Can one forget one's mother tongue? Photo: Drik News

More often than not, I find that my friends who speak both Bengali and English habitually complain about their linguistic difficulties in terms of the usage of Bengali, especially in reading and writing and, somewhat amusingly, they pit it against English. Interestingly enough, they blame the language and its orthography for it. So, for quite some time, I've been attempting to tell them that the problem isn't with the language, it's with the user.
From the perspective of linguistics, there really is no such thing as one language being easier than another. There may be certain factors in terms of regularity and uniformity of linguistic components, along with structural similarity between languages, which might make it easier for learners to assimilate one language over another.
However, structurally speaking, the idea of one language being easier than another from a user's perspective is a conceptual fallacy. And yet I find that a large number of people staunchly believe that English is a much easier language than Bengali and Hindi (sister languages with sister scripts), which have scripts that are far more regular (phonetic) in terms of sound-letter correspondence than their distant cousin English.
Statistics aside, I give some simple examples. Since the complaint is primarily about the shaws and naws I'll use them as examples: If I write shoishawb or shawb, will you not be able to read it just because there are two different shaws? How about mon/mb mon? Can a nonsensical word, nosshochamidashan, be pronounced in more ways than one? Would you be confused regarding the pronunciation of any of the syllables?
How about a nonsensical word in English, how would you pronounce "chadefough?" Will the "ch" be pronounced the same as that in "cheer" or "school" or "charade?" Will the "a" be the same as "about" or "apple" or "are' or "ate?" The list continues. So let's delve further into English.
When I write "read," will you rhyme it with "reed" or "red?' If I tell you "put" is pronounced as "poot" how will you pronounce "but." How would you pronounce "knight" if half the letters weren't silent? And, of course, there's the classic example of "ought": If I taught you how to pronounce the combination of o-u-g-h by teaching you to pronounce through, would you possibly be able to guess the pronunciation of the following words: rough, bough, dough, bought, drought?
A phenomenon often exemplified by the famous sentence: "Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through, I ought to cross the lough." George Bernard Shaw even went so far as to say to say that "ghoti" was a perfectly good way to write fish by taking "gh" from cough, "o" from women, "ti" from nation.
My point is, how is it we read and write this complicated system of spelling, where most of it seems committed to memory, and yet complain about Bengali which as you can see is more phonetic in terms of its sound to letter correspondence. The bottom line is practice.
When I was teaching Bengali in the US, my supervisor Dr. Dwight Stephens would give a brilliant analogy whereby he would compare learning a language to learning to play football (he called it soccer, of course). He would say: "I can tell you the rules of the game, show you pictures of the field, draw diagrams of elaborate strategies, and even bring a ball into the classroom, but will that teach you to pay soccer? No, you have to go into the field and play for real.
A language is just like that. "You have to use it to learn it, to become fluent in it and to be a sophisticated user of it. And if you don't use it for a long period of time it will fall into disuse and you linguistic abilities in that language will atrophy. Much like being a great football player and then taking a 10-year break.
Its extreme form can be seen in something called first language displacement. If you are constantly submerged in your second language environment for a good number of years and have barely any contact with your first language they will inevitably switch places.
Hence the reason that English may seem easier to some people may be because they are in constant practice regarding the usage of English, and Bengali is limited to the confines of informal everyday speech, which by itself is also punctuated with a bit of English.

Naira Khan is a freelance contributor to The Daily Star.