Page:Three Years in Tibet.djvu/40

At Lama Shabdung's I lived as though back in my boyhood, attending the school in the morning, and doing my lessons at home in the company of the children of the family in the afternoon. It is a well known thing that the best way to learn a foreign language is to live among the people who speak it, but a discovery — as it was to me — that I made while at Shabdung's was that the best teachers of everyday language are children. As a foreigner you ask them to teach you their language; and you find that, led on by their instinctive curiosity and kindness, not unmingled with a sense of pride, they are always the most anxious and untiring teachers, and also that in their innocence they are the most exacting and intolerant teachers, as they will brook no mis-pronunciation or mis-accent, even the slightest errors. Next to children, women are, I think, the best language teachers. At least such are the conclusions I arrived at from the experiences of my 'schooling days' in Darjeeling. For in six or seven months after my instalment in the Shabdung household, I had become able to carry on all ordinary conversation in the Tibetan tongue, with more ease than in my English of two years' hard learning, and I regard Tibetan as a more difficult language than English. True, I made myself a most willing and zealous pupil all through the tutelage; withal, I consider the progress I made in that short space of time as quite remarkable, and that progress was the gift of my female and juvenile teachers in the Shabdung family. The more progress I made in my linguistic acquirement, the more eager student I became in things Tibetan, and I found in my host a truly charming conversationalist, himself fond of talking. Evening after evening I sat, an absorbed listener to Lama Shabdung's flowing and inexhaustible store of narratives about Tibet.