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In India, learning science often means tackling two hard things at once: a new physical concept and a new language. For many students, the mental effort spent translating sentences leaves less energy for actual scientific reasoning.
According to the 2025 UNESCO Bhasha Matters report, many Indian children enter school in a language different from their medium of instruction, and the report calls for multilingual education to enable learning and inclusion. This creates a double learning burden. Fortunately, with modern tools, you no longer have to choose between fully understanding a topic and preparing for an English-medium exam.
Why does the "double burden" slow learning?
When you read a dense textbook explanation in a second language, your brain allocates working memory to decoding vocabulary and grammar. This "extraneous cognitive load" gets in the way of building a mental model of the physics or chemistry concept. Your mind is so busy translating words like "proportional," "inversely," or "exerts" that it misses the underlying physical relationship.
When a student encounters a word like "velocity" for the first time in an English textbook, they must first memorize its dictionary definition. Only then can they start to grasp that it means speed in a specific direction. If the underlying concept of directed speed is already familiar in their first language, they skip the first step and go straight to the science. Without this bridge, many students resort to rote memorization just to survive the exam, leaving them unprepared for higher-level application questions where true comprehension is required.
Learning in your mother tongue taps into established neural pathways. You can picture the concept instantly. If a teacher explains inertia by describing what happens when a bus brakes suddenly in Hindi, Tamil or Bengali, you understand the feeling in your body before you even write down the formula. The everyday language makes the abstract concept concrete and personal.
What is the translanguaging method?
A proven approach to solving this is "translanguaging" — moving flexibly between languages to maximize understanding. A 2025 study by Thamburaj et al. notes that when students process a new concept in their mother tongue before transitioning to scientific English, their engagement and conceptual understanding improve significantly.
Instead of dropping English entirely, you separate the meaning from the label. The steps are simple:
Use your first language to understand why something happens.
Use English to name what the concept is called.
Practice solving problems using the English terms once the idea is clear.
How can you prompt an AI tutor for bilingual help?
If you are using an AI to study, you can explicitly set these rules. When you work with Fermi's AI tutor, you can ask it to build a plan for the session and explain the concepts in your mother tongue, while explicitly linking the ideas back to the English terms.
Try a prompt like this:
This method puts you in control of the language barrier. For parents trying an AI tutor with your child, setting up a bilingual prompt ensures the child feels comfortable asking the questions they might hesitate to ask in an English-only classroom.
How does this build exam confidence in English?
The ultimate goal for most students is to write a board or competitive exam in English. The bilingual approach does not hurt this goal; it actually helps it.
By focusing on the concept first through the Fermi Concept Library in a language you intuitively understand, you build a stronger foundation for answering the toughest application questions. Once the core concept is solid, applying the English terminology becomes a simple mapping exercise, not a struggle to understand the idea itself. When you are getting useful AI feedback on your step-by-step physics solutions, an AI can spot a conceptual misunderstanding and explain the correction in your mother tongue, while pointing out if you used the wrong English exam term. This targeted feedback corrects the physics error without punishing you for a language mistake.
