language – Nithin's Blog

French Dreams

Calanque Sugiton in Marseille, FR. One of the most beautiful places I have ever been

I recently went to France, and was filled with a renewed desire to live abroad, particularly in France. When I was there, I tentatively set myself a goal to live abroad before I’m 30. I’m not being very prescriptive about this – it could be for 2 months, or 2 years, and could be someplace as close as Toronto or as far as Taiwan. But since coming back, I alternate between feeling very confident about that goal, and feeling uncertain about it.

Hesitations about this

I have a lot of worries about moving to France, or just living abroad. Some of this is because I’m a generally anxious person who worries a lot. Some of these might be legitimate concerns. It’s hard to tell.

First, I have some worries about even writing about this publicly. I’m scared that a current or prospective employer might find this, and presume that I’m not sufficiently dedicated to my current role. Or that I’ll commit myself to a course of action without an ability to change it by hitting “Post” on a blog post. Or, I fear that committing to a goal raises the stakes of failure. If I tell my friends I want to move to France, and don’t follow through, it will tarnish my reputation.

Second, I’m scared that this might be a misguided desire or might end up being a mistake, for several reasons.

Q2 Language Goal Update

In January I set some very ambitious language learning goals. I wanted to spend 120 hours this year studying 5 different languages.

By this point in the year, I should have logged 40 hours of language study. As of 1/28, I’d completed ~2 hours of study. Since then, I’ve logged 2.25 more hours of iTalki lessons, and attended two language meet-ups (~3 hours total). I’ll log an extra 2 hours of reading time.

That brings my total up to 9.25 hours. I’m more than 30 hours behind where I should be at this point in the challenge, and I don’t think I’ll meet my goal by the end of the year. In this article, I’ll talk about the obstacles I’m facing, how my understanding of myself has changed, and propose some updates to my goals to better match these changes.

1:10 to Yuma

Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:

A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.

Some observations I’ve made so far:

3 hours is a lot of time 🙁

To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.

Updating my language goals

“File:Bilingual sign, Southall railway station – DSC07015.JPG” by Rept0n1x is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

In a previous article, I outlined two goals I wanted to accomplish by summer 2024. The first pertained to languages, and the other was about writing. Much has changed since then, and I’d like to update this blog to reflect that. In this article, I’ll update my language goals, while in a future article, I’ll update my writing goals (and add some new ones).

My fascination with North American French

In the winter of 2018, I studied abroad in Paris, France for 6 weeks as part of the CIEE Open Campus Program. It allowed you to live in 3 different cities over the course of a semester, with 6 weeks in each. I studied in Paris, Madrid and Berlin.

When I chose my arrangement of cities, it was actually Madrid and Berlin that I really wanted to go to. Madrid, because it was the only Spanish speaking city, and I had been studying Spanish in school at that point and wanted to practice. Berlin was because I was interested in Cold War and WW2 history (the former was mostly from playing Call of Duty).

RRR Thoughts

I just watched RRR, the Indian epic anti-colonial film that’s now the third highest grossing film in India, and is receiving critical acclaim and attention in the west. (8/18/22 Edit: The movie is also receiving a fair bit of criticism for promoting casteism and Hinduatva)

Indian cinema in the west is usually associated with Hindi-language Bollywood, and tends to ignore regional cinema. RRR is a Telugu language film, and thus is separate from Hindi language Bollywood. Telugu also happens to be the language that my family speaks. It’s directed by S. S. Rajamouli, who has been successful in producing pan-Indian films that are released in multiple languages. Baahubali was another one of his high grossing Telugu films.

Telugu Pronunciation – Consonants

Don’t want to read? Watch this video instead!

Today, I’ll outline sounds in Telugu that are different from their English counterparts, or don’t exist in English. We’ll need to learn them in order to pronounce Telugu properly, hear distinctions between certain words, and have a good accent. I’ll focus on consonants for this post. I’ll begin by just going over the sounds, without focusing on the more technical linguistics behind it. If you’re curious to learn more, I’ve included it at the bottom of this post.

Telugu Verbs Primer

Hyderabad bazaar — Charminar in Hyderabad. Source: ruffin_reddy

This is a very quick introduction to Telugu verbs – designed to help you get speaking right away. To keep it simple, I’ve decided not to include some more advanced stuff like spelling changes or irregular verbs – I’ll cover them in a future post.

July 6th Progress

I’m writing this article to provide an update to this post. Since writing, it here’s what I’ve gotten done:

bought tickets for RRR (a new Telugu film) on Friday
skimmed through a book (Learn Telugu in 30 Days) to see what I would learn from it, but didn’t study it

I wanted to get more done by this point, and in the spirit of working on the process, here are some things that I think I need to do to be more successful in this endeavor.

Want to learn a language that’s useful in the NYC area? Check out these 5

Let’s say you live in the New York Metropolitan region, the area defined by New York City and its surrounding suburbs. You want to learn a language, but you don’t want to learn one to travel somewhere. Instead, you want to learn a language to communicate with people in your region who speak that language. What language should you learn?

I argue that your best bet is Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese), Russian, Korean or Bengali. I argue this based on a combination of three metrics. The first is total number of speakers of each language, the second is total number of speakers of each language who also don’t speak English well, and third is the percentage of each linguistic community who do not speak English well.