A few months ago, someone reached out to me from Malaysia asking if I might teach her spoken Tamil. At first I was deeply hesitant. There are many wonderful teachers of Tamil from Tamil Nadu and other Tamil-speaking communities around the world. “Who am I to teach the language?” I thought.
But she was looking for something different than that. “I want to study with you,” she said, “precisely because you’ve had to learn the language from the ground up.” Even though she came from a Tamil-speaking household, she hadn’t had the opportunity to learn the language in depth and felt deeply self-conscious when attempting to speak, especially if others made fun of her pronunciation.
So we began working together. Her progress connecting what she can hear and what she can say has been nothing short of remarkable. And in the process I’m finding I can be of considerable help to students who might have previous experience with Tamil but haven’t flourished with traditional or more grammar-centric approaches.
How Does One Learn to Move In A Language?
In my own study of languages, I’ve found that one of the great keys has nothing to do with grammar or even learning words. Instead it connects with discovering or creating a context in which it feels okay to not know something, or to say something awkwardly, or to mess things up.
Just like little kids do. Learning a language requires us to be as vulnerable as a child, and as cared for and sheltered.
Or to put it another way, it requires us to do things we’ve never done before–form sounds that our tongues have never made before, think thoughts that our minds have never thought.
If on top of this newness there’s any judgment or ridicule, our bodies and minds alike can stiffen, inhibiting the very process we mean to encourage.
Only when we feel safe and encircled in care—when our nervous system isn’t gearing up to protect us from harm—can we be in a position to learn anything deeply.
Here’s an example, from my first weeks in rural South India, where I’d moved to learn, among other things, how to speak Tamil more fluently. Each evening I’d walk through the center of the village where I was living, fascinated by the Tamil I could hear all around me—the villagers talking politics beneath the neem tree, the neighbors inquiring about each other’s crops and fields, the youngsters and oldsters and everything-in-between-sters playing games of all kinds along the lamplit edges. And at the same time I was terrified to open my own mouth.
Until one evening a young man sitting with a few others on the steps of the temple by the stop where I’d just gotten off the bus hollered out to me and called me over.
“Hey,” he said, “every evening we watch you rush through the center of the village, making a bee-line for your house down the lane. What’s your hurry? Why don’t you sit down and talk?”
“I’d like to,” I said, “but I don’t really know how.”
“Don’t know how?” he said. “You sit down and open your mouth, that’s how.”
And despite feeling scared and afraid of messing up, I did sit down, because my new friends started to draw me out and make me feel more at ease. Naturally, intuitively, and supported by the context of a culture rich in traditions of hospitality, they created a space, a context, in which I could dare not only to speak, but to learn.
This, far more than grammar or vocabulary, makes the difference between learning to move freely in another language, or leaving its possibilities behind.
A Question for You
As I’ve been deepening my ability to create this sort of context one-on-one and online, I’ve had people begin approaching me about teaching Tamil in small groups of two to four students.
Here too I’ve felt a bit hesitant. It’s not because I have any doubt about my ability to help people learn—that’s something I’ve been honoring for nearly three decades—but because leading a language-learning group online is still new to me. As I’ve begun putting possibilities together, I’ve become curious if there are others for whom something like that might be appealing.
What exactly might such a group look like? I’m still exploring, but it would certainly include elements like these:
- A playful approach to conversation able not only to increase fluency dramatically but also to cultivate new patterns of thought.
- The understanding of spoken language as an embodied physical skill which benefits from short, focused exercises, easy enough to incorporate into daily life but powerful enough to cultivate a person’s natural eloquence.
- Guided forays into beloved movies, stories, songs, and poetry, to be able to taste the wisdom that every language reveals through its greatest poets and writers.
Might this be something that you, or anyone you know, would be interested in? Do you have any suggestions for elements to incorporate? I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have. Write to me here!
Thank you. Your own interest and attention help create a space for me to dare to try something new myself.
Warmly,
Thomas
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