Buying Things (in Hindi!)

            I never became even close to fluent at Hindi, but I was able to put some simple sentences together. Of course, it would usually take me around 15 – 30 seconds prior to stating my statement to figure out how to say what I wanted to say. And even then it didn’t guarantee I’d say it right.

            But I recognize that the most important part to learning a new language is through practice speaking to people. You can study and memorize and even read and write all you want, but if you don’t practice speaking you’re never going to get it down.

            I wish I would have practiced more in India, but because most people seemed to speak better English than I could speak Hindi, I usually wimped out and let them do the speaking. The times I was most apt to try out my Hindi were when the other person knew no English at all, or when I was buying something from a stranger. I would think and think all the way over to the store of how I could say different things. And you don’t even have to say that much to buy something. But for example, if I needed to ask a question, such as if they had something specific, and where I could find it, things like that. And I could and still can say those kinds of things. The only problem was when they would respond.

            Here’s how a lot of my endeavors went:

            Me: Namaste, (in Hindi) do you have _______

            Them: afhuetrbvluwerualbvluiaewrbavnuawerugar

            Me: ….. sorry, I only speak a little Hindi. Can you say that in English?

            Sometimes I could understand or at least understand enough, and those times I felt great about myself and my abilities, but it was hard to want to keep trying when I feared that I wouldn’t understand what they would say back to me.

            Part of the problem was trying to pick out the individual words they were saying from the long run-together sentence, and then being able to translate that sentence back into English. If it was just a phrase, 3 – 5 words, then it was a lot easier to understand, but once it got past that I was usually completely lost. The other big problem was that a lot of times, even being able to hear clearly what they were saying, my vocabulary just wasn’t big enough to understand all the words they were saying. I tried to add to my vocabulary as much as I could, with flash cards and such, but no matter how many words I could learn it seemed like there were still a million more I still didn’t know.

            I tried to remember how I did it when learning Spanish, and I guess it was kind of the same, but I spent a lot more time before going to Mexico practicing and learning vocab, and then once in Mexico I was forced to use it every day because that’s all that anyone spoke. In India I wasn’t forced to speak it, it was more of my own choice and effort, and once I got started on my film, that project took up most of my spare time, so it was hard to dedicate enough time to Hindi.

            Anyway, I did learn a significant amount though, and a few times, when the shop owner’s didn’t speak a lick of English I was able to successfully get what I needed. So at least I knew enough to get by.