It was hard for me to realize the difficulties I am having in communicating before I got here. I heard every manner of things, but I took it upon myself to learn to read and write the Tamil script which was a good idea to be sure. What I've found is that those who say "You won't need to learn any Tamil because everyone speaks English" clearly had a different than I am having. Asking for things in English is more of a task than I'd like to admit. People speak English "konjungonjum" which means "very little." In fact their English and my Tamil are approximately on equal footing as far as I can tell.
Those who speak conversational english speak a funny mixture of british and indian english. This is so difficult, but some funny things have come up in English such as
"today evening," "today morning," and "today afternoon" instead of "this morning," "this afternoon," and "this evening". The idioms are all screwy, and that's not to say they are incorrect, just indianized british idioms that don't make too much sense to me. A third thing that bothers me being the strong american english speaker that I am is using "zed" for "zee". This comes up in mathematics a lot as 'z' as a popular variable name.
To make matters worse I have found out some devastating Tamil news. Apparently the tamil dictionary that I'd been using to learn many words doesn't have all of the words correct. I was saying a few words in Tamil the other night to a couple native Tamil speakers and they had no idea what a couple of the words were. I said them in english only to get confused looks and actual head shakes of "no." These were not the tamil head bobbles which can mean anything necessary, these were definite "no, you are incorrect and this problem is non negotiable" type of head shakes...
I've found this Tamil-English-German online dictionary which apparently now has more correct words, but I don't know how willing I am to go through relearning my several hundred word vocabulary to correct all the mistakes in it... I need a better way to feed Tamil words into my brain!
For now, the only things I know about Tamil are how to read and write the script and random greeting words which people say all the time.
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Wow good!! You are on the right track. Chennai English is another language in itself, as Tamil is! :) It's hard to find a Tamil dictionary or language teaching tool that is actually able to teach spoken, everyday street Tamil. If you find one, can you let me know :)
ReplyDeleteThis is how I had to spell my name in Chennai so people would understand me (I am American, too).
My name- Jennifer
Tamil spelling
Jee - eee- Yen - "yet another" yen - eye - eef - eee- yaar (rolling the r)
Incidentally this 'yaar' was also a word as it
"yaar" meaning buddy or friend (What up yaar? ;-)
Good luck. Wish I was there!
I tell people my name is "kuh luh rah kah"
ReplyDeleteOr I just write out Alexander in full. That seems much easier to most people.
The phrase "everyone speaks English" is indeed an urban legend.
ReplyDeleteYet people also claim "no-one speaks Esperanto" which is also untrue.
If you have a moment please look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0
Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.
I think I'm developing my own version of English-Esperanto as I'm been communicating in a mixture of English and several other broken languages recently. I've also been spoken to in at least a dozen languages lately and sometimes I get it, and mostly I don't...
ReplyDelete