User:Gambatronne

I live in Canada and I'm currently a science student! My goals as one of the User's here is to
 * Create more Hindi entries
 * Cultivate existing ones
 * Get more "real" Hindi entries in there. I've noticed too many Sanskrit loanwords that are rarely ever used in spoken Hindi (and only slightly more so in written Hindi) entered into Wikitionary (and many, many other dictionaries) with no indication of that, and often an actually used term is completely absent. This means adding more entries with Persian/Arabic loans and other times it means adding Sanskrit derivations.
 * Adding more etymologies, specifically ones that show Hindi's relationship to modern Indo-European languages.

I used to have a strong and profound interest in Japanese, but I've lost interest in the language entirely and terminated my exposure to it about a year ago. But my interest in the language was very profound and I still understand about 90% of spoken Japanese. I can speak decently as well, but that and my knowledge of specialised vocabulary are quickly atrophying. Currently, I am working on: -Improving my French (sound like a native, sound like a native!!!) -Going from intermediate to near-native in German and Swedish. -Learning Turkish!

Aside from my affinity for the French and Germanic languages, which are easily explained, Turkish sticks out. I'm a bilingual native speaker of English and Hindi (more English than Hindi, but you get the picture) and I have always found the Persian and Arabic words in Hindi very beautiful - but the over all melody of my second mother tongue has never sounded particularly pleasant to me. I became interested in Persian and Arabic because of this - and truly they are two of the world's most beautiful languages. However with Arabic, I wanted to learn one of the actually spoken, "colloquial" versions (namely, Lebanese Arabic), but resources were few, and with the difficulty of speaking such a unique language, I quickly lost motivation. Persian came more naturally and easily to me than Arabic, being from the same Indo-European branch as Hindi, yet politics behind the language rendered it disheartening to me. Turkish on the other hand is easily spoken and has a melody reminiscent of Persian to me, which is made more so by the presence of many Arabic and Persian loans. The fact that I am so excited by agglutinative characteristics of Turkish is likely a vestige of my dead love of Japanese.

My strange feelings towards Hindi vs. Middle Eastern languages is perhaps because Hindi has such a different rhythm from Germanic languages. The [æ]'s of Arabic, the rounded front vowels of Turkish, the very Anglo-Scandinavian [ɑː] of Persian and the aspirated and alveolar consonants of all three sound much more Germanic to my ears than Hindi ever did, and perhaps their over all flow is more similar to that of the Germanic languages (plus, I think it's hard for anyone not to totally fall in love with Arabic and its exotic consonants anyway). English is higher up there than Hindi when it comes to the "extent of my nativeness".