This weekend, I caught up with a few of my batchmates from the IAS, who are now posted all...
This weekend, I caught up with a few of my batchmates from the IAS, who are now posted all over India.
This weekend, I caught up with a few of my batchmates from the IAS, who are now posted all over India.
The original post appeared on LinkedIn. You can view it below on Linkedin or scroll below for the web version.
This weekend, I caught up with a few of my batchmates from the IAS, who are now posted all over India. While we were discussing the various challenges of our first postings, our conversation naturally veered toward our progress in learning new languages. Many of us have Hindi as our mother tongue, so this topic was particularly interesting.
Intuitively, one might expect that those posted in Hindi-speaking states would show the greatest improvement in their proficiency in administrative Hindi, or Prashasanik Hindi. Conversely, those assigned to regions with languages least similar to Hindi would likely struggle the most. However, our experiences told a different story. Prashasanik Hindi learners showed only slight advancements, whereas learners of Marathi, Bengali, and Gujarati made the most notable strides.
This reminded me of the Yerkes-Dodson Curve (shown in pic), which suggests that there is an optimal level of stress for peak performance, illustrated as an inverted U-shape. If the task is too easy or too difficult, performance suffers. For our batchmates in Hindi-speaking states, the minimal challenge led to complacency and little improvement. Conversely, those in regions with similar languages, like Marathi, Gujrati, Bengali etc, faced a moderate challenge, which spurred significant progress due to the familiar script and vocabulary.
A similar exciting finding emerged for native Dravidian speakers: they showed optimum performance while learning another Dravidian language due to similarity, yet Prashasanik Hindi remained a perplexing challenge.
Personally for me, learning Bangla has been quite the adventure. The first step I took was to learn the script pretty quickly. Now, whenever I spot something written in Bengali, I can't resist trying to read it. Sometimes I ace it, other times I’m hilariously off. But the thrill of cracking the code and connecting it to Hindi is like a delightful brain teaser. Speaking it adds another layer of fun, especially with all the support and encouragement from those around me. It makes the journey a lot more enjoyable. I'm far from fluent, but I'm relishing every twist and turn, chuckling at my charming missteps along the way!
This language phenomena apply to life as well. Set your goals right, and you'll find the journey more enjoyable than the destination itself. Life is a balancing act—too little challenge and you snooze, too much and you lose.