Dreaming in Hindi

This is the third time I've tried to read this. I'm embarrassed to admit that I stopped the first couple of times in part out of jealousy. I am also studying Hindi but I wasn't making such good progress. To be fair it had a lot to do with how little I was studying. This time, though, I have been paying better attention and feeling better about my own skills and so what I found was that reading the book didn't make me feel simultaneously jealous and down on myself for not trying very hard. Instead I really enjoyed it. It felt very familiar and reminded me of my own trips to Rajasthan and all of the help I've been getting from native Hindi speakers. Hearing about her own struggles and triumphs as someone learning language later in life felt very familiar. I know exactly what she was feeling when she would describe problems she had or things she was proud of. Her talk about language learning and motivation was also really fascinating. I liked how we went back and forth between her experiences and some of the more technical details.

Like any good travel memoir it makes me feel like I do at the end of a trip to a beloved place - sad to see it come to an end.

Suddenly fired from her job in her 40s Rich sublets her NYC apt, and takes a year off to learn Hindi in Udaipur, in Northern India. (Yeah, sure I'm only deeply jealous.)

Rich pads her memories from her immersion into a different culture, language, and history with her interviews and research into language learning - whether we can achieve fluency at an older age, how our brains use different literacy systems, and research into deaf children creating language from ASL creole, etc. I love this kinda stuff.

Turns out, Rich also took her journey in 2001- so while I was in grade 8 math when the serious teachers came in to break the news Rich was in her language class - but that is not the only violent political event that happens. Rich recounts the anti-muslim riots in Gujurat and the anti- Muslim sentiment more generally. This part was harder to read about (also the “bride burning”)

I appreciated the context on Hindi within a enormous country with a ton of other languages in it (122 according to Wikipedia!) So while Hindi and English are two major languages used, English is the language of ambition and Hindi has its own hangups around tradition and purity.

I really enjoyed this, definitely one of the better and more thoughtful examples of the “and then I learn another language” genre