Dreaming in Hindi (30 page)

In immersion-only Antriksh Flats, this is the equivalent of flipping the bird.

 

"
WHAT MADE ME REALIZE
how much I dislike the sound of French was the continual, unctuous, caressing repetition of 'l'oiseau' (the bird). It is a word that cannot be pronounced without simpering. I did not want to speak French because it gave me the bird." Several weeks before I boarded the plane to come over, I'd read a book containing accounts by people who, hell-bent on learning a second language, had ended up in far-flung destinations. Called
The Neurobiology of Affect in Language,
it was an exploration into the ways motivation affects the process. Many entries were rapturous, like this excerpt from Alice Kaplan's memoir
French Lessons:
"There was chocolate in every store, on every corner, chocolate bars with colored wrappers showing roses, bottles of milk, nuts in rows of six, three deep. For each bar of chocolate I didn't eat, I learned a verb. I grew thinner and thinner. I ate French."

Heady with the prospect of transport, I concentrated on those entries. I ignored the selections like the first one above, which I found when I rechecked the book. It had been written by a man, age fifty-five, who'd taken to the Alliance Française in Paris with great enthusiasm till he was repeatedly referred to as
imbécile
by his teacher and snubbed by students who considered him ancient. Some diarists, I discovered on the second read, had been faded by frustration until they were blurry presences in the classroom. Others had launched confrontational language strikes, same as I had.

The author of the book, the linguist John Schumann, had wondered back in the sixties why some people stall with a language, while others bulldoze all roadblocks. The deciding factors aren't necessarily tied to natural talent, he'd realized during a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Iran. Some of his fellow volunteers had earned blazing scores on the MLAT, the Modern Language Aptitude Test, then gone on to have only middling success with Farsi, the language of Iran, whereas others who'd placed in the midrange on the MLAT ended up speaking circles around the rest. Their assignments, he realized, had had a lot to do with this: The most promising volunteers, the ones who'd swept the test, were mostly stationed in cities where, with English speakers on every corner, you could blow off Farsi practice at every turn. The others had landed in flyblown outposts where, if you wanted to say anything—and often you desperately did:
The well water's green; you sure it's potable?
—you had to work to be understood. You had to learn Farsi.

This observation got Schumann to wondering what other factors influence performance in a foreign tongue. When he returned to Boston, he got a job teaching English as a second language and discovered "the same thing" as he had in Iran. "Social and psychological factors made a huge difference," he recalls. The Italians he taught outshone the Puerto Ricans. The Italians had access to established Italian communities in the area and "got jobs right away. The families became socially integrated. The Puerto Ricans didn't. They were agrarian, they went back to Puerto Rico often."

Schumann had started this job around the time second language acquisition studies were beginning to take off. Most foreign language teachers back then were still using the lockstep approach: pattern practice drills, which were supposed to replicate what the main theorists at the time, the behaviorists, believed was the way infants learned a language—one grammatical structure at a time. "Little Tommy is hungry?" the mother would ask, and gurgling Tommy would supposedly file away the knowledge that in that particular linkage of noun and adjective, the copula should be singular. This produced a lot of laborious French and Spanish classes, where kids were hammered with rote lessons, similar to how they were taught science and math.

Things were about to change radically, though. Noam Chomsky had, not long before, launched a salvo at the collective thinking when he proposed his theory of universal grammar. In it, he maintained that we all have access to some kind of natural wellspring of grammar, that we all have something like a language acquisition device in our brains, that it doesn't make sense to beat example after example into children's heads, since language begins to expand on its own, almost as if it had a life of its own. That was the end of the "I tie my shoelaces, you tie your shoelaces" form of French and Spanish instruction, the beginning of understanding that language study is a more human operation than, say, trigonometry, and so subject to psychological forces.

"There is no question that learning a foreign language is different to learning other subjects," the English psychologist Marion Williams writes, summing up the viewpoint that holds now. "This is mainly because of the social nature. Language belongs to a person's whole social being: it is part of one's identity. It involves far more than simply learning skills, or a system of rules, or a grammar; it involves an alteration in self image, the adoption of new behaviors." If language is arguably what makes us human, then learning one has to be, by definition, messy, frustrating, glorious, cause for despair, unnerving in how it obscures itself and also for what it reveals.

Not to mention subject to the whims of motivation. A lot of studies into that aspect of SLA were being launched in the late 1960s, when Schumann enrolled in Harvard for a doctorate in human development. The Canadian psycholinguists Wallace Lambert and Robert Gardner had just come out with their observation that people learn languages from one of two broad motivations: either they're doing it to make a living, or they have some compelling desire to slip into another community. Sometimes this second aspiration stems from the fact that they feel masked in their own. "Why do people want to adopt another culture?" Alice Kaplan writes. "Because there's something in their own they don't like, that doesn't name them." Sometimes the underlying factor is less urgent. Next year, if they can keep up with Wednesday nights at the Y, they'll haul off and surprise the proprietor of that little café in Provence with their stream of bons mots. Then he'll really think they're sophisticated. Then they will, too.

These fast-talking personalities of the future—the one who startles and delights the friends in Rome, the one for whom Mandarin flows like sweet wine—are what the Hungarian psycholinguist Zoltán Dörnyei calls the "ideal L2 self" and are essential to long-term success. Motivation, he believes, consists of the desire to reduce the discrepancy between your actual self and your ideal L2 self. In India, after Vanita was attacked, I seriously contemplated leaving. Once I did that, the whole enterprise was derailed, for I was not seeing myself there anymore. Lose your future self, you lose all motivation with it. It's a truth that applies in every area.

To this day, motivation is the subject of more academic papers and discussion than any other aspect of SLA, partly because it's the only area in which a consensus can be reached—namely, that motivation is sheer firepower. Had you taken our motley group at the school and gauged how much of it each individual had, you could have predicted on day one roughly how everyone would do by the end of the year.

Harold, whose main incentive to come to India was not, shall we say, driving—to get out of grunt work, far as I could tell—scored, essentially, zero on the year-end improvement test, his being shipped out early having precluded him from taking it.

At the other extreme, you had Helaena, whose motivation was compelling: she could only be fully Helaena, the avatar version, in India and in Hindi. Her motivation was the greatest, and, indeed, she got top scores in the test: 25 percent more advanced than at the beginning of the year.

The Whisperer was there, she said, "to communicate better with my father," a goal that was, possibly, less sustaining, for in addition to Hindi, her father knew English. Since a bridge of communication already existed, that might have cut the impetus some. At any rate, at the end of the year, she came in 13 percent improved.

As did I, on the button. But since the Whisperer had a strong base of Indian language to start with and I had years of brain rot on her and Helaena, I have, in brooding moments, tried to make the claim to myself that my improvement was, relatively, stratospheric. No,
I
was the shooting star. In my dreams, perhaps. But as far as motivation went, all I knew going in was that it felt like rocket fuel—I wanted that language like I wanted life itself, it seemed. Later, I'd see this was true.

 

WHEN SCHUMANN WAS
still at Harvard, as part of his dissertation he began meeting twice a week with a factory worker who was Costa Rican, illegal, living with other Costa Ricans in a Portuguese neighborhood of Cambridge, and basically only there to make money. Schumann wanted to document how the man's English had developed at the end of a year, but he couldn't, owing to the fact that there'd been little progress. The man, he found, had settled into an obdurate, entrenched kind of pidgin.

Through these meetings, he came up with a theory that's now widely accepted in the field: all language learners, early in the process, go through a "pidginization" stage. But while some build their fragmented sentences into full language, others never progress. "I became interested in what makes someone get stuck," says Schumann, who went on to become chair of applied linguistics at UCLA.

It was because he was looking for clues that he asked people, in the late seventies, to document their experiences learning languages. But when the journals came back, he found he had nothing useful. One girl encountered bug troubles so bad she looked like a "smallpox victim"; another ended up teaching English to the children of a Japanese gangster, and terrified to be. But mostly, as far as he could see, the journal entries were all over the place. The only repeating theme he or his colleagues could find was competition. Every correspondent mentioned it. A little competition appeared to act like a spur, too much turned them off. And that was it for unifying principles.

Till twenty years later, when Schumann came across an idea, called stimulus appraisal theory, that the Austrian scholar Klaus Scherer was proposing. According to Scherer, there are five broad ways in which you appraise an experience, the stimuli that surround you: how pleasant it is; how compatible it is with your self-image and social image; how relevant the undertaking is to your needs and goals; how able you are to cope with it; and how novel it is. This last factor has a more variable impact than the other four, whose effects are more straightforward. If something is pleasant, you like it, end of story, but novelty goes both ways. A little of it adds fizz, makes the experience enjoyable. Too much produces confusion and anxiety, similar to competition. These five variant perceptions combined, Scherer argued, are responsible for every take you have on anything.

In reading over the theory, Schumann was struck by a thought: Every one of his diarists had, in fact, been evaluating their studies according to these criteria. There'd been five strong repeating themes running through the journals. He just hadn't seen them. He set about adapting stimulus appraisal theory to the business of learning a language, got to thinking how one person's interesting experience with Italian is another person's wipeout. Scherer, he began to think, had left out an important consideration, one that applied double time to second language learning: the enormous set of likes and dislikes that you have, over time and as the result of your experiences, stored in your brain. The new way to say "sky," for instance, contains a remembered threat of leopards, and since you have traveled this far in an attempt to show that you're unafraid of anything, the word strikes you as thrilling. Or you loathe cats, big or small: the word provokes a thudding feeling. These responses would draw on different neural sites than the ones commonly regarded as the crucial language sites, and here Schumann sketched out a possible ancillary network. The amygdala would have to be involved: the site that mediates fear and anxiety is the emotional center of the brain. Also, the orbitofrontal cortex, which has a lot to do with judgment, along with the nervous system located in the body proper.

On the phone, when he and I spoke, he elaborated on how the stimulus filters work. "Going to France, where it's Christian and Western, might provide enough novelty to interest some people, but if that same person went to India, it might be too much," he said. I'd been describing how, after Vanita's assault, for a time I'd bowed out; the place had grown too surreal, was too much.

"A Peace Corps volunteer I know was in a country where she'd lived before," he said. "She'd gone back, and things had changed. It was the same city but different this time when she encountered it, and she found it really disorienting. Novelty's a funny thing: you want just enough to make it interesting and not too much to make it overwhelming." You can perceive French as punishment the first time you take it, as thrilling when you try again. A similar split reaction occurred at the school around the time of the hit on Vanita.

In the days after, Helaena continued to blitz happily in Hindi. I gave out stony looks and English, thought,
They're idiots.
Perhaps my recent experiences in the street had made me feel a kinship with poor, alarmed Vanita, had retooled my amygdala in ways Helaena's hadn't been. Or maybe, being from New York, I was quick to link Manesh's political affiliations with the events that had occurred in my hometown in September, to erect a wall between me and Manesh and any associates of his I knew. And likely, as Schumann speculated when I related the story, "when the cultural differences really made a difference, you had to take the position
They're idiots and I'm going to speak differently.
"

Whatever the reason, pleasantness soured, my ability to cope eroded. My self-image stopped short of being able to encompass an association with a fanatic who'd been plotting murder. Novelty turned to anxiety, immediately, and I quit speaking Hindi. I sized up the stimuli and beat it out of there, for a time at least, in my head.