Learning and re-learning my mother tongue in Malayalam

My mother tongue is Malayalam, and I’m embarassed to say that I still don’t speak fluent Malayalam as I would expect. For inspiration on how to get back on my mother tongue, I tried to seek solace in a book that could shed some knowledge or two, and hopefully also empathise with this NRI individual who lost his path along the way.

So I found out about Kato Lomb. The Hungarian polyglot.

She was also an interpreter, translator, and author. In the preface to Polyglot: How I Learn Languages, she is described as having learned most of her languages as an adult, beginning English on her own in 1933, then Russian in 1941, and eventually working at her peak with 16 languages as an interpreter and translator.

She is interesting as she speaks 16 languages. She started learning in her adult year, and progress came with time and interest. She says you just need to dedicate time for languages, and everything would be okay. In my case, I speak in Malayalam at home, and with my family quite a lot, but I would still make multiple slippages and blunders to my embarassment, and I particularly don’t do any such course corrections to rectify the mistakes I make.

Coming back to Kato Lambo, what she points out as the main reason why adults don’t learn as much as children is that there is this fear of making mistakes. You are so embarassed to do that. But kids dont do that. Mistakes are just a part of that process. Evidence of actually using the language. That, Time + Interest = Result.

With Malayalam, I’m too embarassed to say this out open, but in this comfort of this little corner of the internet, i’m okay to scream this out loud — that I’m not aiming to reach Lomb’s polyglot levels, but at the very least, I want to be a better biglot. English is a language I speak, and I’m quite comfortable with, I even dream in english, and Malayalam even though it’s my mother tongue, has not slipped out of my tongue that much.

One of the ways I want to do this better is by watching a 15-min TV show or podcast episode everyday. Then once I’m done, I recite some key activation keywords for recall. Then I record myself talking for 10-15 minutes. This is the 30 min workflow that can help you become a better conversationalist in any language. This is the lean MVP version of what Kato Lomb has been talking about. For my Malayalam-get-back-to-the-flow starter pack, this is what I’m doing. A very workable daily habit I’m aiming to cultivate:

Habit	Time	What you actually do	Why it works
Malayalam listening	10 min	Listen to Malayalam news by G Ravi on Spotify, or watch Uppum Mulakku on Flowers Comedy	Repeated exposure to living language
Phrase capture	5 min	Save 3 spoken phrases you want to sound like	Builds chunks, not isolated words
Self-monologue	10 min	Talk to yourself in Malayalam about your day	Directly recommended by Lomb
Real interaction	5–15 min	Voice note or call with family/friend in Malayalam only	Makes the language load-bearing
Reuse	2 min	Repeat the 3 phrases later in the day from memory	Daily repetition without school-drill boredom

There are certain key concepts from Kato Lomb which are applied here:

• Language should be learnt from living language, not the other way round. There is no point starting to learn the English language from a Wren and Martin grammar book. That’s not how birds learn how to fly, not by listening to Bernoulli’s theorem and aerodynamic drift.
• Daily contact, in this case, for 30 mins exposure, at the very least.
• create a “linguistic micro-climate”, aka by reading interesting material from the very beginning, speak to yourself daily, and connect the language to daily life.
• do this for atleast 21 days, and see if there are any improved results..
• phrase capture is important as you don’t want to memorize isolated list of words as a part of the expanding vocabulary, you would want to learn contextualised phrases instead. so instead of learning what a banana, or apple means in Malayalam, I would have to learn them in chunks such as “Let me tell you something..”, “I forgot the word”, “I was thinking about this today..”, etc.. Just 3 phrases a day is enough. Then reuse them the same day. The reuse is what turns capture into learning.
• interest defeats duty. In this case, I’m picking up geopolitics and comedy. Two genres I deeply enjoy. For Geopolitics, I aim to listen to G Ravi’s 10-minute daily-news podcast. And for comedy, I was recommended Uppum Mulakku on Flowers Comedy, Youtube. For starters, this sitcom is in it’s third season, and it already has 500+ episodes and it’s only going stronger everyday.
• sending a voice note at the end of it all, makes it more shippable. you send something out, and that’s one of the ways you create a small-win for the day when it comes to language learning. I feel the same way when I learn a concept and publish an essay in the personal site. It invokes similar areas in my brain in terms of learning and retention.

What this shows me, is that even if you’re speaking the language every day, it doesn’t mean that you’re actually becoming good at it. IN the same way, someone who drives a car everyday doesn’t automatically become an expert at driving. Wes Kao talks about this, in what she describes as “osmosis fallacy”, where it could be possible for someone to be in France for decade, and still not know French.

Or for a person to hang out with blacksmith, and yet not know how to weld a metal or two. Real learning comes when we deliberately think about the practise. David Deutsch in the book Beginning of Infinity, talks about this as a process of deriving explanatory knowledge, and not just mere pattern absorption as to “invent explanations, criticize them, correct errors..” This was one of the reasons why, I as a native-mother-tongue Malayali couldn’t speak proficient Malayalam to the level I would expect.