Mother Tongue: A Natural Advnatage

After giving it a miss to post any article in the month of May, here I am back with this one. May was just too busy for me initially with academic work and later part with travel.

Well, it’s a long standing debate whether a child learns better in mother tongue or not? This view point is extremely important from our country’s perspective as an overwhelming majority of students do not study in their mother tongue. For most, there is no alternate to English, when it’s a question of successful career for their future generation. Of course factors such as globalization, our ties with US and the never ending colonial effect, make English the de facto choice as the medium of study.

But well, what’s the thing which we lose out when we go in for English, or any other language which is not our mother tongue, for learning. Regardless of how many languages one speaks, it’s a known fact that humans internally translate every language into their mother tongue and understand it. Enough practice makes a person good at a language and masks the mother tongue impact, with time. But, then, there is this extra effort. So, along with the learning effort, the internal translation effort also needs to be considered. But we can do little or nothing about it as this is the lesser evil among the available choices.

There is probably one alternative which I remember reading in an article by Swaminathan Aiyar (a noted Economist and Columnist with the Times of India), which didn’t appeal to me then. That was to make children learn in their mother tongue until their fourth grade and when they seem to understand things better, switch over to English. Today, I find this solution more appealing because of an incident that I experienced recently. While attending a seminar in one of the courses I have opted for, an American student who is technically sound, delivered a seminar effortlessly. His communication (obviously in his mother tongue), but not his technical skills, made that seminar sound outstanding. I have seen several other International students, who are technically as good as he was, but cannot do, as good a job in delivering a lecture. Probably not being able to speak in their first language does them in. I would say, I envy the Brits and the Americans, who by several means and past history have left others with no choice than to learn their mother tongue. This probably is going to keep others second in the race, all the time, because of the obvious advantages.