Personal Bilingual Experience: Why Knowing Hindi is Beneficial

The bilingual experience appears to influence the brain from infancy to old age. You can never be too old to learn something new. There could be many reasons that lead to the need to learn new languages but, the advantages are vast. My mother tongue is Marathi, so my first words were in Marathi. Then, I started play school and after a few months of play school; I came back home and started to talk in Hindi with my mom; my parents and grandparents were shocked as there were not a lot of people to talked in Hindi in front of me at that age or until then. My parents then went on to meet my class teacher and there they were told that I had be seated next to a girl whose mother tongue was hindi; that is when they understood why I was speaking in Hindi all of a sudden. 

As findings show that babies’ brains become tuned to whatever language or languages they hear from their surrounding people. A monolingual brain becomes tuned to the sounds of one language, and a bilingual brain becomes tuned to the sounds of two languages. When I got to the second level of my pre school, I could understand and speak the most basic words for both the Hindi and Marathi. Also, the year of my preschool, I was introduced with english language; we began with alphabets and names of the animals and colours and basic sentences like “my name is Khushi” and more. I happened to grasp that language easily as well. By the last year of my pre school I was able to understand and speak many words and form basic sentences in three different languages, i.e Marathi, Hindi and English. But it turned out that, with everyone at home like my father, and grandparents, I would talk with them in Marathi all the time. But, as the first time I ever spoke in Hindi was with my mom, so I would only talk with her in Hindi and she also continued talking to me in Hindi in order to improve and get me fluent with Hindi language too. As time went by I realised that I have never spoken to my mom in any other language in Hindi until now. Even if she happens to ask me a question in Marathi, I would always reply back in Hindi. Even if I am talking to someone about something in Marathi or English and if had to say something to my mom in middle of the conversation I am having with someone else, I would literally switch the language in Hindi with talking to my mom and then switch back to whatever I have speaking with the other person.

Learning different language gave me a boost and confidence in myself in various highschool events. One time I have the exchange programme in Finland, and we had to live with the finnish families we were appointed to for 2 weeks; the families were of the children who were in theatre and that’s why we were in Finland, for a workshop on theatre. After a few days of training, we were supposed perform a theatre act from what we learnt from the workshop and also perform a few indian dance forms for them in a big programme they hosted for us. We chose 3 different songs, one in Hindi, second one in Marathi and third one in Punjabi. With all the dance forms we were forming we also decided to say something about the culture we’re performed in its own language, so we had someone speak in Hindi as all of us, ie. Me and my friends were fluent in Hindi as it is our national language, that wasn’t a problem. Luckily, i was fluent in Marathi to give a speech about that culture in Marathi and also, we had a friend whose mother tongue was Punjabi; so, he gave the speech in Punjabi. I felt really proud of myself for knowing to speak fluency myself because it was a huge platform to perform in front of.