I had always wanted to learn French and German due to some inner fascination for England, France and Germany ( next comes Italy and Spain !)
I lived in Bangalore for about two and half years and another two years in Pune but the idea of learning Kannada or Marathi was plainly revolting; Kannada is too harsh sounding and tribal lingo type while Marathi sounds like rustics. A language that does not sound attractive, pleasing and polite to one's ears is certainly not worth taking any trouble to learn.
The first opportunity of learning another language came to me when I went to Belgium. Belgium is a small country with large number of people speaking French too. To prevent their native language Dutch from disappearing altogether the Government there is pretty firm on making every immigrant or foreigner learn Dutch entirely free of cost.
I took an avid interest in learning and found Dutch to be very soft sort of language in terms of sound. Many words sound like English gone sour like lemons like North- nord, south- sud, doctor- tochter, short-korts, market-markt. I have discovered I am a sort of born student; I love my class, love my teacher, and simply love anything about studying. My teacher was Sofie, a somewhat pretty girl in her thirties or maybe late twenties and as heavily pregnant as if carrying sextuplets.We were around 15-18 students in the class and I happily remember most of them. Mel from USA, Deborah and Suewellyn from Brazil, Fabiola from Spain, Mustafa and Mohammad, Ahmed from Egypt, Marcie from Iran and then five Indians Savita, Preeti, Silky, Swati, and myself. Savita was doing the first module a second time having dropped off the first time before completion. It was always funny to watch her painful struggles at pronouncing the simple word ' het '. She would pronounce it anywhere from 'hat', ' hut', ' hart',' hurt' or ' hit' except just the right one. I had to seriously remember all these funny pronunciations in order to be able to replicate them in front of S to tell him what fun I had in class. The other Indian gals blandly showed up insolently late for every class and thought it was ok to make fun of the teacher and the outlandish words; so while these were not serious enough, there was Deborah who was far too serious to be comfortable. She was super good, always right, always gave right answers, solved all the exercises and was never wrong and was always studying. She consequently gave the impression that her whole objective of taking birth was to learn Dutch.
The most memorable and nicest one of the whole lot was Marcie, a sweet, shy, scared, reticent, unsure type of girl from Iran who didn't know much English either, just her native Persian.So she carried three dictionaries: Persian to English, Persian to Dutch and Dutch to Persian in addition, her husband translated her entire lessons in Persian.
Despite a mysterious reverence and love for all my teachers, I will have to admit Sofie was a 'slecht lerares' or 'bad teacher'. That she was too preoccupied because of her pregnant state or had always been like that naturally I really cannot tell but she rarely took interest in class. She made lessons dull and boring and never helped students to grasp or learn. So the outcome was, our classes were mercilessly unending and Sofie's speech entirely incomprehensible. When the class ended everyday, instead of feeling relieved, I used to feel grossly depressed and tense that I was understanding or learning nothing.
Incredibly though, I passed off my first module successfully but had to opt out of the second module due to my own pregnancy. Learning Dutch not only became a memorable experience in itself, it also proved to be highly beneficial to me later on, not only in day to day routine life in Belgium and Netherlands but also in Germany !
Knowledge never goes waste. True
