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Hindi: A Confused Approach | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6778 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 1 of 8 13 March 2008 at 1:06am | IP Logged | ||
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So, although I'm not entirely sure why, I've decided to undertake Hindi. Initially I was maybe just learning the script, but that seemed a foolish place to stop, considering how nice it sounds, and the linguistic interest (mixed ergativity!). I technically began this at around the new year, although at that point I only learned the script, and have only recently picked up my interest again.
I'm not really sure what I'm doing, which may be a hinderance to progress. I have Snell's Teach Yourself Hindi, which might be a good resource. Having read so many different methods of language learning, I'm kind of hesitant to go in any one direction. What I started doing, was just entering the vocabulary for each chapter into Mnemosyne, and after a little while, then I would read through the dialogues (which I could then mostly piece together). I've done this through chapter 3 (I've gone rather slowly with it). Although I have the audio, I haven't really used it. It's pretty slow, and there are tons of pauses (which the speakers' intonation depends on). I might switch to entering in sentences from the book using the vocabulary, but I don't know if they're well structured to learn the vocabulary from them alone. Although if I kept doing the vocabulary singly as well as add the sentences from the dialogues, it'd probably avert the need to "learn" grammar. Something that bothers me at present is that I cannot distinguish all four series for the consonants (+/-voice and aspiration), or between the retroflexes and dentals. My thought is that I probably shouldn't do any sort of shadowing technique until I can distinguish them, and I don't really want to say anything aloud if it's coming out terribly wrong (I think I do some weird things with regard to German pronunciation as a result). Since I don't have any better ideas, I've just been pounding my ears with Hindi for the past couple weeks. Since I don't have a baseline for my spoken Hindi, and have not produced spoken Hindi (aside from some urges to sing along to Hindi songs, which I occasionally cannot resist...), I can't really say if it's helped anything at all. I can guess that I cannot yet distinguish them. Perhaps I should listen more deliberately (not entirely sure how, though)--maybe spend some time not listening to the words, but rather the sounds (which I did in the past a bit, but not lately). I'd gratefully accept advice on the topic. I'm trying in some ways to take a "natural" approach to the language, though. I don't really want to be studying grammar, or vocabulary so much in the way of memorization. Which is me stepping outside previous experience; while that's fairly effective for me, because I happen to memorize fairly well, and have never had problems learning grammar, but I don't feel this will provide me with a natural hold of the language--too much thinking, or something. Ah, well. A long and sufficiently rambling introductory post; we all now know how much I like parentheses, semi-colons, and punctuation in general. (Of course, the point of this is for me to ramble, but publicly, because that could possibly result in help for others or myself.) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 8 13 March 2008 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
I've found it helpful to listen to minimal pairs in a loop. Take two words, which differ only in one of the sounds you're finding difficult, and set it up so that you hear one after the other repeatedly. One way to do this is use a program like audacity to create a single audio file out of two separate ones; another is to use an audio player that allows you to have a playlist and repeat it. Listen to it, perhaps in the background, until you can comfortably hear the difference; I'd be surprised if it took over an hour, and it might be significantly faster. After you can distinguish all 4 when they're in any of the combinations of pairs, try listening to loops of 3 or all 4. Looking up a phonetic description (wikipedia tends to be ok for this) of the IPA symbol associated with each can also help. Good luck! Mixed ergativity sounds very cool; now you're making me want to learn Hindi! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6778 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 3 of 8 24 March 2008 at 11:48am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for the suggestion. I gave a try to putting the minimal pairs in a loop, using the audio from the IPA handbook, and found that I didn't actually have much difficulty distinguishing them. So, I think then I just have to keep listening to non-isolated audio of them, and I'll figure it out the rest. (I did have a difficulty at first for the difference between the aspirated and non-aspirated dental stop. For the life of me I couldn't tell the difference, any at all; they both sounded aspirated. Turns out I misentered the filename for the unaspirated, and it was just looping the aspirated over and over.) Well, I just finished my spring break, which I devoted (at the expense of coursework) to Hindi. Most days I'd watch a couple movies in Hindi, at the least page through the TY Hindi book, and over one four day span I entered in three lessons worth of vocabulary. I could probably keep up a pace of a lesson every other day, perhaps simply because I find Mnemosyne to be so effective. (I am a fairly good memorizer of vocabulary, though.) It's likely because I'm still at such a beginner stage, but it's certainly satisfying that I could watch the same movie basically everyday (I think I watched one five days in a row), but pick out new things each time (vocabulary that I learned in the meantime, or grammatical constructions). Part of it was, that I would hear some things repeatedly, and look into what was happening. Mostly for curiosity's sake. I wonder if I should memorize the gender of the nouns. I haven't bothered with it up to this point, as part of my experiment in not trying to learn grammatical points (and instead just pick up on the grammar). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6778 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 4 of 8 28 March 2008 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't really been doing much with regards to this. I've kept up with my reviews in Mnemosyne, and continued listening to and watching Hindi language media, but that's about it. Today, I believe I will add in the next chapter's vocabulary.
I was able to buy a nice thick Hindi-English dictionary for $3 at a library booksale, so that should be helpful, considering the overall low levels of Hindi resources. (It was also one of the holes in my foreign language dictionary collection, holes which I am always pleased to fill for less than $5.) An interesting thought struck me---with the amount of English usage in Hindi, in order to have a perfect accent would require that I learn to pronounce English with a Hindi accent. Just funny, I think. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6778 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 5 of 8 01 April 2008 at 1:17am | IP Logged | ||
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I added another chapter of vocabulary, so I'll soon start reading the dialogues to the chapter. (I like waiting a few days, so that I actually can remember the vocabulary a bit when I read the dialogues.)
When listening to the Hindi broadcast on Deutsche Welle today, I was able to pick out what seemed like more words than usual. I think learning the word for 'peace' might have been a big contributor. Although I haven't been doing "active" learning of anything (I'm not doing anything that requires producing Hindi), I can remember the meaning of quite a few Hindi words -- which I believe is what would be expected to happen; through repeated exposure, things are remembered, even if you don't try to. So, I think that's a good thing. I should probably try to do some more reading. Hindi seems so cleanly pronounced mostly that having learned words through writing alone often allows me to pick them out in speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FlorentT Triglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 6312 days ago 119 posts - 120 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: Portuguese, Flemish, German, Hindi | Message 6 of 8 01 April 2008 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your posts. It is quite interesting to see that my experience is pretty similar: although I am not using Deutsche Welle but the NHK World podcasts, everyday I do seem to pick up more words and grammatical structures. What I find difficult is that processing in your head the bits of language you recognise takes time at such early stages, and I am not picking up the news as fast as I did when starting Portuguese last year. But then again, Hindi is an exotic language compared to the ones I know already.
I am personally trying to memorize the gender of nouns. Once again this is a different, more difficult endeavour than my previous language studies as many words do not share the same gender than romance languages (which are usually common, although with a few exceptions). The reason for me to do it is that it can help searching for Hindi words in a dictionary because you will know which form you need to give to the noun based on its gender and your knowledge of grammar. Also Assimil which I am using as a primary learning method does a good job in this particular course at providing grammar tidbits that ease understanding. Good luck with your further studies! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| nissimb Tetraglot Groupie India tenjikuyamato.blogsp Joined 6406 days ago 79 posts - 102 votes Speaks: Marathi*, Hindi, English, Japanese Studies: Korean, Esperanto, Indonesian | Message 7 of 8 01 April 2008 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for your interest in learning Hindi. I had posted the following links in another thread, but I will post them here for your convenience. Just a suggestion, when you learn a new noun in Hindi, it is best to remember its gender together with it.
A short introduction to Hindi http://www.it-c.dk/people/pfw/hindi/ Hindi Language Resources http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/hindilinks.html Hindi dictionary http://www.hindi25.com/ Online Hindi-English Dictionary http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Hindi-e nglish/ Bilingual Hindi Dictionaries (Hindi and other Indian languages) http://ltrc.iiit.net/onlineServices/Dictionaries/Dict_Frame. html Online Hindi dictionaries (Hindi with many other languages) http://www.dicts.info/dictlist1.php?l=Hindi News in Hindi http://www.sumanasa.com/hindi-news/ A podcast for Hindi learners http://www.ispeakhindi.com/ Hindi language books (link from Grant and Cutler bookshop in UK) http://www.grantandcutler.com/books/section/KDA A good site for learning Hindi http://www.hindilearner.com/ A book and CD for learning Hindi http://www.letslearnhindi.com/ Hope this helps you. Good luck!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6778 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 8 of 8 05 April 2008 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the links and encouragement.
While I won't disagree that it is most likely best to remember the noun's gender with it, as it is the traditional way to do it, it goes against the principles I'm using, even if I am making up these principles as I go along. The idea is that most grammar, including a noun's gender (in Hindi, in any case), should be fairly discernible by context. So, even though directed study of grammar has been successful for me in the past, I choose to forego it in the interest of... well, something weird in my head I suppose. I think because I have no particular reason to learn Hindi, nor any particular timeframe for doing so, it's encouraging me to try weird things that don't really make sense. The only way I'll likely learn a noun's gender deliberately is, I think, to find a few different sentences that use it in enough forms to figure out what its gender and type are. Which I believe I may start doing, since I recognize that I should learn the genders, but don't want to interrupt my odd experimentation. I haven't done a lot of Hindi in the past few days, though; although I've at least been keeping up with my reviews. I'm been considering learning another language simultaneously (one which I would probably study in a more "traditional" way), which might serve as a base for comparison; also, I've been giving some extra attention to my German, which I felt might have been being neglected. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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