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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. English+Hindi+French+Russian+Tamil+.... So cool. You should probably add some Arabic, some Chinese, some Xhosa, some Gaelic and some native American languages to this list to appear endlessly awesome :-)

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I can not speak most of them. But having friends speak them for years makes you start catching the words, phrases, sentences and even the context though not equally well, not all the time, and not the same for each language - this is for the South Indian languages. I did formally study French and Russian (1 semester). And lol, I took Russian when the USSR still existed :) Those were the days.

Edit - I think I am done. I want to learn Spanish since it will be useful locally, but my brain can not take any more confusion. When you do not use these regularly, but have a faint notion of many many words, the brain does get confused on a regular basis. And I was not trying to brag, expressing helplessness.

I have noticed it with a lot of Indian people I know, an aptitude for language. My understanding is that many learn Hindi, their home tongue, and english at school.

Of course I only have exposure to my indian friends who moved to Australia for work, so they're biased towards people who went through university and learned English in school.

Yes, a lot of Indians that emigrate to foreign countries will have gone to schools where classes are taught in English, except for the local language class that is taught in that language. There are so-called "English medium" schools ("medium" as in the method of conveyance of knowledge in this case). There are also schools that are $local_language medium, but they were generally for poor people / lower social classes.

Only around 40% of Indians speak Hindi at home. Many Indians don’t speak Hindi at all. But a lot of Indians will learn Hindi and English in addition to what they speak at home.

I speak a few languages, and find myself losing the grip on the native one.

People I know that know more languages than me seem to be worse at all of them.. and by worse I mean they can hold a fluent conversation, but have extremely poor spelling and grammar.

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