I’ve come to realize that the best possible way to learn anything new in a new country is to experience something that causes panic. Once the situation is over, you either learned something new or know exactly what you need to learn in order for that situation to never happen again. Example:
My lovely roommate, Emily, and I were staying in a home stay in a different part of town than the rest of our team, so one day we went to visit them. We had asked the girls in our homestay how to get to the place we were meeting near their homes and knew exactly what to say in Hindi. We got there perfectly fine and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves because we had gotten somewhere without getting lost. (Obviously God was working on my pride that day). It was only once we got there that we realized we had no idea how to get home, this was our first mistake, yes there were many. You see in order to get somewhere you have to know the exact name so that you can tell the auto or bike rickshaw man where to go. But we didn’t know where we lived. We had no idea what the name of our part of town was and we didn’t know of any major landmarks we could tell him. But thank goodness we figured out the name of the region we live in from one of the women in our teammates houses. So we flagged down an auto rickshaw and told him where to go, he responded in very fast Hindi that I could not understand at all, at this point all I knew how to say is will you go here and how much in Hindi? So he first overcharged us but we just wanted to get home so after fighting him for a little we decided on a lesser overpriced cost and got in his auto.
Once we were in his auto he decided he wanted to talk with us which is unusual for an auto driver to do so I just kept telling him, in Hindi, “I don’t understand” , with which he would respond with a huge Hindi response very fast so I would then say “I am learning Hindi” and again he kept responding very quickly with way too much Hindi for my current level. After this he started yelling at us “Bolo, Bolo” which thank goodness we had just learned that morning means, “Tell me”. It was then that we realized he had no idea where he was going. So Emily said all she could think of which was “Bus, Bolo” which we figured might roughly translate to we will tell you when to stop, well it really says “Tell me, Fine”. After he stopped and asked for directions, and we couldn’t stop laughing because we really thought we might never make it home, he got back in and seemed to know where we were going so I said “Do you know” hoping he knew I was asking him if he knew where we were going. Well I had actually asked him do you know in the feminine form so he was just laughing at us the whole time. Finally he got to a street we knew and we started yelling, “right, right” in Hindi, which he didn’t understand, He just turns around and in English goes “Right?” And its in these moments that I laugh because sometimes we know words in Hindi that they only know in English. Awesome. WE finally got to our street and realized we didn’t know how to say stop, so we yelled “Bus, bus, bus” which means its fine. But he still didn’t stop, I literally had to step half way off the auto while it was moving to get him to stop, but we had made it home.
So here is what we learned:
1. We should know how to say “Do you know where this is?” in Hindi.
2. We should also know how to say Do you know in a male form for when talking to men.
3. We should probably know how to say you’re going the wrong way and or stop.
4. And we really should always make sure we know how to get somewhere and get back. Duh.
But on the bright side, we got such a big lesson on Hindi out of the panic of this situation. But in the future I would really choose a different avenue for learning new language.
The picture we took while thinking we were never going to make it home.
This is an "auto rickshaw" we think we should buy one for the team.
0 comments: