advice on learning hindi

Here is a website with a lot of useful material for learning Hindi, much of it produced by Rupert Snell, author of "Teach Yourself Hindi". I've been using the "Glossaries Alive" section and the worksheets as I go through TYH on my own. Other parts of the site may interest more advanced learners, for instance the videos and the PDF of Snell's Hindi-Urdu Reader.

http://hindiurduflagship.org/resourc...ning-teaching/

Yes, that's when you realize you have hit the Bhojpuri belt.

In "correct" Urdu kitaab is in fact a masculine, as in the source language Arabic. In Hindi it becomes a feminine, as does the Sanskrit neuter pustak(am) because both have replaced the "genuine" Hindi word pothii, a feminine derived from the Sanskrit diminutive pustika.

Oh, no wonder I've had such inconsistent results testing gender agreement with kitaab, which I thought would be s simple straightforward example (and one that I can pronounce!). In Ladakh the 2nd language Hindi is perhaps largely Urdu.

Okay, so what would be a common feminine noun that most Hindi and Urdu speakers use as a feminine noun, that I could use as a tester with lamba or bara or something? It would help not to have any sounds that are difficult for me, like ṛ, bh, gh, dh or jh... Now I'm really curious to find out if people use their gender agreement corrently most of the time!

Of course you would need nouns that denote inanimate objects. Those ending in (long) i are almost always feminine. The most commonly occurring exceptions are paani, dahi, ghi (spelt ghee in English), also moti. Anything else like dhoti is a feminine. Some common feminine nouns without the telltale ending are chaadar, kambal. You can mention these while getting your bed made.

Here is a set of podcasts in the public domain to learn basic Hindi
http://archive.org/search.php?query=Namaste%20Dosti

The series is called Namaste Dosti

Seems to be hosted by a very officious german woman