When I was in Florida over break I went to a famous bookstore called Haslam's. It was big and fun to walk around, but I was somewhat disappointed by their book selection, especially in the foreign language category. I found nothing for Hindi. This was discouraging because after all, I didn't find anything for Hindi in the stores back home, either. I had taken a few things from my University library, but as much as I hate to admit it I'm spoiled and prefer more modern books, with more modern methods of learning languages. Teaching yourself a language during the course of ordinary life is enough of a challenge as it is, without having to decode old books!
My luck changed in New York. I went into an absolutely huge Borders store there and picked up both Teach Yourself Hindi and a Hindi visual dictionary. The visual dictionary must be new - it's the same brand I have in English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Finnish, and I thought I knew all the languages they offered the small independent form in, so I was surprised and delighted to find it in Hindi.
I've been going through Teach Yourself and so far so good. The recordings are a bit irritating, and I have my issues with some of the methods, but the pace of the book seems pretty good, and the examples and dialogues are quite nice. Hindi doesn't seem to be too hard, really, especially in terms of grammar and vocabulary and such. I'm getting quite good at Devanagari, finally. Zahra saw my notebook the other day and seemed impressed by my handwriting. :D For someone trying to pick it up, my advice is to learn everything en bloc. It will hurt you're head, but if you don't learn all the letters - and yes, I mean all of them - you will have no idea what's going on when you start trying to read anything at all. This is because even letters or irregular letter conjuncts that you think must be unusual cases... really aren't. For example, they teach you almost as an afterward that you add a dot to kh and j to make them a hard, phlegm filled kh and a z, respectively. When I read this I got the impression that those sounds weren't extremely common in the native language - more used to write borrowed or foreign words.
I was wrong, at least sort of - Hindi seems to be like English in that it has so many borrowed words that there's really hardly any point distinguishing them. People say this is the case about Japanese, but in Japanese you can usually guess as to which words will be imports - like technology - in Hindi I'm not really sure yet what words are imports but as an example Teach Yourself has already included two words for man, and mentioned, in an offhand way, that one is 'native' and the other an Arab import - and so far they're using the Arab import far more in the examples. (It's also the word I'd learned before).
So yeah, you will use all those letters, so just buck up and learn them. I think I finally have - I'm still uncertain of how to write a few of the conjuncts properly - and I'm proud to report that I no longer feel like I'm drawing and embellishing squiggles, except for the numerals, which still bother me. Here they are:
Not a fan.I've started learning to type recently, albeit still using the Quillpad website. It's a little bit interesting as I've sort of learned the transliteration style used in Teach Yourself, (it helped a lot to finally have a single learning source, so I could properly get a handle on one transliteration style), and that style doesn't always turn into the write Devanagari on Quillpad, so I'm trying to watch it closely and learn how it wants me to input things. I imagine this wouldn't slow a native speaker down very much but it's a bit weird for me at least initially. For example, it took me a good 20 seconds to get it to accept any spelling I offered of acchaa (okay).
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