Tejas is learning Mandarin. A teacher comes home to teach him. I watch him learn the language. It appears very tough as it does not look like any other language which I have learnt.
I know quite a few languages. Tamil being my mother tongue I can speak fluently and can read very fast, but when it comes to writing I am not very comfortable and I wish I had learnt to write my mother tongue well. Still I have time and I will learn how to write properly soon. Kannada an Indian language I can read, write and speak very fluently as I learnt that language till my High School in Bangalore. I can understand and read and write Hindi our National language well. I am not that fluent speaking hindi since my accent gives others creeps when they hear me speak . Sanskrit is another language which I learnt in school/ college as second language. (the reason being it is a scoring subject) I know the meanings of many words in Sanskrit but I can not form complicated sentences of my own, but can make out the general meaning of a sentence if you know what I mean. Reading is no problem being the same script(Devanagari script) as Hindi and pronunciation is perfect. Malayalam is yet another language which I can understand and communicate quite well and read bits and pieces as my daughter studied the language till she finished her school. Of course it goes without saying I am quite comfortable in English, though again my pronunciation gives my kids creeps some time, though not always.
Well after all this background let me tell you that when I first came to Malaysia I was kind of surprised to read boards written in English but the spellings were really horrible. For example a clinic was spelled as klinik. I thought they were poor at spelling the words. It took me couple of visits and a serious thought to this subject to realize that it was not English but the boards were written in the local language the Bhasa Melayu. The language Bhasa Melayu had adopted the Roman script and the words were Malay words written phonetically. For example 'c' was to be pronounced Cha all the time and K is Ka sound and so on. Even though I get very little chance of communicating in Malay, I know the meaning of many words since I can read them because of the Roman script.
Coming back to the beginning, I find it easier to follow Tejas studying communication malay as I can read with him and test him, it just floors me to see his Mandarin. I understand that each character represents words and the meaning changes diabolically when the characters position is changed in a sentence.
All this set me into thinking. My children and many children in India do their schooling in English medium. They have second language as Hindi or many times, Sanskrit for reasons said above and never get a chance to learn their mother tongue. My children can speak Tamil my mother tongue very well. But when it comes to reading and writing they don't know. Every summer holidays when they were young, I tried to teach them some words and we never proceeded beyond writing all our relatives names in Tamil! So now they can recognize some letters and words in Tamil. That is all.
Whenever I read classics in Tamil and some lovely articles, it saddens me that I can not share the experience with my kids. We discuss many things we read in English and these are the conversations I enjoy most with my children. Some of the Tamil articles make me feel like wanting to share with the kids, as they being brought up in India and being Tamil, the artilces are very relevant to them and they can give me so many different ideas about the article or books or what ever I read. I feel sad and feel guilty for not teaching them how to read and write properly.
This again sets me in thinking that if Tamil also can be written phonetically in Roman scripts, my children and many like them can enjoy so many things written in Tamil which is a very ancient language like, Sanskrit, Latin and Greek. I know that even such an idea will make the Tamil scholars to pounce on me for even thinking like this.
I feel since German and French have Roman scripts many people are able to learn them fast and there are so many German and French classes going on in India. A thought can be given to the idea of Romanizing the Scripts of Indian language.
Coming back to Mandarin again Tejas has to cross many hurdles before he even can speak the language since writing it is so different from other languages.
