Tonight is the last night of my Hindi class.
10 weeks of learning to read and speak Hindi. I’ve learned a lot, but I’ve definitely reached the dropping off point in terms of complexity.
Learning a language always starts off easy. Everything you learn is something you frequently use. You learn Hello, thank you, counting, and how to have a brief conversation. It exciting and rewarding to start learning a language this way.
But, then you start to see how difficult the language actually is. There are loads of words you need to learn. It’s easy to learn a word like “weather” that you will use from time to time, but how much time to you want to invest on learning a word like “fountain pen” or “lettuce”? It’s difficult to work these into daily conversation.
It was the same with Chinese and Vietnamese too. You get immediate gains on language learning, then you hit a plateau and have to consider how much you want to push forward. For those languages, it was my job to press forward. This, being a hobby, makes it much more difficult.
I’m having a great time learning the language. I can’t see myself every speaking like a native, though.
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