"Two persons speaking chaste Urdu is beautiful thing"

"Two persons speaking chaste Urdu is beautiful thing" - or at least that was the tagline of our program introduction. Unfortunately, chaste Urdu is a less than beautiful thing if, like me, you cannot speak chaste Urdu to save your life! "Chaste" or pure Urdu is a quite ironic moniker since, as you can learn from this exciting wikipedia article, Urdu is really a hybrid language that emerged out of Hindi/Sanskrit, Persian, Turkic, Arabic, and Pashto registers. This means that its vocab and spelling and certain grammar rules are all over the place, with certain Arabic plural formations squished up against Sanskritic words and so on....and of courses, it is generally written without any short vowel markings and only a couple signs for a variety of long vowels. In other words, learning to read and write it well is a real challenge, even for native speakers.

The first days I felt barraged by scads of Perso-Arabic words I'm totally unfamiliar with - all my Sanskrit toilings don't come in as handily as they would with Hindi! However, after the first couple of days I started to feel a bit more comfortable with my classes, and was moved up to the next class level.

We have lots of individual attention here, as our classes mostly have about three or four people in them, and at least twice a week we have "personal tutorials" one on one with different teachers where we can study whatever we want to work on. At this point, I'm just working on the script, and another girl and I have extra script practice after class to try to improve, as we haven't studied the script formally as much as many other people here. It can be intimidating at times, but then I remember that a lot of other people here have much more language background, and by those standards I'm doing pretty well comparatively! The teachers here are very willing to help and give extra time as well, and to work with us as best they can whatever level we are at.

Classes, moving into the host family, and then running errands like getting cell phones, filling out various Indian bureaucratic necessities have been taking up most of our time. Whatever energy is left seems to be mostly sucked up by the heat and other various physical discomforts that abound in the tropics. I did pretty well most of the first week, but the last day or two I've fallen prey to the classic Indian stomach problems in all their charm. I'm swigging plenty of water and electrolyes, and trying not to be directly in the heat too much....though when the power goes out, as it is wont to do during the night and morning in particularly, it's not very conducive. I'm definitely to appreciate that western plumbing and clean water when I go back!