Hindi Textbook recommendations?

squidward

This probably doesn't exist, but does anyone know of a Hindi textbook that teaches based on the English alphabet? I really don't want to waste time parsing the Hindi script, which all the textbooks I have seen require you to do. Thanks for any help.

kullukid

I'm using "teach yourself beginners Hindi" by Rupert Snell which uses a Roman transliteration (English) but i'm also having Hindi lessons from an Indian girl who's at Uni in my town & she's just convinced me how much easier it is to learn using Devanagiri script (hindi. Give it a try & save youself time in the long run it's easier than you think. KK

karuna

Sounds like you might be best off with an audio kit or CD Rom. The first thing most Hindi books will teach you is the alphabet!

But I am convinced that you need to read Devanagari too. The English transliteration isn't precise, you really need to read the script to get some of the vowel sounds accurately= U and OO (short and long "oo" sound) for example. And the difference between D and Dh, G and Gh, K and Kh- well, you need to listen to people saying it!

kullukid

The "teach yourself beginners Hindi" by Rupert Snell comes with 2 audio CD's.
Yes Karuna, i agree it's important to learn the Hindi alphabet before you can make much progress & then it all starts to fall into place, although it is a bit like returning to junior/infant school to an old fogey like me! KK

karuna

I agree! I was so frustrated in my first few classes sitting there learning the alphabet! The problem I have now is I can read perfectly, if slowly, but most of the time have little to no idea what the words mean. Unless the word turns out to be English, which always makes me laugh- I remember trying to work out what "maich" was in the context of sport. Why, it was a cricket "maich" of course!

the opoponax

I'm in the same boat, and I'm slowly making my way through Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi.

You know what I really want? Because I do agree that this would be a whole lot easier if I could just read. I want a Devanagari handwriting primer.

The Hindi books that want you to learn the alphabet, as far as I've seen anyway, generally just throw letters at you and don't actually go into how to write. I can't speak for others, but I'd have a much easier time learning an alphabet via writing than just staring at it all day till I started recognizing the letters.

blackbird

As soon as I started to learn Oriya, I realised it would be extremely difficult without the alphabet. The problem is that Indian languages have many more consonants than European ones, so the Roman alphabet is totally inadequate. What I found was that I would remember, for example, thanda (cold), but forget whether there was a dot under the N and D and which vowel was long. Where as, once I knew the alphabet, I would develop a visual memory of which letters were involved.

As I couldn't find an Oriya textbook, I used a children's schoolbook for learning English, which had the English word followed by an Orissan English pronunciation of it (eg "was" is apparently pronounced "owaj"!), then the meaning in Oriya. So I would look up the letters in the Oriya word, and write it down in Roman letters. I would recommend this method for learning the alphabet as it's totally effortless (if rather boring) -- once you've looked the letters up enough times, you start remembering them. I also learnt quite a few words while I was at it.

As I understand it, although almost all the major Indian languages have their own alphabet, they are all based on the same principles, so this advice would apply to any of them. I'm hoping that if and when I get round to learning Hindi, it will be relatively easy to learn the letters, even though at first sight they look nothing like the Oriya ones.

As for learning to actually make the sounds with my mouth... now that's far more difficult than remembering a hundred or so shapes and squiggles!

kullukid

Yes you have to learn how to shape & squiggle your tongue to make Hindi sounds correctly. KK

Dilliwala

JuliaF

I've had a similar experience to Karuna and it always makes me laugh too. I remember spending ages over a Hindi menu board and the word I was puzzling over turned out to be Maggi Noodles!

Aishah

That's what happens to me too, Karuna - I can sound the word out but unless I know what it means is very frustrating (trying to read the newspaper in Hindi, for instance). It took me 3 weeks to fully learn all the characters - as suggested by blackbird I bought the Hindi writing book used by Nursery class first - not only plenty of practice for writing but sounding out at the same time! Slowly went through the books for primary school, and had a tutor about every 3rd day for an hour to push me along.
If you wanted to learn phrases that might come in handy, squidward, either LP or Rough Guide have a small pocket-sized book and it's all in English alphabet.

__________________
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

the opoponax

Though you should be warned that Lonely Planet's transliteration system leaves a little to be desired -- it's slightly off of what you'll see used in India (for instance the Hinglish used in pop culture and advertising, like Jab We Met or Life Ho To Aisi. Also, the pronunciation examples skew heavily towards British English pronunciations, so it's hard for an American or Canadian to grasp exactly which 'a' sound is being asked for. Long? Short? Schwa?

Haven't looked at the Rough Guide, but the language guide in back of my LP was absolutely worthless.

Sorry to be such an LP-downer these days, by the way. I'm sure they're good for something, I just can't figure out what it is...?

karuna

Fuel?

I'm glad I'm not the only one floundering in a sea of literate incomprehension! I should add that a lot of my vocab is picked up by listening to people around me talking, which they do at machine-gun rapid speed unfortunately. Phone calls are good because they often consist of questions which you can usually pick up on quite easily, and there are "gaps" when the other person is speaking that you can use to translate in your head. Knowing one or two words like "aaiye", "ghar" etc you can piece things together- so and so has come to the house. But I would have no clue how to say it myself.

Do other people have this- understanding the meaning of what's said, but being unable to respond or say it yourself?

the opoponax

Yep! I was in that same boat by the time I left India. I could eavesdrop to brilliant effect, but couldn't so much as ask where the bathroom is...

blackbird

Yep, me too with Oriya -- I'm still too slow forming sentences, and there's usually a word I need but don't know. But I've only been learning for 3 months.

On an encouraging note, the more I've listened to people talking, the easier it has got to distinguish between various letters that sounded identical to me not long ago. I even found myself understanding a fair amount of Bengali, a lot of words are the same as in Oriya but with a different accent. It seems to me that if you learn one north Indian language you can probably learn other ones pretty easily. A bit like German and Dutch, for example.

Regarding opoponax's point about pronunciations, I'm not sure which version of British English the Indians are going by, given that they seem to think (for example) that man is pronounced the same as men.