This summer I’ve been learning Tamil. Not only is it the primary language spoken in Tamil Nadu, a state in Southern India, it’s my mother tongue — a language everybody else in my family speaks. Learning my mother tongue has always been a priority of mine, but I hadn’t been disciplined enough to put my head down and practice until recently.
Every year as a child, I’d visit my extended family and my predominantly Tamil-speaking great-grandmother in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Our interactions, which consisted mainly of smiling and nodding, were sweet but frustrating. I felt slightly ashamed that I wasn’t proficient in my mother tongue, despite knowing that, having grown up in America, I had limited opportunity to practice.
However, I was able to understand Tamil decently well. I was always confused as to why my ability to understand greatly exceeded my ability to speak; if the words are inside my head, why can’t I articulate them at all? I learned recently that this scenario was termed “receptive bilingualism,” and it typically affects immigrant children, such as myself. Upon learning this, I felt slightly reassured — I’m just “receptively bilingual” and I’m not an outlier.
But I wasn’t very good at Spanish either, despite my four years of high school classes. With Spanish, expressing myself was still an issue. I’d often convert the thoughts I wanted to express from English to Spanish, word by word, and if I didn’t know a word, I’d scrap the current phrase and think of a new phrase. But you can’t do that instantaneously, so my then-technique led to many awkward silences.
While my time learning Spanish was largely spent in a classroom, Tamil was a language I simply grew up hearing. So when I set myself upon learning the language, I was curious if I could channel the same strategies I used to learn English as a child –– such as watching movies and TV shows, listening to nursery rhymes and speaking around the house –– to learn Tamil
However, when I employed these strategies, I grew exceedingly frustrated. It felt like nothing was being retained, other than perhaps a few words and phrases. I wondered why this was the case; I’ve read about neuroplasticity and how babies can pick up knowledge quickly. But I didn’t like the notion that I was supposedly smarter as a child than I was right now because it felt like the window of opportunity to learn a second language had closed on me.
To rationalize this situation, I delved deep into the fundamental nature of language. My line of reasoning went something like this: Languages are meant to express thoughts. But I have more complex thoughts now than when I was a child, and, these complex thoughts are exceedingly more difficult to communicate than the thoughts I harbored as a child, thus giving the illusion of a lack of proficiency. Ignoring that illusion, in theory, should be easier to gain actual proficiency as an adult because I don’t need to relearn entire concepts like what a house is or what the cardinal directions are. Learning a fresh concept is a far loftier task than labeling that concept with an arbitrary word, which was all I had to do.
To this end, I shifted my learning methodology to place an emphasis on rote memorization, while the Tamil TV shows and movies became a means to gauge my improvement. At first, I was a little wary of memorizing word-to-word translations because I’ve tried that before and it has not been successful. But I kept in mind that languages simply provide labels for concepts that are already known to me and that English is a useful tool in language acquisition that I shouldn’t shy away from.
I’d sit down and memorize word after word, using online resources. It was significantly more monotonous than learning the language organically, but I tried my best to stay the course. I’d keep an open ear whenever my parents and grandparents would converse and randomly interject with, “You just said (this Tamil word). What does it mean?” I would then write the translation down in my notes app. My grandmother was an extremely useful resource, explaining to me various proverbs and other esoteric Tamil knowledge you couldn’t learn through English as a medium.
I got to a point where the bulk of my learning was done through English to Tamil translations. I sat down and reflected on my journey thus far. How could these two languages, one of which originated in India and the other in Europe, be so interrelated that they lend themselves toward learning the other? As far as languages go, they were as dissimilar as can be, but they still shared such close parallels. I realized that while languages can vary in word and syntax, the underlying thoughts being conveyed, the “essence” of each language, are often very similar.
Learning Tamil through English was primarily useful for learning vocabulary, and this came to a head when I started exploring more complex sentence structures. I knew it would be to my benefit to learn the script, but I didn’t know the extent to which it would be beneficial. After all, Spanish and English both use the Latin alphabet, but I wasn’t any good at Spanish. In English, I could look at a word and say it without thinking twice. But the Tamil alphabet was different. There were so many letters, and each letter had so many squiggles.
I figured if I wanted to become a complete Tamil speaker, I should know the script, so I began learning the alphabet. I’d practice reading children’s stories, and I’d see the word, ஒரு (oru, meaning ‘a, an, one’), sprinkled into every reading. As I kept reading and reading, I noticed that whenever I looked at ஒரு, my brain instantly recognized it and moved on, similar to what my brain does with English words. This was incredibly encouraging. With each reading, the words became more and more familiar, and my confidence was skyrocketing.
I felt like I was on top of the world. If I could program my brain to recognize words that weren’t English, what couldn’t I learn? This was a seminal moment for me on a journey of language acquisition that hadn’t been successful up until this point. I wouldn’t say I’m fluent quite yet, but I’m decent enough to add it as a skill on my LinkedIn without feeling guilty. Still, I’ve gained much more than just proficiency in a language; I’ve learned how to overcome mental blockades, with the understanding that my ability to learn will provide me with the skills and work ethic necessary to succeed. Regardless of what you’re studying, if you focus on the fact that you are capable of learning new things you can push yourself beyond your limits.
Rohit Ramaswamy is an Opinion Columnist from Tampa, Fla. He writes about an assortment of topics at the intersection of personal decision-making and the human condition. He can be reached at rohitra@umich.edu.