Hello, Namaste!
My name is K Y Philip. The K and the Y in my name are abbreviations of long Indian names that are difficult to pronounce, so most of my friends have shortened my name to just “K Y” (spoken as “Kay Why”). I have a great interest in languages, and one of the first languages I learned as a kid was Hindi. Even so, it took me many years to appreciate the beauty of Hindi as a language, especially its idioms and proverbs; but you, my readers, won’t have to wait another day because I am going to be your Idiomatic Guru. People all over the world interested in learning and improving their spoken Hindi would undoubtedly benefit, quickly and easily, from the knowledge they will gain from the Idiomatic Guru blog.
Let me tell you a little more about how I came to write these posts.
My sons struggled with speaking Hindi . . .
I have two children, both boys, who were born in Saudi Arabia. They studied in an international school in Riyadh, where all subjects were taught in English. They knew very little Hindi, one of India’s most widely spoken languages. What little they knew, they had learned from listening to my wife and me, as we sometimes spoke Hindi at home.
As they grew up, my sons managed to learn Hindi by going online. They were able to speak and even read and write a little.
Although their efforts were commendable, I felt that merely translating the words was not enough to understand the meanings conveyed by those words. You need to know the literal meaning as well as the figurative meaning of the words. Only then could you grasp the whole meaning of what was being conveyed. I felt the need to educate my sons concerning the popular idioms and proverbs in Hindi that they were bound to encounter daily in their Hindi conversations.
I started texting my sons one idiom a day, with its literal and figurative meanings and a sample sentence showing how the idiom could be used while talking.
My mission is to make your Hindi colorful
My sons were grateful for the daily idioms I would text them. One lived in California, USA, and the other in Adelaide, Australia. They eagerly awaited my daily messages and thanked me for my efforts. Soon I began sharing my messages with my niece in India and some friends. They all appreciated my way of explaining the meanings of the idioms, as well as my attempts at digging into the origins and writing a few words about the history of each idiom.
In the process, I discovered that writing these daily messages gave me great pleasure. No matter how tired I was at the end of the day, I would still have the enthusiasm to write out my message and send it across to my sons, niece, and friends.
With each message, I could give them some new insight, information, and a new way of looking at the Hindi language. They were able to convert their plain, dull dialogs into colorful and vibrant speech!
My goal is to make you an expert . . .
If you have even a slight interest in the Hindi language and its usage, I promise you that you will find the contents of my blog interesting and valuable. Once you learn the meanings and the correct usage of popular idioms and proverbs in a sentence, your speech automatically becomes very colorful. People will want to hear you speak, they will find your talk amusing, and they will remember what you said for a very long time. My goal is to make you an expert user of these famous Hindi figures of speech.
If you ever need a hand or have any questions, feel free to leave them below, and I will be more than happy to help you out.
All the best,
K Y Philip (aka “Kay Why”)
website: IdiomaticGuru.com
email: ky@idiomaticguru.com