Anand Mahindra struggles to learn Spanish, Twitter shows empathy

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Anand Mahindra has taken up a new challenge. The Mahindra Group chairman, took to Twitter to reveal that he is on a mission to master the Spanish language. The billionaire shared a video from language translation and learning app Duolingo and wrote, “Since both my son-in-law and grandson are Spanish speakers, I have been working hard on acquiring that skill—mainly through Duolingo, online.

This explains beautifully why it’s not easy… “ In the video, the instructor, a young woman explains that the presence of similar-sounding words in Spanish befuddles many first-time learners. The post went viral on the microblogging platform, amassing 151K views and 1,512 likes. Many Twitter users flooded the comment section, sympathising with his predicament.

One user wrote, “Spanish does have more tenses, and, consequently, more verb conjugation than English. It also has “masculine” and “feminine” gendered nouns and articles, and adjectives change to agree with the gender of the noun they are describing.” Another user pointed out that some Spanish words such as ‘kamisa’ (shirt) ‘tu’ (you) sound similar and even have the same meanings as a few Hindi & Marathi words such as ‘kameez’ (shirt) and ‘tu’ (informal version of you). However, the magnate seems to have made good progress in learning the language.

When a fellow learner ranted in Spanish that they were experiencing difficulty in mastering the language, Mahindra replied promptly in Spanish, “ "Por supuesto! Yo tambien. Nunca me rendiré… (Sure, I am undergoing the same difficulties! But, don’t give up)... Mahindra’s elder daughter Divya is married to New York-based architect Jorge Zapata.