language as a barrier

‘Me Talk Pretty one day’ is an example of how some people misuse word in their daily lives. Some people do it unconsciously due to their limited vocabulary in terms of speaking a particular language. I have found some sentences that are not grammatically correct. For example, one of Sedaris fellow student was saying, “Sometime me cry alone at night.” Now, in English, ‘me’ always been used as a passive form of I when the subject is not in the center of interest but the work. In the following sentence, the girl (me) is the one who is describing her act, not somebody else. So, she should have used the 1st person singular number to refer herself. Therefore, the sentence should be, “Sometime I cry alone at night.”


I have seen a lot of people trying too hard to learn Bengali. At that time, I used to think that Bengali is very simple and easy to learn as a language, yet they are struggling to say a simple word. I was obsessed with the idea that they are not listening very carefully or they have something wrong with their vocal cord. That why, whenever they said something, it sounded more like foreign word than Bengali. I thought they were doing it on purpose. For example, they would pronounce ‘ami’( which means I) as ‘hami’ , tumi ( you) as tomi, hath (hand) as hat etc.

Since I’ve learned about morphology, grammar and syntax, I know now that was not intentional. Actually they cannot recognize the phoneme which stands for any meaning distinguishing sounds in a language. They cannot differentiate the vowels and consonant sounds in Bengali. Moreover, our grammar has significant distinction which they cannot understand so easily .In English, we have a simple form of sentence structure which is sub + verb+ obj. But if somebody wants to use the same rule for Bengali, it would be hilarious. Our sentences often use verb after the object which look like sub + obj + verb. For instance,
English - Bengali
I love you- ami tomakey valobasi (I you love)
I like you- ami tomakey pochondo kori .( I you like) etc.
There are lots of examples like those. It is may be easy to learn some word in a particular language but hard to fit them in a sentence.