Mother Tongue!
When my elder daughter was born,I had no doubt in my mind what language to teach her.I taught her english.I was so immature to think that and by the time I realized it is too late.When I came to America I used to speak in Hindi with my husband.We used to have accent problem with Americans and at times it was very embarrassing when they looked at us with perplexity on their face.Therefore even at home my husband and I switched completely to english to avoid those frustration and improve our accent.That never happened though.
We continued this process with our daughter too, although with her our mind set was different.We started her off with english so that she did not have to learn english separately.Little did we know that we were hurting her instead of helping her.Now she can speak fluent english ,can express herself better than kids of her age in India but the biggest drawback is that she picked up our accent.She can speak in American accent but it does not come to her naturally.So in spite of being born in America she has Indian accent which she unfortunately picked up from her immature parents.
I am not ashamed of her or myself having Indian accent but at least for her I wanted her to fit in ,and accent and language can be a big barrier for her.Where as I see most Indian kids who grew up learning their mother tongue have double advantage.Firstly they learned their own mother tongue(one extra language) and as they start going to school they pick up english language and American accent from Americans.I still cant forgive myself for depriving her from this knowledge.
The biggest problem is she cant converse with her grandparents very well.She feels handicap when she talks to relatives who only know Hindi.The worse part is that since we started off in english with our elder daughter so I had to continue with my younger one also,making her handicap too.Now I try to reverse this but it seems very hard and overwhelming. I am anyway trying to work on this. Fortunately my elder one can understand Hindi very well now and can speak few words here and there too but younger one would not budge .Instead she refuses to talk at all if I talk to her in Hindi.
How do I make it right?
We continued this process with our daughter too, although with her our mind set was different.We started her off with english so that she did not have to learn english separately.Little did we know that we were hurting her instead of helping her.Now she can speak fluent english ,can express herself better than kids of her age in India but the biggest drawback is that she picked up our accent.She can speak in American accent but it does not come to her naturally.So in spite of being born in America she has Indian accent which she unfortunately picked up from her immature parents.
I am not ashamed of her or myself having Indian accent but at least for her I wanted her to fit in ,and accent and language can be a big barrier for her.Where as I see most Indian kids who grew up learning their mother tongue have double advantage.Firstly they learned their own mother tongue(one extra language) and as they start going to school they pick up english language and American accent from Americans.I still cant forgive myself for depriving her from this knowledge.
The biggest problem is she cant converse with her grandparents very well.She feels handicap when she talks to relatives who only know Hindi.The worse part is that since we started off in english with our elder daughter so I had to continue with my younger one also,making her handicap too.Now I try to reverse this but it seems very hard and overwhelming. I am anyway trying to work on this. Fortunately my elder one can understand Hindi very well now and can speak few words here and there too but younger one would not budge .Instead she refuses to talk at all if I talk to her in Hindi.
How do I make it right?
Comments
Post a Comment