Emotions are universal. And these emotions get repressed and create anxiety if not expressed. We use many methods to express our emotions. These vary from direct methods like talking, writing letters to indirect ones like paintings, music or just letting your eyes speak for yourself. In the more commonly used direct methods, the most crucial element is the language. A language has its own rules, beauty and life (not sure about the death phase though). Its like a skin cover which our skeletal thinking process wears. We all have various mother tongues and a large fraction of us are most comfortable with the mother tongue.
A simple jugglery of sounds and characters (more often called letters), and it tends to have meaning, just because it follows the rules of a language. Now when we encounter a new language, the same jugglery becomes senseless since we are unaware of the set of rules it follows. Theories say that all languages are developed more or less on the same basis. This implies that when you know one language, its easier to learn another rather than starting from scratch i.e. learning like a child. But despite all these similarities, etc, the beauty of a language is unique to itself. It is here this beauty attracts me.
I was brought up in a largely multilingual environment. With Hindi as my mother-tongue being, English the first language at school, Marwadi (popular dialect of Hindi used in Rajasthan) being the language used by grandparents, Gujarati spoken by the society kids and the sacred texts read at religious occasions (not really occasions, they came 5 times a week or so) that were written in mainly Sanskrit. I don't really know from where but like a typical Indian Hindi speaking kid, my exposure to Urdu was also pretty decent. On top of this all, when I travel to different parts of India, I encounter a bunch of many other languages, a few of which barely possess any similarity with the ones I know. With all this exposure, I developed a desire to like master all languages on earth (I realize that in no way this is possible, but still...). And it is this desire which makes me figure out the meaning as soon as I hear something in a new language. I have managed some basic level of Marathi and Japanese recently. I want to master this and learn other languages as well. As a part of this effort, I launch this blog where I shall post the experiences of my attempts of learning a new language.
A simple jugglery of sounds and characters (more often called letters), and it tends to have meaning, just because it follows the rules of a language. Now when we encounter a new language, the same jugglery becomes senseless since we are unaware of the set of rules it follows. Theories say that all languages are developed more or less on the same basis. This implies that when you know one language, its easier to learn another rather than starting from scratch i.e. learning like a child. But despite all these similarities, etc, the beauty of a language is unique to itself. It is here this beauty attracts me.
I was brought up in a largely multilingual environment. With Hindi as my mother-tongue being, English the first language at school, Marwadi (popular dialect of Hindi used in Rajasthan) being the language used by grandparents, Gujarati spoken by the society kids and the sacred texts read at religious occasions (not really occasions, they came 5 times a week or so) that were written in mainly Sanskrit. I don't really know from where but like a typical Indian Hindi speaking kid, my exposure to Urdu was also pretty decent. On top of this all, when I travel to different parts of India, I encounter a bunch of many other languages, a few of which barely possess any similarity with the ones I know. With all this exposure, I developed a desire to like master all languages on earth (I realize that in no way this is possible, but still...). And it is this desire which makes me figure out the meaning as soon as I hear something in a new language. I have managed some basic level of Marathi and Japanese recently. I want to master this and learn other languages as well. As a part of this effort, I launch this blog where I shall post the experiences of my attempts of learning a new language.
I always have a question in my mind.. why do we need so many different languages on this earth. Why cant we have one single or mainly some 3-4 different languages which can make our life easier? And why the hell we want to preserve ancient languages in this fast growing developed world of communication?
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