“Kaavya, samji?” my aunt asked, after a long string of instructions in fluent Hindi. I did not, in fact, samji (understand). Just one quarter into Northwestern’s Hindi-Urdu sequence, this second-generation Desi disaster was not ready for the big leagues (my cousin’s wedding).

I have parents who don’t speak the same mother tongue, and like many other multi-language households, my family didn’t really strike a balance between my mother’s Tamil and my father’s Hindi. Instead, my brothers and I learned neither and became monolingual disgraces to the subcontinent.

I used to believe that taking Hindi would immediately bring me into the fold of my culture, but one quarter was not enough for me to competently talk to my grandmother in Hindi. Not without wanting to curl up and cry on a carpet, anyway.

Learning the language has never been easy. I mix up के and को all the time, and for a full month, I couldn’t figure out how to describe where I put my shoes.

Still, learning Hindi was satisfying. Struggling in Hindi was a breath of fresh air from my endless organic chemistry memorizations. And I always had a reason to keep going.

SESP third-year Hana-Lei Ji already speaks Japanese, which she learned from her mother. She started learning Korean when she arrived on campus.

“When I started taking Korean, I didn’t know any of the letters, and we had quizzes in the first week about the entire alphabet,” Ji says. “In the beginning, it’s very hard to hear even the difference between the different tones or pronunciation. I just haven’t heard much Korean growing up.”

Learning a new script and language is daunting, but her quarter of Korean provided her with a structure that helped her start from zero. For her, learning Korean is a way to connect with her heritage, even though her American-born father does not speak the language.

I found learning the Devanagari script in class was helpful. Although I was initially focused on just learning phonetics, I realized that learning the script meant I could actually distinguish between sounds that don’t exist in English more easily.

Korean and Filipino SESP third-year Anna Alava also took Korean at NU for a full year. Alava started formally learning Korean at her local community center in high school. Her classmates were mainly adults, many of whom were not Korean.

When she took classes at NU, however,she met many Korean Americans who were also not taught Korean growing up. “It was an opportunity where I was finally able to relate to other Korean people who were struggling to learn,” Alava says.

My Hindi class is entirely South Asian during both quarters, with people from different backgrounds and countries, but united against a common enemy: spelling English words in the Devanagari script (here’s Northwestern, revel in the horror of it: नॉरथवेसटरन).

But classes alone did not prepare me for the real thing. When I went to my cousin’s wedding, prepped to converse in Hindi, I just didn’t. I was too scared to mess up, to say सनना instead of सोना and mangle the pronunciation of घर (ironically, home, ghar).

I’m not the only one. Ji said that she has often been nervous to speak Korean with people she doesn’t know, and Alava has found some Koreans and Korean Americans to be judgmental of her lack of expertise.

Alava also faces challenges communicating with family. Alava’s grandparents both speak English but are more fluent in Korean. She often finds that she can’t always understand exactly what they’re saying.

“I’ll run it through a translator, I’ll send it to my aunts who can tell me more about what they’re saying,” Alava says. “But if I could speak fluent Korean, I bet there’s so much more to them that I could know that I don’t know right now.”

Last quarter, in between almost being brought to tears by continuously learning and forgetting vocabulary, and struggling with the pronunciation of the four duh sounds (द, ध, ढ, ड), I realized Hindi was never going to be truly intuitive for me.

I had grown up in one language and was going to live in one language — and that was it. I will never be able to truly connect with those who came before me — the generations and generations of Desis speaking their mother tongues, each sound carrying millennia of history and culture.

And I could hate it. I could regret my childhood and resent my parents. And I could stay a pathetic, self-determined beginner forever.

Alternatively, I could get the fuck over it. Hinglish is a beautiful thing. Language is not fixed, and my relationship to my heritage and my father’s language is in my control. Hindi may not always roll off my tongue, but I can read lyrics to my favorite song. Maybe, one day, I can read a book in Hindi. The sky is my limit.

For Alava, when she was able to understand other Korean Americans’ Konglish at a convention, it was a watershed moment. “It was the first time I felt integrated in the Korean American community properly because they also didn’t point out that I was Filipino or half,” she says.

Even though Alava is no longer in class, she’s finding her own ways to keep the language fresh, such as finding textbooks online. Soon enough, she wants to learn Filipino too.

I haven’t even really touched on each of our deeper relationships with our family’s other languages, like my mother’s Tamil, which if I hear in public, will instantly make me homesick. Each language has a specific place in our hearts, and each language is part of a different history of our life.

My name is Desi (see: कवया or காவிய), and my face is brown, but my accent screams American. I can’t erase the years of single-language learning, but I can try and work despite it, even if I mess up kaam and kam, even if I can’t find my way to ghar. Mera ghar California mei hai, my home is California. I didn’t grow up with these languages, but I can grow with them. That’s life, baby. Sab theek hai. It’s all good. I just keep trying.

Tips from the classroom

1 - Confidence is key

Chinese language professor Jingjing Ji starts her classes by strengthening her students’ confidence in their existing knowledge and skills.

“Sometimes they do not even realize, ‘Oh, actually, I could express myself or respond to that question in Chinese,’ because in family [sic] they are so used to responding to their parents, probably in English,” Ji says.

Ji says her students’ families in China or Taiwan often laugh at them, although it is not from bad intentions.

“It’s very often they receive such kind of negative feedback, and it’s very true it’s hard to build confidence,” she says. Ji says she has assignments in which students must talk to native speakers and another where they must talk to international students in particular.

2 - Learning context matters

Ji says that previously, her learning materials for heritage speakers often did not align with their priorities. That’s why she, along with other educators, wrote materials specifically tailored to the Chinese American experience, such as Chinese parenting and different language variations.

She says her students have loved that the material reflects their experience across different cultures.

Ji also says she teaches trans-languaging, a less traditional teaching philosophy where professors start with what students want to express in English and use the class’s collective knowledge to express that idea in Chinese.

“We want our heritage students to get connected to their family and community,” Ji says. “That’s their advantage of learning language.”