Very soon after I met M, I wanted to learn more about his language. Due to some inconsistencies in M's story, for a little while I thought that language was Malay. When the truth came out, I realized it was Urdu. Do you know how hard it is to try and learn Urdu? I will answer for you. It is very hard. There are almost no books, no tapes, no cds. It was even worse six years ago. I guarantee that your local Barnes & Noble won't carry any. I found one book & tape set online (of the Teach Yourself series) that was all but useless. I found a "Colloquial Urdu" book and cd at M's school library, but I could only keep that checked out for so long until it had to be returned to the library. So M and I set out to make our own way.
First, we bought a kid's picture dictionary. This particular dictionary was geared toward Spanish speaking kids learning English as a second language. We didn't mind. M just wrote the transliterated Urdu words underneath each picture, and I studied from that for a long time. It was a pretty big big book, and several months into this project, I had amassed a large amount of vocabulary. But, I could still not communicate in Urdu at all.
The problem was (and still is, unfortunately) sentences. Urdu sentences are backwards. Or maybe I am. Like many (most?) languages, it follows a subject-object-verb sentence structure which is not the same as English. This means that when I think of what I want to say, and translate it in my head into Urdu, all my sentences turn out backwards. Another problem with sentences is that there are all the extra bonus words at the end of sentences. Tha, raha, hoon, hay, chucka. All these little leftovers to sort through in my head. Some of this is verb conjugation but some of it truly is just leftover words, I'm convinced of it. I quickly realized that vocabulary wasn't enough - we were going to have to work on sentence structure as well. So we figured that we would just buy another English kid's book, work through translating it together and writing the Urdu at the bottom of the pages, and my Urdu would improve. M said we should start with something easy, so we picked up a Curious George book.
Life intervenes, as always, and while we still worked on the vocabulary book, it was a long time before we ever got around to the sentence structure book. (I admit, I'm stubborn and a bit OCD. I wanted to finish the first book before moving on!) M has had a Curious George book sitting on a shelf in his room for months at this point. But the day finally came, and we sat down with our yellow-covered copy of Curious George Visits The Zoo. We had our pen and we were determined that we were going to go through the book and translate all the sentences together. We opened the book and we both silently read the first page, and then M said:
"Oh. Curious George is a monkey?"
13 comments:
LOL... MashaAllah! This is one thing I have not attempted yet.., InshaAllah, I would like to learn Urdu as well to able to communicate with my MIL more (or in Arabic as she's fluent in it) and the rest of the hubby's family... I can pick up things here and there when he's speaking but evenutally one day we'll get there.... thank goodness the kids can relate so not all is lost!
Were there no books on Hindi available either? From what I understand Hindi and Urdu are very very similar...
Reading the word "Chucka" in there made it all worth while! :)
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I have learned to speak Hindi/Urdu pretty well, am often told that I sound native cuz my pronunciation is pretty good, too. It is possible to learn. I swear you will pick up more if you stay a few months this summer.
"Tha, raha, hoon, hay, chucka" etc.
Barring "chuka," (which conveys the idea of already/just finished an action) the rest of these are just normal verb tenses with number/person and are expressed in every language in someway or another. Nothing special about Urdu here. Each of these has something of an English equivalent.
There are a few features of Hindi/Urdu which don't have an English equivalent like the subjunctive case (like in Spanish), the use of post-positions rather than prepositions, and of course the split ergative...meaning past tense transitive verbs require that -ne thingy on the subject.
Even being pretty fluent, my gender use is still quite inconsistant. That part is the hardest for me to get right, and even when I would know the gender in writing, I often still use the wrong one when speaking cuz I guess my motormouth moves faster than my brain.
Every language learner is different, some people really can teach themselves from a book. Others need an instructor and a classroom setting, some lucky people can just pick things up aurally.
Perhaps you just need the right setting for you to learn.
Hahaha thank God you didn't spend a lot of time learning Malay!
Anon- Hindi and Urdu are quite similar and if one person speaks the other, they pretty much can understand each other ... but Urdu is a language composed from Hindi, Arabic and Farsi.
Anonymous. . .yeah, the books on Hindi are not easy to use though because of the script. And from hubby and my experience, it is much easier if at least HE is able to read the script to help in learning.
That teach yourself series IS GARBAGE, just as you say. . .bought it, hate it. . .I wish Rosetta Stone would add Urdu instead of just Hindi and I wish that I had more self discipline to learn as well. . .
LF, funny that the gender would be an issue, with you speaking Spanish too. It is so interesting how languages are learned and used!
I don't speak proper Urdu at all. I barely understand it. Whenever I fly on PIA I just wait until they translate into English! It's that much different from my ghetto language we speak. It's almost Punjabi but not proper. It's from the area we are from is why we speak like that. But my hubby speaks, reads, writes Urdu and Punjabi and is learning English. Before we got married I barely spoke anything but now I have gotten better even though I know I make mistakes. The one thing I always get confused with is the "Aap" and "tum" part. You never want to sound disrespectful to an elder although I know someone who always says "Tu" to her elders and it drives me nuts! Not only does she sound disrespectful but stupid too....
Cryss: I think in Spanish it is easier (although I do mix up sometimes with ambiguous words in Spanish, too. But mostly there are rules like -a, -ad, ion etc get la. In Urdu there are some rules based on endings, but way more ambiguous words that you just have to memorize the gender when you learn the word. Also, I learned Spanish as a kid. That makes a big difference.
In Urdu/Hindi my gender is fine with humans, but I mix up with other nouns. For most people I meet who are speaking Urdu/Hindi as a second language (there are a lot in Dubai and also in India and Pakistan) gender is the hardest thing and is the easiest way to catch us as being non-natives. You're husband might appreciate this...I often catch myself saying uska shakl, (uska shakl khubsurat hai) even though I KNOW in my brain where the rules are stored it is feminine! Gender is actually one of the things that according to second language acquisition theory you will never get 100% correct unless you internalized the rules before puberty, so even high level speakers who learned past puberty will get it wrong sometimes.
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LF, I think you're right. I think my Urdu has probably progressed as far as it can until I find myself a more formal setting. I think that's how I'm programmed to learn most things, through a formal teaching experience and writing things out..
And I did eventually find a Hindi phrasebook, but there weren't any in my bookstore 6 years ago. I'm always surprised, also, by the amount of difference between Hindi & Urdu. So often, I look to M for a translation and he'll say "I have no idea, that must be hardcore Hindi..."
hmm.. I actually learned Hindi at university and now I am trying to transform my "hardcore Hindi" into Urdu. ;-)
I am trying (or was) to learn telugu. the lack of resources has made this nearly impossible. I never realized what a challenge it would be to learn a language that uses a different alphabet! I've all but given up at this point.
Oh wow... I'm native in English and have 2 years of French, but I only know very little of Arabic, Hindi, Urdu.
When my future husband tells me that in his family home they speak a mix of "Gujarati, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic" all at once and mixed together...
Well, let's just say that I'm fortunate that my desi guy is most understanding, helpful, and patient with me.
My homework is cut out for me, hehe.
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