Learning Hindi!

Good news everyone! We now have a shared Google Drive Folder, which you can find here http://rachel.likespizza.com/archive/learning-hindi.com/drive, with several resources to help you learn Hindi. If you’ve never heard of Google Drive then don’t panic, it’s just a shared folder that anyone can access on the web. It looks something like this:

You’re probably already asking yourself what resources are actually there - so let’s get straight into it.

The biggest attraction is the folder titled Pratham Books. This folder contains a collection of over 60 Hindi children’s books, along with their English translations so you can check your understanding. Some books even have audio recordings too! Click here to go straight to the folder.

A teaser of some of the books available to read online!

Pratham Books are an amazing Indian Non-Profit that want to help Indian children learn to read. It’s only because they release many of their books under very generous Creative Commons copyright that I am able to share them with you here, so send thanks their way!

In a different folder we have all the audio files from our site available for you to easily listen to online or download…

And as if that wasn’t enough for you, we also have a .pdf eBook which complies most of the lesson from our website into one very large, 284 page file. Again you can download to your computer or print it off (if you have a lot of paper!) Many people have asked for this in the past and so here it is!

Inside the main folder you will find a Read Me file with more information about the contents and full instructions on how to download an entire folder!

Please let me now your feedback on these resources, both good and bad in the comments section below. Hopefully in the future I will be able to add even more resources to this folder, so if there’s anything else you’d like to see then please let me know and I’ll see what I can do! I hope these resources can help you :)

So don’t forget to check out our Google Drive folder: http://rachel.likespizza.com/archive/learning-hindi.com/drive!

Namaste everyone! I’m currently working on the second part the Similar Sounds lesson. Before I post that though I’m updating old parts of the Consonants Section! Here is the completely new version of Lesson #54 now with audio!

So far we’ve covered all of the main Hindi consonants but unfortunately there’s still a bit more for us to learn! Today we’re going to learn about some additional consonants that are mostly used to represent sounds that have come from Arabic, Persian or even English and that don’t quite exist in the Hindi alphabet.

This lesson is all about what’s called the nuqtaa or nuktaa in Hindi - which is just a name for a little dot that can sit under a consonant and modify its sound. As you read this lesson you will see that many of these sounds are ignored by many Hindi speakers - but make sure you pay attention to ड़ and ढ़ which always have a distinct sound! So anyway here goes, the first letter for today is…

qa

This is the letter क़ qa. As you can see here we have simply added a dot under the letter क ka. The letter क़ qa is pronounced like a “k” sound but it comes from much deeper down in the throat. However most Hindi speakers will pronounce it as a normal क ka sound. The qa pronunciation is more common with Urdu speakers. Click the audio above to hear the two pronunciations firstly the rarer qa and secondly the more common ka.

The Hindi word for pen is क़लम qalam. Click the audio next to the letter क़ qa above to hear two pronunciations of the word: the rarer Urdu qalam and then the more common kalam.

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If you’ve never heard of Duolingo then you are seriously missing out! Quite simply they are the best language education website ever - and they’re completely 100% free. It almost sounds too good to be true. At the moment English speakers can learn French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. What’s more Russian, Hungarian, Irish, Romanian, Turkish, Dutch and Polish courses currently being created. And that’s not even mentioning the courses that aren’t for English speakers, phew!

Anyway yesterday Duolingo launched a beta version of the English course for Hindi speakers. Let me repeat that: this is a course for people who already know Hindi and who want to learn English. However I think this is going to be an incredible help for Hindi learners too - until Duolingo eventually launches a Hindi for English speakers course that is (which could be as early as late 2014). To sign up for the course click add new course then select “I speak Hindi” then click English!

On Duolingo you start with what’s called a tree - as you complete lessons you unlock new ones. It’s all very intuitive and should be easy to follow for everyone. Lessons start off easy…

And get harder and harder…

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When learning any language one of the most challenging things can be producing the correct sounds in the correct place. What makes this even harder is that there are often words that can sound very similar to our English ears but are completely different to native speakers’ ears!

Today, in the first of a two part lesson, we’re going to look at some Hindi words that have very similar pronunciation and that can be confusing for learners. Most of the time we are going to be looking at minimal pairs (this is just a term for two words where only one sound is different!). Today we’re going to focus on just the Hindi vowels and next time we’ll look at consonants.

 

Of course this lesson is going to have loads of audio that you should listen to over and over again!

First of all be sure that you’ve covered everything in the Vowels Section so far because we’re going to be using everything we’ve learnt there! Ok so enough chat let’s get going…

कम kam - less and काम kaam - work.

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Anonymous asked: If the word kal means both yesterday and tomorrow then how do we know one is meant?

Namaste and thanks for the question. This is a great point so thanks for asking. The Hindi word कल kal means both yesterday and tomorrow - so how can we tell? Well it’s easy, we use the context of the sentence! Let’s play a little game to illustrate this point. In each of these English sentences I’ve left a blank - the blank word is either yesterday or tomorrow. Can you figure out which it is? 

____ I watched TV.

____ I will go to the market.

If you go shopping ____, please buy me a new bag.

Can you guess which sentences use yesterday and which use tomorrow?

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