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Why isn’t Bengali/Bangla more popular? | ||
Tags: Bengali | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| unmaad Tetraglot Newbie India Joined 5974 days ago 38 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: Bengali*, English, GermanC2, Hindi Studies: Japanese | Message 25 of 35 16 October 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged |
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I both agree and disagree with most of the reasons discussed here:
- Economic status is unrewarding: True, but people learn Uzbek and Georgian. - Spoken only in one part of the globe: Esperanto is not spoken anywhere, still it has some learners. Same applies to Latin. - Never having the need to use the language: Same applies for Japanese, Korean, Chinese etc. (when you are not in these countries) - Second language in India: Why do people learn Cantonese then? Even the Chinese agree that Mandarin will slowly take over the whole country, something that will never happen between Hindi and Bengali. - Bengali people speak English: Only in cities and only in formal occasions. It is impossible to really interact with people without speaking or at least understanding parts of the language. All of above and some more notwithstanding, Bengali still remains the sixth most spoken language in the world. So why don’t people learn it? The answer is simple. They don’t learn it, because there are no proper resources to learn from. Even Basque has more available materials than Bengali. The only available resources will take the learners only a few steps beyond the general greetings, and that itself is a lowly reward for a language lover. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| triliana Newbie United States Joined 5567 days ago 2 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Bengali | Message 26 of 35 25 October 2012 at 2:23am | IP Logged |
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Hi Liddytime, I've been learning Bengali since 2007 using a variety of methods. I'm
also in the Pacific Northwest. Do let me know if you are interested in starting a group! Of course, it depends on where you are; just WA state is huge! I think the reason people are not interested in learning Bengali, despite the number of speakers, is that generally outside of a few places in the Western world (Jackson Heights!) you are really not going to encounter it. There may be 300 million people who speak the language, but they're highly concentrated in Bangladesh and the Eastern states of India, an area about the size of Texas. If people want to learn a South Asian language, they almost always choose Hindi. If they want to learn a language of a majority Muslim nation, they will choose Arabic for the obvious reasons. So Bangla goes overlooked. There are not very many resources out there, but the number that are there now is much greater than when I started learning. Additionally, if we get vocal about wanting to learn, people will hear us. It may just take time. I submitted a request to Pimsleur just today to add Bengali, and I've been badgering Livemocha for ages! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| FinnegansWake Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4233 days ago 10 posts - 14 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: French | Message 27 of 35 17 November 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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Interestingly, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature is the
Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. From what I've learnt, Bengali has a very diverse literary tradition, ranging from Middle Age poetry to modernist plays. I am very certain the Bengali canon is superior to the Hindi canon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_Renaissance#Science Edited by FinnegansWake on 17 November 2012 at 9:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5238 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 28 of 35 13 December 2012 at 8:29pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't posted here for a while, but I am an active Bengali learner too (Hi Trillana!).
Bangladeshis are ALL over the New York area, not just Jackson Heights. West Bengalis are throughout US in most of the tech-oriented cities, but are so American-acculturated it can be hard to speak Bangla with them. The Bengali culture is very developed and many major Indian classical musicians are from Calcutta. Here is a good resource: http://supriyosen.net Especially the Verb Wizard: http://supriyosen.net/write-bangla/verb-conjugation-wizard/ http://www.youtube.com/watch? also v=SbCx6yKz0ko&eurl=http://umbangla.typepad.com/um_bangla/stu dents_projects/index.html 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4466 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 29 of 35 21 January 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
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The language situation in India, can, de facto, be described like this:
Hindi and English = official languages Tamil and Telugu = (economically) important regional languages Hollywood movies are dubbed in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu-only, never in Bangla, Kannada, Marathi, Malayalam etc... Marathi-speakers normally understand Hindi, Kannada-speakers understand Telugu, Malayalam-speakers understand Tamil. The same is true for Bollywood movies. They are rarely (almost never) dubbed in languages other than Telugu and Tamil. Click here for more info: http://tinyurl.com/howt olearnany Edited by Medulin on 21 January 2013 at 5:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Richard Burton Newbie Spain Joined 4130 days ago 34 posts - 64 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* | Message 30 of 35 21 January 2013 at 5:21pm | IP Logged |
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Some "alternative" people like me who follow the alleged means of prediction called the Web Bot, under genious linguist-and what not Clif High, and also alternative -in our opinion, only truthful- science, included theory of expanding Earth, and in view of what happened in Thailand with the never receding tide, believe Bangla Desh will be in good measure hardly hit by flooding soon (deliberate ambiguous word here), with population undergoing displacement, diverse hardships and possible high mortality; therefore, if so, the language also will be driven into minor status.
Actually, in a bigger period of time, I fear for Dutch people and language also, and other instances could be found, simply by observing location and topography. But dont worry because we can be wrong. Only it can give an usuful hint that things are far from stable in this world. Edited by Richard Burton on 21 January 2013 at 5:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5238 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 31 of 35 21 January 2013 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
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Unmaad, I sympathize with your frustration, but disagree (very late) with your last conclusion:
The answer is simple. They don’t learn it, because there are no proper resources to learn from. Even Basque has more available materials than Bengali. The only available resources will take the learners only a few steps beyond the general greetings, and that itself is a lowly reward for a language lover. [/QUOTE] Now there is not only William Raddiche's Teach Yourself Bengali and Dimock's Introduction to Bengali, which have been around for many years, but now (maybe for ten years or so?) there is Colloquial Bengali which is Bangladeshi accent-friendly and the magisterial Bengali Grammar by Hanne-Ruth Thompson. That is some book! (And a very enjoyable read, inspite of being a grammar book--just steel yourself for some occasional scary grammar terms, if, like me, you are not grammatically academically oriented). Her phrasebook it excellent too, with an invaluable chapter on how to tell people to buzz off. Not to mention online resources. We cannot complain too much about resources after that. (I used to, too). I think it is a matter of marketing, pardon the expression. These other languages are mostly one language per country. And India has...how many?? This makes it hard for admittedly attention-span-challenged Westerners to focus on it. Bangladesh needs to market itself so the rest of the world doesn't just think about floods when we hear of Bangladesh.. And I think one thing that would be a help would be a big campaign for Bengali literature in the West, both old and new. I personally think debating "why don't more people study Bengali" is kind of a silly question anyway. If you're interested, you're interested, if you're not, you're not. Why bother discussing why I'm not interested in...stamp collecting, suntanning, boxing statistics and bow-and-arrow hunting--and who would want to waste their time reading about it ? Most especially other people who ARE interested in those things. I know a lot of Bengalis who are in America who are very interested in Bengali culture--drama in particular--but they tend to practice it in kind of a closed circle. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| unmaad Tetraglot Newbie India Joined 5974 days ago 38 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Bengali*, English, GermanC2, Hindi Studies: Japanese | Message 32 of 35 14 February 2013 at 11:11am | IP Logged |
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Deji, I could not help but agree with you even though you clearly refuted my (now 5 months old) arguments.
I also agree with you on the pointlessness of discussing why people do not learn a certain language, but my only concern was that the reason could be ‘unavailability of resources’ and not ‘unwilling to learn’. Frankly, to me, the first reason is worse. But you have certainly dispelled a major chunk of that concern with your precise examples. I will try to have a look at most of them. I am a native speaker of the language, so I may even be able to point out which one is best. You would not believe this, but even in India, Bangladesh is known as a country of floods and refugees. Talk about marketing! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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