I am feeling particularly accomplished today. I watched part of Koi… Mil Gaya last night, in an attempt to see (a) how well I understand Hindi and (b) how well I can knit stockinette while reading subtitles. And the answer to both is: pretty darn well! Okay, so there is a range of “well” here, but I can do both with some level of competency. I know when somebody is talking about feelings, action in the past, present, and future, and assorted other random things one only understands by watching lots of Bollywood (pyaar, dil, etc). I have progressed to the point where I’m learning postpositions, and although it makes no logical sense, I somehow also feel that when I get to learning German, I’ll have a leg up (let me explain: English has prepositions, Hindi has postpositions, and German has both, therefore leg up, q.e.d.).

The knitting went swimmingly. I fear that I am using a cable needle that is a bit too long, so that when I pick up stitches for the sleeves they will be too loose, but I also feel that this is mostly my imagination and that things will work themselves out.

I am loving this tiny jacket. It is so cute. And pink. eeee. I’m such a girl.

(The camera cable has vanished, yet again. I will post photos of the new project when it resurfaces)

(also, why are you people searching for “butsecks” on google? one person every day finds this blog through a similar search. This makes me want to seed my blog with random words, just to see who looks for them. Like kumquat. Or hippo pants. Or something.)

So then the rest of the “but not really” part is that I am proud of where I’ve gotten, but last night I made the mistake of looking up gurmukhi on Omniglot (a friend sent me a copy of a Punjabi newspaper in the mail) and I realized that learning Hindi to gain some understanding of India is like learning Portugese to gain understanding of Europe. It’s just silly. I can’t learn all the languages (well, I could, but I’m not going to put myself under that kind of pressure), but I think I need at least two. Once I’ve gotten a relative mastery of Hindi, I’ll move on to Bengali, and then maybe Kannada or Tamil (I will also try my hand at possibly Marathi or even Panjabi). I mean, if I’ve got Italian and German (and its Swiss variant) and Portugese and Castillian Spanish on the list, then I need more Indian languages, too, to be fair.

In a knitting context, it’d be like saying that you’ve knit a scarf in stockinette, so you know how to knit everything. Why learn socks, or lace, or sweaters? Or colorwork?

I think I have a long way to go.