an Indian still has to learn English
I make the mistake sometimes of implying that my personal experience and my personal acquaintances are representative of the general case. I had a curious coterie of close friends and acquaintances while I was a student at university. My wedding pictures tell the tail and I still remember my grandpa pulling me aside before the ceremony and asking suspiciously, "Son ... do you have any *American* friends?" (He called his grandsons "son" and his granddaughters "daughter" ... no idea why ... maybe it's a common thing for peole of his generation.)
Sometimes (in my experience) the English spoken by Indians does sound awkward, maybe overly complicated. I guess I had chalked it up to colloquial habits of speech in India. I idolized them because when I got past the accents I discovered they tended to be extremely erudite. Even the few I disliked tended to have a sense of humor I relished. Maybe living in Kentucky my standards were low and I'd think anybody who could speak in complete sentences was a genius. We did have (we do have) a crappy school system, but there's a lot of smart people there. Hard to say.
Also, accent is usually a far more difficult thing to understand (at least at first) than the ornate grammar or sometimes esoteric vocabulary. This part isn't just my experience, though. I've spoken to many native English speakers who have said the same thing about trying to understand Indian speakers of English.
OTOH, of my 3 closest Indian friends at the time, two learned English at home (one attended school in England and he could do a great texan ... could have me in tears). So, one learned a lot at home, one at least a little. One may or may not have learned at home. I don't think I ever talked to him about it. Probably not, now that I think about it, but I'm not sure. Kinda odd. He had a BA in English (or literature or something like that) from some Indian University. G (from Kerala) spoke English and Malayallam; E (from Bombay, Goa) English and Hindi; D (from bengal, Calcutta i think) English, Hindi, and Bengali.
ah, well ... kids need something.
k
