| MEET MS.LANGUAGE.. Thulsi Madhumitha is a mother of two and a temple-goer like all other 'ammas' in Tamil Nadu. In addition, she is also a linguist, having mastered 15 foreign languages and seven Indian languages. This 45-year-old lawyer is also a freelance content-writer for several IT majors across South India.
Born as a Chennaite, brought up in Bangalore and having worked as a scriptwriter for the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, she has now she settled in sub-urban Tambaram. She is also a well known legal officer and translator among the MNCs in Chennai.
Recalling her childhood days in Bangalore railway colony, where she learnt Indian languages likeHindi,Kannada, Tulu,Malayalam and Bengali, she says, " In the colony, I had more than 10 friends from different states, and so it was not a difficult for me to pick up Indian languages."
"During college days, it was fun to discover the origin of one word everyday and in a course of time, I became aware of the origin of common words we use in everyday conversation", she said. Explaining her fluency in Kannada, she said," While practicing Criminal law for three years in Bangalore, I worked with clients from Shimoga, Dharwad and Mysore. Through them I became fluent in four dialects of Kannada, after which learning Telugu was easy." "Though I have learnt several Indian languages, Mandarin is my favorite, as it sounds like singing", she says. When I was working in Singapore, I was assigned to translate Chinese scripts, so I learnt Mandarin. After learning Japanese I gained enough confidence to pursue a career in linguistics," Now she teaches Japanese at the Anna University and has also been appointed in other Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry Universities to teach Spanish, German, Swedish and French. "One who is fluent in their mother tongue and a foreignlanguage can become a translator. Housewives with a flair for languages can take up outsourcing jobs, to earn a hefty sum. Linguistics is an extensive field, which provides opportunities for anyone, irrespective of their age," Having a language library in her house, she said, “ it took 14 years for me to learn all the foreign languages.” When asked about her fluency in European languages like Portuguese and Swedish, she said,” I opted for Germen and French as a language subject in BA BL and then it became easy to pick up European accents in no time. While most of her languages fall under the Indo-European and Dravidian classes, she laments that she is yet to learn sign language, knowledge-thirsty linguist, whose teenage children are now fluent in seven languages. |
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