Differences

Having students from different countries around can be really amusing sometimes. Today in the break (literally!) from the German class, there was a small group which was formed, in it there was a person from Palestine, one from Jordan, one from Bengal, one from Gujrat, and one from Maharashtra. Eventually, we were tired of speaking a foreign language all the time so the Palestine and the Jordanian started talking in Arabic. That was when i thought "those two are from two different countries, how can they speak the different languages!!"

But immediately i realized the various questions asked to me by other people. A few are

Brazil: how can two Indians not speak the same language

Turkey: Is it true that India has more than 200 Languages

Somebody i don't remember: How can all three of you be the same country and still talk in english all the time!

This is how the world is, we all have our own notions about the world, and distant parts of it which really come as a "culture shock" when we actually experience it. One guy though did really believe it till i pulled out one of my Indian currency notes and counted the languages for him.

Heh! And in Germany, it seems there're dialects which sound nothing like textbook German and this evening, luckily, when one of my neighbors had his friend, from just-out-of-Stuttgart, over for dinner, i had the privilege of listening to one, and compared to the "special German" (compare to 'news in special English' from VOA) we're used to at class, it sounded something like how Brad Pitt sounded in snatch, talking "English" to a slick looking, country-speaking, Jason Statham in "Snatch"!

And, @Adithya's comment about chucking the dictionary for one of my previous posts.

Learning German by chucking the dictionary is like trying to learn Sanskrit by listening to the Sanskrit news on TV every weekend, you'll miss the news, and will never learn the language too, apart from wasting time that is. Well, even if it's slow, when you learn, learn it technically!