hindi

Hindi: A Complete Course for Beginners (Book & 6 Audio CDs)
$49.95
Excellent book. I am teaching my 14-year old this subject as an Elective, and she loves it

Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary
$14.95
good points: VERY easy to navigate. easy to read print. it's light and easy to travel with. it has pronoun, verb, adjective (etc) guides that are superb.

bad points: it has very few words. most of the words i've needed to look up so far, have not been in there. or they had a word for it, just not the one i was looking for. 14,000 definitions (NOT words) sounds like a lot, it's not.

perfect! except for the fact that it needs MORE WORDS!!! :-(

Dreaming in Hindi
$26.00
I received this book as a gift when I was hospitalized this summer. It was one of People Magazine's picks for new non-fiction and an Oprah's book club pick. I found the book a huge disappointment. Had the recommenders actually read it?? I was most interested in getting to know the author through her experiences in a Hindi language immersion program in India. I was least interested in the latest linguistic/scientific studies on how we process language. I found the book to be disjointed and boring, almost a textbook for linguistic students--with the exception of some interesting cultural information about modern-day India. Thinking maybe it was me not being "intellectual" enough to "get it" I lent the book to a well-read friend. After carrying it around with her on a couple of vacations, she returned it to me saying she just couldn't maintain a level of interest to finish the book. I am shocked and surprised that the author is now teaching writing at Lesley University where I am an alum whose senior project was writing a book of creative non-fiction.

Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script
$12.95
Rupert Snell's TEACH YOURSELF BEGINNER'S HINDI SCRIPT is a friendly introduction to Devanagari, the script used to write Hindi and Sanskrit. Whenever learning a language with a different writing system, I personally always find it helpful to use a separate preliminary book to get up to speed with the writing system, that way when I'm working with my main textbook, I don't feel like my unfamiliarity with the writing system is holding me back from fully absorbing the lessons. Snell's book works quite well as this initial step. He introduces the components of Devanagari step by step, with plenty of exercises so that the student can apply his knowledge and internalize the script. There are photos of signs from India, including some with errors so that the student can see how the script works in daily life. There's even a bit on handwriting, which is a nice touch.

And it's not just about Hindi! Devanagari is used to write Sanskrit as well, and Snell does cover the letters found in Sanskrit. If you want to embark on a Sanskrit course like Coulson's TEACH YOURSELF SANSKRIT, I cannot recommend enough that you use this first.

My only complaint about this book--and it may well be the unrealistic expectations of a linguaphile--is that it doesn't talk about how the Hindi script differs from other Brahmi-derived scripts. A short appendix along the lines of "If you want to eventually learn Gujarati or Bengali, here are some ways you can apply your knowledge of Hindi script..." would have been nice. Snell does of course talk about how Hindi's relationship to Urdu in being a sometimes mutually intelligible language but written completely differently.