No Man's Land Writer

🧶 Tags:: #Thinking #🌱 #Permanent_Notes
2024-07-02 - 02:54

As an Indian who was sent to an English speaking school, but otherwise uses Hindi I can say that. Most of us stand in a no man's land when it comes to writing or specifically expressing ourselves.

The problems is that we are taught to write in English from such an early stage of our lives that, that's the only language we feel comfortable writing in. Also most of the writing that we do is online, or on computers/Smartphones where the preferred language is English.

The problem I find is that most of us even though we use English everyday, on a deeper level it is still not our first language, you might talk to your friends everyday in English, but you still don't have the kind of expertise you'd want when you're trying to express yourself.

This becomes apparent when we use it express ourselves in long form writings, like I'm trying to do now. There can be better ways to explain this same thing I'm saying here, with better sentences, etc. But I'm stuck here at a mediocre level.

And don't get me wrong it's not like when you'd be given free reins to express yourself in your own mother tongue that it'd make any big difference, you'd still use the same level of mediocre language, even though you might be able to feel the sentences better and deeper, it might still not be the best way to go about it. Why?

Because from a early age you were split in two. Unknowingly... They say that your first language comes from a part of the brain that work differently compared to any other language that you might learn later. The problem is that we learnt half of both. We wrote in English and spoke in Hindi (insert your 1st language here). Although as time went on we learnt to speak English and write Hindi as well, but it was not the same. You'd somewhat learnt a set behavior on a deeper level, that is oh so hard to change now.

So what can be done now? the best to I think to go about this is learn more about both the languages. Try to get better at both of them so much so that it becomes easier to express yourself in both. Will it require some effort and time? Yes! Will it be worth it? Of course...

But if let's say you don't have that much time to put in the effort, then you can still focus on one and get better at it. It'd require half the effort and probably half the time.

This is one of the reasons I write. I understand how bad this no man's land is, or can be! Learning to write is never a bad option to have.