Vegas, this has got nothing to do with smartness or intelligence. I can speak for myself. My aptitude for learning new languages is very poor. But it all depends on the environment you grow up in. For example, my country is multi lingual. We have so many different languages. My mother tongue is not Hindi. I had to learn hindi at middle school. So I know my own language, Hindi and can understand bits of some other languages like Gujarati, punjabi,dogri,bhojpuri, angika, maithali, assamese,oriya etc. But there are the other south Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu,Malyalam,Kannada which are as alien to me as Chinese or Korean. Then there are other languages like Konkani,Parsi,Kashmiri etc which are very difficult and as with most of these languages I wouldn't know which is which when I hear somebody speak.
But in any normal Indian school curriculum we have our own language as 1st language, the language of the state we reside,then we have a second language which is Hindi or English. Then we have a third language. And sometimes we have to learn sanskrit apart from all these.
P.S.: I had Hindi as a subject from Std V to Std VIII, and in that period of time I was forced to take 12 sessional tests on Hindi. And I have to confess that I flunked all 12 tests. My highest score was 18 out of 100. It was very traumatic. The report card having one too many red marks. Those were the days when I didn't like the idea of being burdened with an extra subject called 3rd language and completely neglected it.
But now I can proudly say that I can speak Hindi quite well and I can read basic Hindi too. So I am not so stupid as my score shows.
Vegas, this has got nothing to do with smartness or intelligence. I can speak for myself. My aptitude for learning new languages is very poor. But it all depends on the environment you grow up in. For example, my country is multi lingual. We have so many different languages. My mother tongue is not Hindi. I had to learn hindi at middle school. So I know my own language, Hindi and can understand bits of some other languages like Gujarati, punjabi,dogri,bhojpuri, angika, maithali, assamese,oriya etc. But there are the other south Indian languages like Tamil, Telugu,Malyalam,Kannada which are as alien to me as Chinese or Korean. Then there are other languages like Konkani,Parsi,Kashmiri etc which are very difficult and as with most of these languages I wouldn't know which is which when I hear somebody speak.
But in any normal Indian school curriculum we have our own language as 1st language, the language of the state we reside,then we have a second language which is Hindi or English. Then we have a third language. And sometimes we have to learn sanskrit apart from all these.
P.S.: I had Hindi as a subject from Std V to Std VIII, and in that period of time I was forced to take 12 sessional tests on Hindi. And I have to confess that I flunked all 12 tests. My highest score was 18 out of 100. It was very traumatic. The report card having one too many red marks. Those were the days when I didn't like the idea of being burdened with an extra subject called 3rd language and completely neglected it.
But now I can proudly say that I can speak Hindi quite well and I can read basic Hindi too. So I am not so stupid as my score shows.