advice on learning hindi

Saulteaux_woman

I know exactly what you mean, everyone tells you to buy the book but it really is aweful to follow. I have a Cambridge self Hindi Teacher, which is awesome for pronounciation, I bought it here in delhi but I'm sure you can get it Canada somewhere. My teacher and I went through the book and there were very few words that were pronounced wrong according to her anyway. I'm actually from Saskatchewan but our tribe orginated from there like a few hundred years ago, saulteaux is the plains dialect of Ojibway. which part of canada are you from?

edwardseco

New book out: Dreaming in Hindi. Its about a language school in India. Sounds like a nice slice of life book on a school as wacky as my class was..

gvdv

Hi Saulteaux_woman,
Thanks for the information about the origin of the 'Saulteaux' in your user name. I only know a couple of words in Ojibway/we. I'm from Toronto.

I don't actually have a problem with Snell's books re. pronunciation; it's the teacher in the Hindi class who is using 'non-standard' transliteration which gets me.

I also have several Urdu speaking friends who are helping me with concepts/pronunciation (although I know that there are differences between Urdu and Hindi pronunciation sometimes).

Thanks for mentioning the Cambridge book.

Take care,

paratmoshe

I found an interesting site to learn languages, they also offer a course in Hindi.
I tried it and it seems fine, you can also get in tough with people who will teach you Hindi if you help them with English.

www.livemocha.com

gvdv

Hi paratmoshe,
I had a look at that site, and decided to not use it because the amount of access/resources available free were limited in their scope (I'm devoting my money to paying for 'in person' lessons right now, but this might be a good alternative to 'live' instruction).

Is there anyone here who has used/participated in livemocha.com?

Saulteaux_woman

I have used it, but because our internet is a bit slower or could be the site I found waiting for the flash cards to apear is more frustrating then actually learning the language!!!

gvdv

Yeah, I can imagine that that would be very frustrating!

I have just been listening to 'Colloquial Hindi' (2 part CD course) which an acquaintance has just lent me; it seems quite comprehensive; it's an audio only course.

gvdv

August 2009 Summary of Resources for Learning Hindi


This is a list of the resources which I have found helpful/valuable, some others which people in this thread have talked about, and some others which are well-known.

I have numbered the items in the list below for easy reference - numbering does not reflect any idea of quality or importance.

1. 'Hindi Guru' CD; PC only (written for Win 3.1 and Win 98, but works on XP). This CD contains semi-animated conversations between members of a fictious family, which includes recordings of the different members of the family speaking.

It also contains a host of other features - notes on grammar; exercizes to test concepts learned in each chapter/unit; a dictionary; and songs and folk tunes.

2. Books by Rupert Schnell in the 'Teach Yourself' series (N.B., sometimes a particular books will be available in two
configurations; with and without accompanying CD's).
3. 'Colloquial Hindi' by Tej K. Bhatia. 2 CD set.
4. Linguata CD set
5. Various comprehensive, expensive multi-CD audio courses:
Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone (see message #19 in this thread)
6. Websites/Webpages/Podcasts/Free MP3's:

livemocha.com (live lessons; some free access, some paid access);
youtube tutorials;
shabdkosh.com (English/Hindi dictionary);
wordanywhere.com;
'A Door Into Hindi';
hindibhasha.com (writing Devanagari);
ispeakhindi.com/2007/06/27/essential-hindi-001-hello-and-goodbye/ (Free MP3 lessons)
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/hindilinks (Hindi resource page)

Sorry for the awful formatting here; I just can't seem to get the editing controls to do what I want them to do.

samvita

Learning a language from a book without knowing the correct pronunciation is a disaster. I tried learning Tamil but even my maid in Chennai could not understand what I said. The spoken language is best learnt from a person after learning the basic alphabets yourself.

Best wishes !

bjp

ok, 'Hindi Guru' and some other CD ordered from matchless-gifts.
I suddenly started the learning process yesterday on bcmtouring. I figured out that angoor khatte hain was sour grapes and being "crazy" to go on long bike rides was because of having a keeda. So I decided I might as well start, never mind the script, or even the grammar, even a basic vocabulary will be better than nothing.
So, next time, maybe it won't take half an hour to buy a few spices, and trying to draw little circles to portray peppercorns. ...It's gonna be fun when I can wind up the Hindi people at work, who can't speak it, don't know much of it.

PS: samvita, thanks for the best wishes. Any start is better than nothing. Tamil, I might even be better at at learning that than Hindi. Although I don't know a word of it, the sound of it in Chennai was vaguely familiar to me, I suppose because I heard it when I was a child.

vireya

I've tried out Livemocha, and it has a few issues.

Firstly, there are lots of mistakes in it. You will be marked as wrong for giving what is actually the correct answer more than once in the first couple of sections. The mistakes are unforgivable from my perspective.

Secondly, because there are no explanations given, the beginner would have no hope of figuring out the sentence structure. If you don't know that Hindi has postpositions, for example, you will not have a clue what is happening in the sentences or why.

Thirdly, because there is a standard set of pictures/sentences they use for every language, rather than sentences chosen to teach Hindi in particular, they include things that either aren't relevant in Hindi, or which are quite advanced concepts so shouldn't be in the first lesson or two. For example, participles in Hindi are not the first things you need to learn, because they are quite complex, but one of the first lessons includes things like "is sitting" and "is wearing", which will make no sense at all to a beginner.

Fourthly, the two people reading the Hindi don't have a consistency in how they pronounce words. For example, one uses very "correct" pronunciation of the words for "this" and "that", the other says them the way real Hindi speakers say them. This would lead to confusion for a beginner, as they sound like completely different words.

So, all in all, I can't say I recommend Livemocha!

rahul_127

try google translator very good utility

lenka0279

watching bollywood movies with subtitles definitely helps !! i've learned quite a bit that way.....

gvdv

Just wanted to post an extra resource, and thought I could edit my original message, but obviously not, so I'll just append it here:
http://hindiboloblog.blogspot.com/20...write-and.html

gvdv

Hi vireya,
Thanks for this review of 'livemocha'; very useful.

I'm taking classroom lessons at the moment, which I'm supplementing with some of the resources discussed above, and one of the things my teacher does that I find very helpful is to tell us both the "correct" pronunciation of words, and what people actually say.

bjp, I'm finding it more and more useful to know how to write (and increasingly read) Devanagari because it speeds learning and does away with having to use transliteration (which was helpful at first, but it just gets in the way after a while and not everybody uses the standard type, so it can get confusing).

I'm finding, as veriya implied, that it is essential to know the correct pronunciation in Hindi. If one knows how to pronounce the language, it then becomes possible (for me, anyway) to hear variations in pronunciation which may occur from person to person, or to hear the differences between Hindi and Urdu speakers pronouncing the same words. That way, I can tell the difference between various phrases, which 'sharpens' my ear. It's getting harder as I go on, but I must say that it's also more helpful.