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Advice on transliterated materials

  Tags: Transliteration
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery Post Reply
Gregy1727
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 Message 1 of 5
05 August 2009 at 11:04pm | IP Logged 
Professor,

I am about to begin my studies of Hindi. I have read through your advice about Hindi
and plan to use a TY/Colloquial type course to aid in learning.

My question has to do with a second recommendation of yours -- Ernest Bender's Hindi
Grammar and Reader. I managed to track down this book and I have to say, it has an
impressively large wealth of knowledge on Hindi grammar and seems very structured and
immensely useful for learning to speak the language correctly. However, as you have
observed, there are two problems with the course: It is not in Devanagari script, and
there is not any (to my knowledge) audio available.

I'm having trouble figuring out when I should begin the book. It has a wealth of
information in it and I find it hard to keep my hands off of it, yet I don't want to
foster bad pronunciation and reliance on the Roman script since my ultimate goal is to
be fluent in all facets of the Hindi language. I eventually plan to move into
instruction books meant for Indian students. I have found textbooks for I-XII standard
(grades 1-12 respectively) meant for Indian students of Hindi. These books are written
entirely in Hindi with full Devanagari script usage, so I don't want to weaken my
reading ability.

My main questions, as you have noticed, are when I should begin the Book in relation to
autodidactic study with Colloquial/TY and how I should counterbalance the book's
shortcomings so that I receive well-rounded instruction in Hindi.

I should also note that I have a Hindi-speaking fiancee who might be willing to record
some audio or check to see if I am correctly writing Bender's sentences in Devanagari.
What are your opinions?

Thanks,

Greg Hines
1 person has voted this message useful



Juan M.
Senior Member
Colombia
Joined 5686 days ago
460 posts - 597 votes 

 
 Message 2 of 5
06 August 2009 at 2:03am | IP Logged 
I don't have much to contribute to this, other than to say that I would never use transliterated materials. Not only will you waste your time forging useless associations between signs and meaning which you'll then have to redo once you eventually move on to authentic material, but transliterated text is plain hideous and will partly rob you of the mystique of diving into another culture.

I wish to ask you though a couple of questions: where did Mr. Argüelles provide advice on learning Hindi, and where did you find Hindi school textbooks? Are you acquainted with online stores where they and other Hindi-language books might be procured?

Thank you in advance!
1 person has voted this message useful



Gregy1727
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Speaks: English*, Spanish, Afrikaans

 
 Message 3 of 5
06 August 2009 at 5:53am | IP Logged 
JuanM wrote:
I don't have much to contribute to this, other than to say that I would
never use transliterated materials. Not only will you waste your time forging useless
associations between signs and meaning which you'll then have to redo once you
eventually move on to authentic material, but transliterated text is plain hideous and
will partly rob you of the mystique of diving into another culture.

I wish to ask you though a couple of questions: where did Mr. Argüelles provide advice
on learning Hindi, and where did you find Hindi school textbooks? Are you acquainted
with online stores where they and other Hindi-language books might be procured?

Thank you in advance!


Actually, they are free on the Indian National Council of Educational and Research
Training. NCERT textbooks and curriculum structure are considered to be the best in
India. They produce books on many subjects both in English and in Hindi and these books
are available for download on the NCERT website. They are sorted by 1-12th standard and
also by subject. Usually there are several textbooks for one subject per standard. Some
of them are Hindi and some of them are in English. They also have textbooks for
sanskrit and subjects not related to languages such as business, economics,
mathematics, many science disciplines, history, ETC. The different standards 1-12
correspond mostly to the ages of American education with first standard being the
lowest, and 12th standard being the highest.


Here is the link for the portal

http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm

Notice that the PDFs are split into chapters by book, so what I've done is used a
download manager capable of wildcards and downloaded the book in batch format and then
used adobe acrobat to combine the pdf files into one file. Then I edited the links to
make them work inside of a pdf document rather than on the web.

Lastly, I would like to stay away from transliterated materials, but this book has such
a wealth of information and the professor has said that this book helped his father to
learn to read Hindi better than any other book, so it must be worth it, right? I figure
I can make up for it by working through TY and the NCERT textbooks, especially 10th-
12th standard Hindi which contains many stories and poems from various famous indian
authors.

1 person has voted this message useful



nissimb
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India
tenjikuyamato.blogsp
Joined 6201 days ago
79 posts - 102 votes 
Speaks: Marathi*, Hindi, English, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Esperanto, Indonesian

 
 Message 4 of 5
06 August 2009 at 12:55pm | IP Logged 
How about this? First, get yourself sufficiently familiarized with Devanagari script using all the other resources you have. This should take about a month, maximum two at most.Once you can read (not understand) anything in Devanagari confidently, you can take out that Hindi grammar and Reader, and using a pencil, write all the dialogues/sentences in the book itself in the Devanagari script.You can also take the help of a Hindi speaker if possible. Once you have written everything down in the Devanagari script, the book is all yours to enjoy!!
1 person has voted this message useful



Juan M.
Senior Member
Colombia
Joined 5686 days ago
460 posts - 597 votes 

 
 Message 5 of 5
06 August 2009 at 3:54pm | IP Logged 
Gregy1727 wrote:

Actually, they are free on the Indian National Council of Educational and Research
Training. NCERT textbooks and curriculum structure are considered to be the best in
India. They produce books on many subjects both in English and in Hindi and these books
are available for download on the NCERT website. They are sorted by 1-12th standard and
also by subject. Usually there are several textbooks for one subject per standard. Some
of them are Hindi and some of them are in English. They also have textbooks for
sanskrit and subjects not related to languages such as business, economics,
mathematics, many science disciplines, history, ETC. The different standards 1-12
correspond mostly to the ages of American education with first standard being the
lowest, and 12th standard being the highest.


Here is the link for the portal

http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbooks/testing/Index.htm

Notice that the PDFs are split into chapters by book, so what I've done is used a
download manager capable of wildcards and downloaded the book in batch format and then
used adobe acrobat to combine the pdf files into one file. Then I edited the links to
make them work inside of a pdf document rather than on the web.

Lastly, I would like to stay away from transliterated materials, but this book has such
a wealth of information and the professor has said that this book helped his father to
learn to read Hindi better than any other book, so it must be worth it, right? I figure
I can make up for it by working through TY and the NCERT textbooks, especially 10th-
12th standard Hindi which contains many stories and poems from various famous indian
authors.


Thank you very much for the link!


1 person has voted this message useful



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