Reading skills in mother tongue

As many of Lisu young people in India, I grew up not learning to read and write our mother tongue, Lisu. As a result, my skills in those areas are weak, though I speak fluently. Obvious reason: I don’t need to learn for education purposes. The major uses are when I write letters to my parents and sometimes when preaching at my village.

I thought this is not good. So I bought three Bibles: one each for me, Simasa and my sister. My wife, Simasa, and I started to read it every evening since January. Beginning it was difficult. Words are not familiar. We were not able to read well. We have fun too; good opportunity to joke each other.

It’s the fourth month since we began reading in Lisu. We haven’t been noticing whether we have improved our reading skills, until a few weeks ago when a friend of us came to stay with us. We realized we improved a lot. We are reading it much fluently. I discovered because a friend who has been staying with us is struggling more than us. We “corrected” him often.

In addition to the ability to read better, we have learnt new vocabularies and regular expressions in our language. Our knowledge of our language is richer now. We’ll be reading the whole Bible until we complete. Hope by then, we’ll be much better. Even we expect that our spiritual growth will be better.

I often meet many Lisu friends from around the world. Except for a few, most have the problems we have. Some even couldn’t read.

Occasionally, I joke with friends that if you tell your child, “Don’t learn English or other languages”, they will not listen to you! They will surely learn because those are the medium they will have wider access. But they will NOT learn to read, write, even speak, your mother tongue unless you teach them well.

Here is my encouragement to my Lisu friends and those from minority language communities. If you haven’t learnt your mother tongue yet, please pursue. If you have learnt, pass on the language skills to your next generations.

Or if you are involved in language development work in minority languages, never forget to encourage the newly literate or those who are learning to read their language for the first time.

Blessings,

Liahey
April 03, 2011