Saturday Night

Tonight I drove out to Rocheport with Zahra and Michelle, and we met Laura and Rachel at their house for a Bollywood Night (the first one that wasn't on my territory). I think I'm up to seven Bollywood films now. I understood tons of Hindi this time around. Laura made scones - blueberry and maple with pecans and chocolate chips - and Indian spiced tea with lots of milk. It was delicious.

I came home and I was a bit high from all the sugar. I planned to go to bed early, as I have a lot to do tomorrow (today), but instead I found myself hanging out with Lingxiao and some friends in the common room for half an hour, and then chatting with Tina, and chatting, and chatting. We talked about everything, mostly the saddest stories of our lives and that kind of shit. And I suddenly realized it was almost four o'clock in the morning. Not smart. But it is Saturday, so neither is it suicidal...

The End.

Hindi Update

So, I haven't spent an extraordinary amount of time with Hindi. I had the basics of the script crammed into my head around Thanksgiving break, and then there were finals, then Christmas, then New York, and then staff training... you get the idea. However, that doesn't mean I've been totally ignoring it, either. I've really improved my control of Devanagari to the point where I'm not actively studying it by itself anymore, and I've finished the first chapter of Teach Yourself and half of the second.

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).

Hindi Update... Again...

As soon as I'd finished thinking about how many wonderful resources there were online for learning Hindi, especially in comparison to the absolute lack of materials in the bookstores here, it hit me -

Somehow, I manage to forget time and time again that I live at a University. I can check out books from a large, research library! I am happy living on a University, feeling cultured and happy, knowing that within a twenty minute walk I have dozens of cafes and restaurants and cultural events every night and a cool independant cinema and tons of cool people to hang out with, and as a backdrop to my daily activities the sophisticated facades of Jesse Hall, the J-School, and Memorial Union... one of my advising offices is even in a 200 year old building! It's all quite impressive, even more than a year in, to this little Missouri girl. But my absolute favourite part is the library, which is why I need to kick myself - hard - for not taking greater advantage of it.

I walked out with two books: Dreaming in Hindi, a sort of novel length rant about how much fun it is to learn languages, especially Hindi, and what it does to your brain to do so, and to live in India... It's fascinating to read, and even a bit educational. It is scattered with Hindi words, many of which I already recognize, and has a lot of information about India as well. And, as if I wasn't on enough of a high with learning a new language, it's full of quotes that I would like to think would make anyone feel the need to go out and study languages.

And I also got the even more appropriate book HINDI for Non-Hindi Speakers. Yep, that's me! I also want to see HINDI for Hindi Speakers, though, just for curiosity's sake. :P

Hindi Update - Including Some Resources

So, Zahra and my language swap is going pretty well so far. In Spanish we've covered pronunciation, extra letters and accent marks, about 12 nouns and 6 -ar verbs, as well as how to conjugate those latter in the present tense. We've discussed gender, plural, and articles, as well as using gustar to express liking something. She thinks it's very easy so far and she's right.

Hindi is going well for me too, although a bit more slowly because it's a bit harder, at least initially. At first, when I thought I knew exactly what I was looking for (lists of words written in devanagari) and had limited time in the computer lab, I felt frustrated by the lack of materials I was finding. With a bit more patience, internet time, and random wandering, I've actually found a wealth of resources.

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There's Quillpad Hindi http://quillpad.com/hindi/ which lets me type in Hindi without knowing how the Hindi keyboard words - I just write phonetically and it converts things for me. It has it's quirks and irregularities, and so does the transliteration I've learned, but nevertheless it works pretty well. Also, Quillpad lets you type in Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, and English - basically a little sample of Indian scripts, most of which are related. For comparative purposes I've sometimes selected what I've typed in Hindi and pushed the button to transliterate it into one of the other scripts. Interesting to see the similarities.

Then there's Hindi Script Tutor http://www.avashy.com/hindiscripttutor.htm which originally upset me because it's distinctly unprintable. However, it's awesome for learning Devanagari if you have internet, because it shows how to write (stroke order and all) and pronounce each letter, and shows each letter in one or two examples, which are spoken by both male and female voices. The Conjunct Engine is also nice - that's what I'll be moving onto next.

In fact, the more I look around, the more I find. There are several things I've found that will be excellent for improving my Hindi once I have a basic grip on the language.

For example, this site uses clips from real Bollywood movies to teach Hindi: http://www.cuttingchai.com/HouseFull/index.html

This website http://www.babloo.com/is great for learning all sorts of things about India (from their description: folk tales from India, nursery rhymes, significance of festivals, Indian Panorama, all about Olympics, magic tricks, safety and good manners for children, reference park, health awareness, online games for kids, puzzles, mathematical brain teasers, amazing facts... and much much more.) and is available in English and Hindi, as well as other languages of India. You have to enable pop-ups.

This website's "Kid Zone" http://www.indif.com/kids/hindi_proverbs/hindi_proverbs.aspx also has a lot of cool things in Hindi.

Although I went to the bookstore here in Columbia and was a bit disappointed to find not so much as a Hindi phrasebook, the web seems full to bursting with resources! :D What a great language to learn over the internet!

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I've almost gotten a good handle on the alphabet, which Zahra wants before she starts teaching me much grammar or vocabulary. I know all of the basic letters now, although I'm not 100% certain of my pronounciation, especially with hard and soft and aspirated and super aspirated t's and d's. (???!!) I haven't even really started with conjuncts yet, although I recognize most of them and I'm not really afraid of them - I just think I can probably get started with the language itself before I'm ready to transcribe entire novels.

Yesterday I watched two Hindi songs on Youtube, both from Bollywood films I've already seen. I actually understood a handful of words. :) Although having the English translation at the bottom helped, of course...

Adventures with Devanagari

Today I wrote my first sentences in Devanagari (in Hindi... Devanagari being the script and Hindi being the language). They were so simple that it was hard to tell, but I think I actually understood the grammar of what I was doing and knew the letters, so it wasn't just copying. Next thing I need to do is learn how to type. :P What I did today was all along the lines of "The boy writes" "I read", etc, although I stretched myself by using the verb hesitate, which literally translates to if-but-do. Clever. I also tried one more complex sentence, "The brother takes but the sister gives". These sentences barely make sense on their own and certainly not together, but just to feel accomplished I put several of them together to make a 'paragraph'. It looked very pretty.

So, Devanagari. I call it a script. It's not an alphabet because the symbols normally represent a full syllable each, not a consonant or a vowel that have to be combined to make a syllable. But it's not a syllabary, like Japanese's hiragana or katakana, because a syllabary has different syllables like "ma" "mo" "mu" "ga" "go "gu", and devanagari instead has only "ma" and "ga" and, to differentiate between different vowels, you modify these characters. So basically, it is the love child of a syllabary and an alphabet, and there's a word to describe what it is, abugida, but I usually just use the catch all word - script - when talking about it.

This is what the letters look like, although I don't think this is ALL of them:


On the top right, in that little box, it shows the matras. These are the things you add to the normal letters to change their vowel sound from the default a to something else. My feeling about this system is that it would work fine, if it was designed for a language which uses the default a a lot, other vowels slightly less often, and generally has word composed of consonant-vowel-consonant vowel, like Japanese or Hawaiian.

But that's the problem - it doesn't. Most hindi words don't end in a vowel, to start with, and they're actually reasonably fond of consonant clusters. So, to provide for this, they have a bunch of ways you can /literally/ combine two consonants, by cutting off half of the symbol. It's rather unsettling, really, because if, for example, this symbol:

makes the 'ka' sound, that doesn't mean that you can break the symbol apart into 'k' and 'a'. But, if you want to say 'kyaa', you can't have it being read as 'kayaa', so what do you do?


You take Ka...

And you take Ya...


And you sort of smash them together. Erm... okay.

The problem is that this one is relatively straightforward, you could probably even guess it and write it without ever having seen this combination, or conjunct, before. But others aren't like that. Many can be guessed when reading, but you can't really guess when you're writing. And a few seem to be completely irregular, but I'm not far enough along to speak authoritatively yet.

As for the characters themselves: I have a firm handle on about one third of them, but they seem to be used more than the ones I don't know as well, so I only need to check on every third or fourth word when reading. Still, I think it may go more slowly from here, because I'm not 100% sure of the pronunciation of some of the ones ahead, many of them don't have precise English equivalents, they're used less often, and in some cases they look a bit trickier to write.

The letters are curvy and feel sort of insubstantial, sometimes it's hard to find things to grab onto. It's sometimes hard for me to write them all distinctly, because the stroke order isn't as rigid as in Japanese so people get confused when you ask them how you're supposed to write a different character. So sometimes I start to feel like I'm just drawing squiggles and then decorating them with vowel and nasalization dots, lines, and more squiggles. It looks lovely and mysterious but also chaotic. Sounds strange but it reminds me a little of the alphabet I was trying to make for my conlang so many years ago. I wanted this curvy chaotic ornamental mess, but imposing enough order on it to make it reasonable was far beyond my capability.

I have to say this: I /love/ the line. It pulls the alphabet together, sort of reforms the chaos. All the squiggles and madness sort of hang down from it. It's so unique, distinct, and beautiful. It's not always super easy to work with, since you have to line up the characters well enough to connect them all with the line after you finish the sentence, but it's well worth it. And at least for the time being, I look forward to finishing each sentence and drawing the line. Much more satisfying than a period.



This is Alexander Arguelles, a Youtube-famous polyglot, writing in Arabic, then Sanskirt (Devanagari), then Chinese.

In Devanagari he writes this: विनाशमुखमेतत्ते केनाख्यातं दुरात्मना

I am happy to report that my handwriting is a little bit better than his. However, he writes like 3x as fast as I do. :P

This site has tons of children's poems and stories in Hindi, so it's a mid-term goal for me... http://www.4to40.com/ :)

The Morning After

Oh, what a wildly exciting life I lead. :P