हम तोडी तोडी हिंदी बोलते है

I have a new favorite Hindi word: टुकड़े-टुकड़े (pronounced "tookaday tookaday"), meaning "bits" (never mind that I learned it in the context of "I will tear my enemy to bits" in an Indian Aesop's fable-type tale.)  It's more that the word is just fun to say! -- the sounds themselves are something a bird or a rooster might say to another animal... or what someone might say when they're thinking ("Hmm...tookaday tookaday...")

Both Tyler and I seem to be at tipping points with our Hindi (which sounds about right, considering we leave India in two months!)  It's turned from something we should know, to something that's become innately fun...  And useful too! -- the shopwallas in Kathmandu seemed so delighted at Tyler's negotiations in Hindi/Nepali that we emerged with quite a few great deals on outdoor equipment (but that's another story in itself).

In a way, languages are also living histories, allowing you to delve deeper into the culture you're experiencing.  For instance, we were intrigued at the similarities between Nepali and Hindi, and learned this may have had something to do with high-caste Hindus (Brahmans and Kshatriyas) fleeing India in the wake of Muslim invasions in north India hundreds of years ago (and Buddhist monks fleeing India before that).  As our Hindi teacher pointed out this morning, Nepali comes from "Pali", an ancient language and means "new Pali".  It's a middle-Indo-Aryan language, whose structure remains in medieval times -- not having been changed and modernized as Hindi has, with the infusion of Persian influences.  In India, even paying attention to people's choice of words (coming from Sanskrit versus Perso-Arabic) can give you a sense of their political affiliation. 

Indirectly through Vipassana, I learned that just as Eskimos supposedly have numerous words for "snow", Hindi speakers have multiple words for "happiness" (connoting surface happiness, deep happiness/joy, excited happiness, etc.)  And on a deeper sense, no one "is" happy -- rather, one "has" happiness, connoting the fleeting nature of an abstract emotion.

Still an incredibly long way from dreaming in Hindi, but the journey continues to be wonderfully fun.