For those who know me, I have been teaching English and Nepali languages online to people from all around the world since five years. This newsletter features an encounter with a student who made me reflect on the nature of language shifts in Nepal.
This was during the pandemic era. I had been working at a Japan-based language teaching platform but the pay was ridiculous. I wanted to transition into a different platform, and so I did some digging online and decided on a particular one which had been positioning itself really well for both students and tutors. It showed promise — I signed up.
In a few days, I received a notification. The first student had booked a trial lesson. Someone from Qatar.
I was excited. This was a new start and a promise for better pay. I had to crack it.
Many nights fell and the day arrived. I logged in and entered the virtual classroom. In front of me was a Nepali woman. She kept on looking at me but a female voice outside the screen spoke to me first, “She has to do housekeeping but she can’t even read English. Please teach her how to read and speak basic English words.” The voice was that of a Qatari woman in her abode, keeping away from the gaze of a stranger man. Later, I learnt from my student that she was one of the nieces of the Qatari emir.
The lady left the two of us to talk. For me to teach and for her to learn.
She told me that she was from the district of Nuwakot. She had studied in a local public school in her village and had completed grade eight before she stopped her formal schooling. I asked her to read simple one syllable words like ‘hat’, ‘ball’ and ‘car’. She answered some correctly but most were pretty off. I realized that she had been guessing, mostly. A grave task befell upon me. To teach a grade eight graduate the English alphabet and beyond…
Over the next few lessons, we went over the alphabets and transitioned into the topic of monosyllabic sounds. It is always a challenge to teach English to non-native speakers because of the language’s non-phonetic nature. The word ‘table’ can be pronounced in infinite number of ways — only one’s imagination is the limit. And as any student would, she was as imaginative as she could be. Playing her favorite guessing game until my reaction would change and then she would realize that her latter articulation was correct. Just to feel good, not for her to remember the correct response for the future. Teaching is difficult, okay?
As we progressed further, I drew the word ‘school’ on MsPaint (or Paint, as they call it now) and shared my screen. I asked her, “how do you say this?” She made a few attempts but couldn’t really crack it. I had to give her a hint. I told her that it’s the English translation of ‘बिद्यालय / bidhyalaya’
She gave me a blank stare.
I thought she had not heard me correctly. Internet issues? So I voiced the hint again.
A blank stare.
Followed by a question, “what is bidhyalaya?”
Didn’t she go to a bidhyalaya?
So I told her the answer, “I have written ‘school’ here. In Nepali, it’s called bidhyalaya. Haven’t you heard the word before?”
She replied, “Oh, you should have told me ‘school’ and I would have understood it. What is bidhyalaya? I have never heard of it.”
A Nuwakote lady who has passed grade eight from her local Nepali-medium school (bidhyalaya) and now is somehow in Qatar working for a member of the royal family has no idea what a bidhyalaya is!
And I wonder - how much has language use shifted nationally/regionally/locally? Can our dictionaries encapsulate them all? Can our teachers even recognize that ‘agantuk sabda’ or borrowed words are not borrowed just in history.
How fast language changes.
And that’s partially the fun of it.