Polyglots

I can speak English, Malayalam and not too comfortable in Hindi. In that I can understand Hindi almost completely but am not to comfortable in speaking it with enough confidence. I can get by if needed but it’s just that since the mid 90s, I stopped watching Hindi movies and tv shows and I don’t live in an area of India where it is spoken all the time. So I kind have lost touch with the language and I will make a lot of mistakes, mostly grammar, when I speak in Hindi. But yes, I do understand it well and can converse if push comes to shove.

When I was young I learned some Arabic as I was born in Kuwait and lived there till the age of 11. We had to learn some basic Arabic as a 3rd language in our school (3rd after English & Hindi) and it wasn’t given much importance as it was an Indian board school, teaching us the CBSE syllabus that is taught in India, the central Indian school syllabus. Same textbooks, Indian management and mostly Indian teachers. However I soon forgot all the Arabic I learned (which was very little) in a few short years once we settled down in India.

I wish I could speak fluent French, Arabic and Spanish sounds fun. Italian (will also need to gesture a lot and grab my crotch a few times in a conversation), German, Dutch, Cantonese, Mandarin, Tamil, Telugu. If you can speak a lot of languages, it makes it so much more fun when you travel. Oh and I’d love to be able to speak Klingon & Vulcan.