It’s an emotional as well as an intellectual process, learning a language. The initial exhilaration of rapid progress wears off as my brain gets full and struggles to process all the new knowledge. The linguistic principles are learned and understood, but my mouth continues to spew gobbledygook from which my teachers will manage to extract a tiny grammatical kernel that gives a vague clue as to what on earth it is I’m trying to say.
If I say “main mera…” rather than “apne” one more time….
But then there are gratifying moments when I’m complimented out of all proportion – such as by the man in the fabric shop the other day who told me I knew a lot of Hindi based soley on my knowledge of the word for “purple”.
Partial Truths 