Written by: Aryan Thagunna - 2022003, Grade X
Posted on: 28 December, 2020
It is no secret that the new generation of Nepal struggles with our language. I do not know how relative this might be out of urban areas, but here the struggle is as clear as crystal in urban areas. This obviously is not something to be proud of. But sometimes it is not up to us to decide that Nepali isn’t cool.
A child born in Nepal almost always learns Nepali as their first or second language. We hear everyone around us use this language as a means of communication. So how do we grow apart from it? School. On average we have 8 or 7 subjects starting from the first grade. 90% of the subjects are in forms of English. And the Nepali subject alone undergoes the effort to help kids with their mother tongue. Take any average kid of today’s age and ask what their favourite subject is. It is almost always not Nepali. We grow distant from Nepali with every step forward in our education. Given an option between writing anything in either Nepali or English, I always lean towards writing in English. Nepali language in school has become only a form of talking casually with friends. Other than that, it has sadly become a burden.
That being said, here are my struggles with writing in Nepali. Out of all paperwork we do in school, Nepali accounts for less than 10% of it. If we look at it logically it should be less than that. But somehow Nepali assignments always find a way of overwhelming the amount of work a student gets. This obviously decreases the appeal of students towards Nepali. Hence, my first struggle. Secondly, writing in Nepali takes a lot of time. Now if I use this as an excuse for choosing English over Nepali, I am most likely to get hit with an “It's the lack of practice”. And who knows maybe it is. And in third place comes English expressions. Let me break it down for you. When I am writing something like this article, for example, I tend to use various expressions. In the last sentence, I used “let me break it down for you”. We all know that means I wanted to simplify my third struggle. If I wrote the same thing in Nepali it would sound dull and uninteresting. But that is on me. I probably am unaware of ways to make my writing more appealing and interesting in Nepali. I read a lot of books and only a tiny fraction of it makes up Nepali. That probably explains why.
So there it is. My three struggles out of many. To be honest with you, I think the type of distribution of subjects accounts for a small part in the loss of interest in Nepali in terms of writing. The major part still lies in us students and our lack of effort in the fields of Nepali literature. It is very sad to see the current generation hold the English language at a higher order than Nepali. Originally I had planned on writing this article in Nepali but you know how it is, I struggled to do so.
