So I'm from India, and you probably have heard enough about our diversity. From cuisines to languages to dressing styles, we are diverse in several aspects. Just to put things in context, there are about four to five languages spoken in the state I come from, Karnataka. While I wish I knew all those languages, I can just manage to communicate in one which is Konkani and know a few phrases and words of another which is Kannada. Now, Kannada is the most commonly spoken language in Karnataka and Konkani is my mother-tongue. Since I wasn't brought up in India, I missed out on learning Kannada since no one around me spoke that language. That was not the case with Konkani.
Given my lack of proficiency in Kannada, I always struggle while conversing with others but I still give it a shot because I feel there's no better way to learn. One thing I noticed while trying to converse in Kannada is our ability to deduce. You don't need to know the meaning of each and every word in a sentence to be able to understand what the other person is trying to say to you. To be honest most of the words in Kannada still sound alien to me but I'm always trying to pick up on the odd one or two words that I would be familiar with and then my deduction engine kicks into action. Everything from hand gestures to tonality to face expression serve as input to the engine and more often than not the output turns out to be right.
One such instance occurred today on my visit to the clinic in the morning. The receptionist at the desk only spoke in Kannada. So while I was waiting my turn to see the doctor, she asked me something which I could barely understand at first. I just nodded my head in agreement hoping that was the right response, but she thought otherwise. She repeated the same sentence again and this time round I managed to pick up on one word, 'Appa', which means Dad and then she looked at the clock. All of a sudden it made sense to me. She wanted to know if my Dad had visited the clinic as well a few hours earlier. Turns out, he did visit the clinic and I was able to answer in the affirmative. So all it took was one word and a glance at the clock to be able to deduce what she said. That says a lot about our abilities to deduce and pattern match. We as human are intrinsically wired to find patterns and the more we put it to the test, the sharper it becomes.
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