The Hindi Project, Part II

It’s been a month and a half since I’ve started the Hindi Project. I haven’t been giving learning a language the full attention it deserves amidst applying for the Fulbright, traveling, and starting a new job. Now that I’m more settled, I’ve started to get back into my routine of Italki, Duolingo, and Anki flashcards. I’ve started putting conversational prompts into my flashcards, asking myself questions like “what color is your hair?” And “where is your family from?”.

I’ve been taking classes with my Italki tutor about two times a week. I’ve also found a conversational partner through Tandem, and we’ve talked four or five times so far. She's also excited to learn more about America. She mentions that a lot of people at her college that know English seem more confident. It's interesting that she says that, because I feel like I'm a pretty confident person but when I speak Hindi I am for sure not confident. It's nice to be in that space again and to feel yourself working at something and getting better. I feel this especially when it comes to my accent. My conversational partner mentioned that it would be good to try and emulate an Indian accent for a film star or someone else and talk along with them to get the pronunciation just right. I think with Telugu, I have some of the pronunciation down, but it’s far from perfect. I'm still pretty self-conscious of my accent and think I sound like the White people from Lagaan.