Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When Indians like us take our kids to school the first time, we worry whether our kids will pick up English fast enough . The need and benefits of knowing English, other than their mother tongue, is obvious. That’s not the case with Americans. Except if they are married to foreigners. Like Robert Lane Greene, who is married to a Finnish woman, wants to “raise a genuine bilingual” . It was interesting to read his take on the whole topic since for us, the benefit of knowing English is obvious, whereas for them, the benefit of knowing anything other than English is, well, questionable. But we’ll get back to the benefits later. Let’s start with the “how to” part. Lane can think of two strategies in case of parents, who between themselves, know multiple languages well: “one parent, one language”, and “one language at home, the other outside”. Most Indians follow one or both patterns while raising our genuine bilinguals. And yet I wasn’t aware of this problem: “Bilinguals hit...

My parents tried learning Kannada when they shifted to Bangalore a few years back. Not that anyone living in Bangalore needs to, but they tried it anyway. They didn’t get very far because all the people they practiced on (bus conductors, maids, shop keepers) would shift to a language that my parents did know once they realized that my parents didn’t know Kannada (you see, they didn’t want to lose business). Which made me think: other than when it is necessary , is there ever any advantage to learning multiple languages? I never considered being able to read literature or watching a movie in another language as something worth the effort, so to me the answer was No. And then I saw this article that pointed out that being multilingual could help you overcome certain biases. How? Well ok, it is really a 2-step process, but the first step was to be at least bilingual, if not multilingual.  The second step? Force yourself to think in the language that you’re least comfortable in. Wo...