Editor’s note – This narrative is from a European student who visited India to learn Hindi. The narrative revolves around the author’s general educational experience in a government school for which they had received scholarship to attend.
Author’s note – I am a European, a “professional student” (as a friend once described my mindset), been studying languages for the last decade, even teaching for a few years. Here, in this piece I describe my experience in an Indian government school where I was supposed to learn Hindi.
I think before I start, I have to apologize for sounding bitter. That probably just means that I haven’t gotten over the negative experience yet. My story here is about my Hindi studies in India, in a government owned school, studies financed fully by Indian government. I do want to skip the name of the school though, always been raised to be polite.
Let me start by telling you how I got there. I have been studying languages in the classroom environment every semester for the last decade, even teaching a foreign language for a few years. Let’s say learning languages is my hobby. I have also studied for two years in language schools in East Asia before (also on scholarships), and it was always a rewarding experience studies wise. So, it’s easy to see why, when an opportunity to get a scholarship to study Hindi in India came up, I grabbed it.
The program
The program I got accepted to was two semesters long, with what I assumed to be intensive studies for about three hours every day. Before going I did go through some basic things like the alphabet, first 4-5 chapters in a textbook I had, plus half an audio course, but I fully expected to be tested before class and put in a beginners group. I had been starting my language studies abroad from a beginners’ level with only little knowledge once before, and progressed from there very fast. That time I was learning a language much more difficult for a European than Hindi, and I got to a decent level within two semesters. Let me assure you, I expected to achieve the same or more while in India.
My arrival
Where to begin? That I got information I’m accepted to the school more than a month AFTER the studies had started there? Probably not. That bit seems to have more to do with the Indian bureaucracy as such, less so with education.
I arrived in India as soon as I could, and was not the only one still arriving from their respective countries to the school. The last student, if I remember correctly, arrived more than a month after I did. When I arrived I was very much excited about starting my studies, and finally a few days later I and a few students who arrived with me were tested, and sent to join the beginners’ class. So far everything was going as I had expected.
What the classroom environment was like
Then the studies began. In my group there were 30 students. That is, of course, way too much. Studies suggest that for language learning, 12-15 people in the group are already too much. 5-7 is the recommended number. But well, gift horse and everything, let’s assume it’s OK. I have worked with 25 people groups myself as a teacher, it was hard for me, not optimal for students, but what the hell – it’s doable.
The language level of these 30 students in my Hindi class varied. Some did not know a word or a single letter in the alphabet, some had picked up from Bollywood films enough already to sort of understand quite a bit and speak a bit. Some had studied Hindi in their home universities for sometimes even more than a year, knew a lot of vocabulary and grammar, but did not have any conversational skills. All of these people were put in the same class. I believe the problem is clear here. It is impossible in these cases to teach on a level that is more or less appropriate to most of the students. If the teacher works with the weaker ones, those who know more are bored, and vice versa. Many attempts to persuade the school to divide the group into absolute beginners group and a beginners+ group failed miserably, of course.
Would it have made much difference if the group would have been divided, I do not know. The way the teaching was done was clearly not student oriented. It felt like the teachers did not care much about do we learn anything or not. There was hardly ever any interaction with students during the so called teaching. If there was any, it was initiated by students themselves. Teachers came, did their talking and writing and left. Normally it is not the case in a language classroom. Teachers try to do anything they can think of to get the students to participate, to speak, to ask questions, anything really. This school did some mechanical kind of “teaching”, went through the motions, and no more than that. I think they did not have much incentive to try harder, because as long as the government keeps on issuing scholarships, there will be at least some people coming, though I hear (rumors) the number of volunteers for this is decreasing.
The classes were in Hindi only, which made it impossible for absolute beginners to follow. Again, this needs an explanation. Immersion (doing everything in target language only) is a popular language teaching method, and, if done properly, it works. I have myself learnt language as a beginner with instruction only in target language. The teacher knew what she was doing, though, and could explain herself the way we understood her. What was happening in my Hindi class however, was not the case. It was just everyday Hindi, everyday speed, no attempt to slow down, phrase things simply, repeat or rephrase anything. So, half of the class was just sitting there and doing nothing more. I, for one, did not understand what was being talked about, could hardly guess what it was that was being written on the whiteboard, and what any of that was supposed to mean.
As I already mentioned, but would like to stress once more, it was the teachers who did all the speaking. Some of the students who knew some Hindi would ask a question occasionally and get an answer, but that’s all the speaking there was. We were not doing such basic things as making sentences with the new words or new grammar rules, reading the text in the book out loud, or anything that one would expect in a language class. There was zero language practice. Normally (good) language schools tend to emphasize actual communication. The more students get to speak and practice using the language, the better the class is considered to be. Schools that are not so good go on drilling students only with reading, writing, learning word lists and translating texts; but even that teaches valuable skills. But what did we get to do in class? Let me fill you in.
The classes
One of the classes we had was a writing class. When I arrived more than one month after the studies had begun, they were still finishing learning the alphabet. At home, on my own, with a textbook and internet to help me, I had managed to learn the basics of Hindi writing within around a week. What was there to learn for a month, I do not know. After we were done with the letters, the teacher would read out words and we’d try writing them down. This was, by the way, not a bad thing to do, quite useful really, both for writing and listening practice, to learn to spell properly and hear the differences between different sounds. Unfortunately few weeks later the teacher got replaced by someone who would not do that anymore. It’s hard to say why that was done, but I regretted the change.
One more class was a speaking class. We started, of course, (again) with learning the alphabet. All 30 of us would repeat „kha, kha, kha” after the teacher, and then we were done with the „kha”. Later, he did sound pairs, like long and short vowels, aspirated and unaspirated consonants. The teacher would read sound pairs and ask us to identify which one was which. Unfortunately, for me it was always so that if I did hear that difference, I heard it straight away so the whole practice was unnecessary, and in the cases I did not hear the difference, I still did not hear it after the class was over. I was not the only one. Any exercise has to be done only if it has an effect, and as long as the student needs to get the point that’s being taught. These kinds of listening exercises have to be aimed more towards the difficult sound pairs spending more time on those, (like “hard” and “soft” Ta, for example), rather equally on every sound, regardless of whether it is needed or not. Just doing something for the sake of doing anything is a waste of everyone’s time.
If you think I’m talking of a few weeks time wasted like this, you’re wrong. All of these things described in the paragraph above we did for most of the year. Everyday. For 45 minutes. Last two or three months we sort of went through a few random dialogues he made up on the spot. He just wrote them down, we had to copy the text, then it was read out loud and never ever came up again. This was done after the students begged him to do something actually conversational in the conversational class, and I do appreciate him at least trying. Sometimes the teacher would dictate some words and feel genuinely surprised that many students got most of the words wrong. He never attempted to actually do anything about it though. So, this was all the speaking we did for a year. I’ve had more conversations in class when a teacher wasn’t a native speaker.
Then there was the grammar class. Let me remind you, that it was at the same time we were still learning our “kha, kha, kha” in other classes. The grammar teacher would show up, and start writing on the whiteboard. It was grammar, sure, but more like theory about grammar. When we did nouns it wasn’t things like “nouns ending in –aa are masculine, those ending in –ee are feminine, and this is how they change into plural”. It was more like “There are the following types of nouns: common, collective etc.” That is, I hope you know, NOT what is generally taught in a beginners’ grammar class. What is normally taught is how to apply basic rules to make basic sentences. When our teacher was done writing the particular bit, he erased everything. My writing speed wasn’t enough to even manage to copy down half of it. And, to be honest, as a beginner I did not really see much use copying down some Hindi text that was random (at least for me). I did not understand a word of what he was writing. Till this day I do not understand why he could not have just typed it, and given a copy of a particular grammar lesson to the students. Then we would not have had to spend time copying down from the whiteboard, we could have actually tried going through it all, maybe even tried to (somehow) practice some of these things.
Then there was text reading class. This was the only class, let me note, where we had any printed material in our hands. Everything else was just teachers writing on whiteboard. So in this class there were texts with some new vocabulary listed and the new vocabulary was explained by giving the word a Hindi synonym. A word I did not know explained by yet another word I did not know. And that, for a beginner class. Of course there are textbooks out there written only in the target language. But these are usually published for using in schools in many countries with different languages spoken, and the book relies on the teacher supplying the translation and explanation of the vocabulary list in the students’ mother tongue. The ones where the target language explanation is expected to be sufficient without any translation tend to have a word “advanced” on their cover. In our class, at least ¾ of students spoke good enough English, so I see no reason why English could not have been there next to the Hindi synonym. Though it wouldn’t have improved the book much.
There were never any explanations on grammar or anything in the book, just a block of text with a few exercises in form of questions about the text. Language textbooks tend to move in steps, progressing from easier to more difficult level, each step teaching some new words, some useful sentence construction points, some useful phrases. Texts go from short and basic to longer and trickier. The book we had was, of course, not such a book. The level of the texts printed was probably appropriate in difficulty to those who had learnt Hindi before in their universities. That book we were issued in the class is the only book I have thrown in the garbage ever in my life. Did that the day exams ended. Felt great.
We also had a class that dealt with words. The teacher would write down prefixes, give examples, would go through synonyms, antonyms, and things like that. Basically all I saw was pairs of unfamiliar words. A translation in English was given in this class, but those weren’t really commonly used words, most of the time that was a kind of stuff I’d expect to learn as an intermediate student. Later he started writing down on whiteboard stories from Panchtantra, wrote, erased, left. Did not go through words, meanings, grammar, anything. I could have just as well bought a Panchtantra book in Hindi and mechanically copied down the texts. Did I really need a teacher for learning that particular skill? By the way, this class was the only slightly more useful class we had.
I’ll describe how I passed my midterm exam for this class. Few days before the exam we were given a list of suffixes, prefixes, synonym pairs, antonym pairs and a short story, which we would need to know for the exam. Was like 80 word pairs, and a 5-6 sentence story. Sat down the night before the exam and memorized all that. For the word pairs, I did not even bother learning English meanings. The exam was for at least an hour, I came in, got my paper, filled in the other half of word pairs, wrote my 6 sentences, and was gone in 10 minutes. Got 100% score. Learnt absolutely nothing. Sorry, no, learnt the words for “tired” and “hungry” from the 6 sentence story.
Life in school, some brief notes of
Classes aside, the situation in the hostel was such that we spent most of the time there, in the hostel with other foreigners. Those of my friends, who chatted with Indian friends, did it through Skype or Facebook. We weren’t encouraged to really go anywhere much, let alone make friends with local people. You know, for “security reasons”, what ever those might have been.
I soon started skipping as many classes as possible. We had to be present at least in one class a day, so that’s all I did. Going or not going to classes made no difference, for I did not learn anything in those classes anyway. Could have studied in the hostel, sure, but I’ve never been a self study type. I need teacher, classes, outside of the class communication in the language I’m learning, only then there are results. So, after 8 months of studies I came out the school still speaking zero Hindi. Sure, I had picked up a few words here and there (from listening to my friends speak Hindi on the streets), a few grammar rules (from reading a grammar book in my hostel room, of course, not from the so called grammar class). But as to speaking or understanding – nothing.
I have to add here that I did have reasons for not leaving the school and suffering all through this amount of useless boredom.
I could add stories about teachers not coming to classes (happened in intermediate and advanced classes all the time), sexual harassment case that happened between a male teacher and a female student, inedible food and whatnot, but what I’ve written is long enough as it is.
Conclusion
I do want to end on a positive note here. I have been now learning Hindi for three months in a private school in Delhi, and I’m making huge amount of progress. We speak in class all the time, we read, we write, we make sentences, we listen to songs, watch film fragments, discuss what ever there is to discuss, and have lots of fun in the process. In these few months I have learnt...let’s just say that I have actually learnt. In the previous school, I didn’t. So no comparison on the lines of “I have learnt X times more than what I learnt there” is possible.
Go, private sector!
P.S. – To be fair, some people did enjoy the government school, mostly because other students were a good bunch. Also, for more advanced students in more advanced classes the learning was a bit more fruitful, I assume. With a lot of determination and 90% of self study in the hostel room it is possible to learn something (though I’d rather do that self study in the comfort of my room at home, with similar results, if I were determined enough). There is, I hear, a new man in charge of studies now, he is using a very decent textbook of his own making for the beginners class, so things should be a bit better. All the other teachers are the same though, and I doubt they have improved their methods. That’s how they’ve been teaching for decades, and that’s how they’ll teach.
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