Hindi (हिन्दी)

A thread for Hindi! Well, I always wanted to create one for all of us, but I always in doubt whether anyone would be interested or not. Now since VVV asked me about this so I'm going to do it. This thread is basically for those who want to learn Hindi. Well, I'm not sure how exactly will I proceed with this, but I'll try.

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To start with, just a brief introduction. Hindi is one of the official languages of India and mother tongue of over approx 600 million people. Hindi finds it's roots in the language Sanskrit. Sanskrit is much more pure and systematic. Hindi on the other hand has absorbed features of all languages and is very flexible. So, you can find words of English, French, Bengali, Russian in Hindi. One of the features of both Hindi and Sanskrit is that the reading and writing are highly associated with each other. There is only one way to read what you write and if you know how to read any alphabet, then you can read any sentence. It's unlike English you need to know pronunciation of each word separately.

Hindi is written in Devnagari Script. It has 10 vowels and 40 consonants and 2 modifiers. It is written from left to right.

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Hindi - हिन्दी

Devanagari - देवनागरी



That's the set of alphabets for Hindi.

[Människöpesten]

my mind just got blown.

[VVVACCPLPNLY]

Cool... Now to try to learn my third system of writing!
I totally failed at cyrillic (used for languages like Russian), but I excell at hangul. Hopefully I'll be able to memorise the shapes of the letters. That's what I struggle wth most with.

Here is a normal written form of alphabets (not by me)



Just to show how it can vary from the actual printed form. I won't call it a good handwriting though and the person made mistake with and second vowel. Second one was आ and not ओ

[severianb]

This is awesome. Thank you MA. You are a intellectual giant. I'm now going to go cry in a corner and think about how dumb I am.

[sumi1]

Try this site for learning the script and pronunciation.

http://www.avashy.com/hindiscripttutor.htm

[VVVACCPLPNLY]

Ok, here's another place I'm having trouble. With Korean as my third language (though, come this thursday, I will learn how to make superlatives, meaning I will officially know more Korean than French), I'm used to how it has a difference between the aspirated and non-aspirated p sounds, as well as k, t, ch. The similar consanant sounds b, g, d, and j, all have no aspirated form. These last five are very hard to aspirate. But they do have aspirated forms in Hindi. It is very hard for me to try to make the difference, without my mouth going into Korean mode and turning them into a p/k/t/ch, respectively. I hope that made sense. Wasabi might know what I mean, or anyone who has tried to learn hangul.
Basically, I can't make the aspirated g/b/d/j very easily. I might have found a language that will kick my butt finally.
Funnily enough, the restroflex consanants aren't to hard, they just slow me down a bit when I read romanised Hindi.
Also sumit, awesome site. Many thanks my friend!

[ed2010]

I just got a coupon for up to 150.00 off Rosetta Stone software
at Borders. So do I buy the French language packs? or Hindi?
( I cannot afford both )


Ah, to be a Cunning Linguist!

[Rev]

Glad you are doing this.

I have wanted to study Sanskrit for years, but have never had to opportunity. Also, it seemded too complicated, and the conjuncts are just too many to even begin to grasp.

[user472884]

So, when you write in Hindi do you draw the one horizontal line before writing the whole word, or do you write each individual character and connect the horizontal lines as you go?