When we learned this, I decided that my gateway to India would be through food. But low and behold Baby 2.0 made it impossible for me to handle any really strong spice smells. So the hubby took over cooking the Indian food. With all the moving, packing, and unpacking, I hope to get back into testing out some new Indian recipes in the near future.
So I have been trying to acclimate myself to Indian culture and Hindi through other means - history and learning the language.
We all know that history is not exactly my strong suit. I have never really been able to make that sort of information stick in my head. In support of this new job, I have taken the plunge into India After Ghandi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy. It is a tome - weighing in at over 800 pages. I began reading it nearly 6 months ago and I am still not done yet. It discusses Indian history from Independence (1947, and a little earlier) onward. While I have a difficult time with it (historical writing in general), I am making progress - I reading about the 1960's and am about halfway complete with the book. I also purchased In Spite of the Gods at the same time - I am hoping that all this in depth reading will make this shorter book fly.
If we all thought my issues with history were rough, learning a language pales in comparison. Sometimes I have a hard enough time with english (partially because I know these babies are taking all of my good-hardworking braincells). I stayed away from spoken languages in high school and college, opting for the very dead Latin. It served me well in avoiding having to provide conversational proficiency. But here I am stuck. I definitely need to obtain a working knowledge of Hindi.
So, we got Rosetta Stone. Pregnancy and Rosetta Stone do not mix well. After sitting through the first couple of lessons, I had an emotional breakdown. My brain couldn't seem to keep straight the differences for boy, girl, man, woman, eat, and drink. I was beyond frustrated and left a trail of tissues all around my computer. So I have taken a break from Rosetta Stone for the time being.
In the meantime, I know I work well independently - just me and a textbook. So I have picked up Elementary Hindi along with it's corresponding workbook. I plan on cracking this open (yeah right - like I have time to crack any book open once Rampage arrives) on I complete my history reading (shouldn't take more than...6 more months right?). I also picked up several workbooks geared towards children (cause that is my working level right now) on the alphabet, writing, vocabulary, and grammar.
For JT and Rampage, I picked up some children's books of which there do not seem to be many. Bindi Baby covers numbers and animals in Hindi, as well as, several other linguistic states in India. I also picked out Aamoo the Mango, which has stories with simple sentences that introduce colors, counting, food, shapes, etc.
But I am making the most progress with, of all things, Dino Lingo. Oddly enough, my brain really seems to have taken to this language learning system for children. After just a couple of viewings, I have my numbers through 10, colors, a bunch of animals, and some foods in my vocabulary. (As a mathematician, or well I used to be, it irks me that they do not provide the word for zero as it happens to be a construct attributed to the Indian number system.) I also understand the short conversations and am starting to pick up on the grammar and genders of words (gender not being something I think they intend children to consciously pick up on). There are 5 episodes - the last seeming to contain most of the information that Rosetta Stone throws at you in the first 10 lessons. I did not walk away from the final episode teary-eyed, which made me feel a lot better.
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