I spoke as it came naturally to me

Ever since I gained the liberty of free thinking, I never really knew what I wanted to do. Everything I came across seemed interesting, and I realized that almost everything came to me rather intuitively. I used to want to study Fine Arts along with Biology, in my middle school days; Statistics and Economics, with Film, in high school, among all kinds of other things. This lack of concentrated interest used to worry me a lot. I realized none of them, I actually enjoyed or would enjoy studying. I had a knack for the Humanities and the Sciences came naturally to my comprehension with a little bit of effort.

In my high school we had a simple Linguistics course in Bangla, covering history of languages, language families, basics of articulatory phonetics and phonology, some of morphology, and a little bit of syntax and semantics. I remember everyone hating that part; even the teachers hated that part. My tutor simply asked me to mug up most of it, and only taught me the basics. She didn't try to make it any more interesting. I studied just for the exam, and forgot most of it, thinking I would never need that knowledge, ever again.

I took up Journalism & Mass Communication in my UG, as I couldn't think of anything better. As usual it came naturally to me, and I was a decent student. In the 2nd year, we had to study several communication models, which seemed quite interesting to me. I realized that language is the ultimate necessity for communication, and slowly understood the importance of language in our daily life. We had this little module about Semiotics, which blew my mind. From there eventually I came across the idea of language as a symbolic association, concept of signs, meaning of words, how does our brain contain these words, and language per se - things that I actually began to like. I understood this is what I would enjoy doing in the long run.

Now, I am doing my Masters in Linguistics from a premier Public University. The first thing that I caught on, coming to this field, is the importance given to  one's mother tongue - language as a preserver of culture, which is a completely new perspective that struck me.

The most challenging task for me was to get accustomed to the nomenclatures, and Linguistics is, as I came to realize, full of those. Apparently the linguistic knowledge I acquired back in my high school, didn't really leave me, and I caught on quite easily.

I believe it is such a field of study that is not really hard, although it might seem so to some, who try to approach it from a Humanities point of view. This may be a reason why most Literature students hate Linguistics. It is not pure Science of course, but it is not like any other Humanities subject either. If you ask me, one ought to have at least some knowledge about the various methodologies of the Sciences, and should approach Linguistics with the same mind set. From the beginning of my course, all our professors stressed the notion that we have to develop a "linguistic way", and must start seeing the world from a Linguistic point of view. They said it is actually helpful in doing Linguistics, and I can’t disagree. Now that I’ve acquired this Linguistic way of looking at things, I realize how important language and Linguistics is in every kind of human interaction.