agree that accent is more difficult than language itself.
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It’s always interesting. Even within India, people from different regions have problems with sounds. Hence, the variety of accents in English as well. Most Indians have a problem with the ‘th’ sound which is pronounced so differently by native speakers of English.
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I’m very bad at this.. Somehow I only know Bengali, Hindi and English… Learning another language even if I want to just doesn’t come naturally to me 🙈
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I can pick up words easily but the full grammar, correct sentences makes it harder. Though I love trying 🙂
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Oh yes, this is so true! English is my first language, but I’m currently teaching myself Spanish, and I speak Thai and Mandarin, and smatterings of Italian and French. I know Thai best, and it has vowel sounds that don’t exist in English, and t/d and b/p sounds that don’t exist either. Also they seem to interchange “r” and “l.” This didn’t help me as my first name begins with L, and my second with R, and they were frequently reversed!
I also used to think Spanish was easy to pronounce, but as Mithila said, some of the consonants are quite confusing – particularly the b and v sounds. Sometimes they are “b” in English, never “v”, and often they’re something in-between. Argh. Rolling my “r’s” is also difficult, as apparently when I was a child I used to struggle saying “rabbit” – it came out as “wabbit!”
I am hoping to visit India sometime in the next few years. Do you think it would be worth me trying to learn Hindi?
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Wow Linda! You are multilingual and so much of dilemma with the name.
In India, most people at tourist destinations are comfortable with English but if you want to, you can learn Hindi. 🙂 It will be different and there will be new words for you to know.
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I remember how I made the Spanish-speaking first-graders in one of my music classes giggle as I mispronounced of a fellow student’s name. It was Mariposa, where the r is more like a d.
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Learnt Malayalam (I’m a Punjabi) a few years ago. The pronunciation is very different for a few words. But not much trouble in learning
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You are a rockstar, Suman!
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Forget about new languages – teaching the kids Hindi is like discovering a new language. What I took for granted, apparently isn’t so easy. Not just the th and the dh there are scores of problem areas. I’ve been tearing out my hair.
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Ho you should then learn malayalam.. a true tongue twister it is!
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I took a French class for three or four years in high school. A few years later, an acquaintance asked me to go with her on a trip to Paris, partially because I “knew” the language (had I know this was her assumption, I would’ve corrected her immediately, while still buying my ticket to go, because come on – Paris! 😀 ). Two minutes after our arrival, I realized my schooling was useless. After hanging out with French friends for a few days, and being immersed in the language, I began understanding, but couldn’t form replies. By the end of the trip, I was speaking well enough to be understood most of the time.
Oh, and I completely agree with all your realizations!
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So true — my name in Hebrew has a letter without an English equivalent, and it’s painful to hear people try to pronounce my name. It is so hard when you can’t get the sounds correct. That’s why I like to read languages instead of speak them 🙂
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That’s quite an interesting thing to read. I wanna learn Spanish, some day:)
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It’s strange how you talk about language and accents . It all depends on your ability to mimic and learn a language. I don’t want to sound boastful but the other day I met a group of Francophones who were astonished at my ability to recall and speak the language correctly with the right accent and intonation . They didn’t believe I had learnt French as a college student in Bombay ! I have the ability to copy accents and sometimes so impersonations so accurately that people imagine it’s actually the person speaking. So I would say learning a foreign language is more a God given gift or a natural ability.
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Going through you notebook, my first impression was, why are you abusing coffee, why not change the cafe! 😉 Agree with you. Learning a new language isn’t hard, learning the accent, the sounds, it’s tough and takes time.
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Oh, tell me about it! My experience with learning french echos your reflection. I am still struggling to grasp their pronunciation of ‘R.’ 😦
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Personally I’ve learnt only a little bit of german, and the pronounciation seemed fine. I’m a malayali from Kerala and people say that it is the toughest language to learn to pronounce…certain sounds cannot even be represented with english letters!
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See! Yeah – Malayalam is hard. I have not yet tried though to give up 😉
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that’s very interesting. I love reading about languages… it’s so difficult to learn the accent, even though one can learn the pronunciation. There are certain northeastern languages that are an amalgamation of other languages. They don’t have a script as well.
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Languages interesr me. A couple of years ago I tried learning Spanish from an app and since I only used the app to the extent of it allowing free access, I know spanish which must be as good as their kindergarten level 😀 I never purchased the app. Going by all the comments here has been informative about so many world languages.
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Interesting notes. I’ve learned some Kannada now from it! 😉
Btw nice handwriting as well.
I tried a few French words and never got it right, the French people said! 😉
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Ha ha! Learnt Kannada here 😀
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My husband is German and I learned it in school. I do pretty well with the German -ch but not as well with the -r. My husband is quite fluent in English but he has a hard time hearing the difference between th and f (to him, “thank” and “fank” sound alike). There is neuroscience research showing that babies can hear and distinguish all the sounds the mouth can make, but as children learn their native language(s), they lose the ability to distinguish sounds that aren’t part of that language. It’s hard to relearn those distinctions as an adult.
A few years ago, I posted a blog about the parallels between accents in language and in music. Accents: http://www.violinist.com/blog/ravena/20136/14708/
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Oh yes1 Absolutely. It is the correct pronunciation that is a challenge. As you rightly pointed out, even I have noticed how despite having the same letters as Hindi in fact more, some sounds have been suppressed in Kannada. They find it difficult to say kha, gha, tha etc. In Italian, I’ve noticed that it is only the softer t that they use. European languages have the deep sound from the epiglottis which you find in Arabic and Urdu. Fascinating, really!
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