Hindi materials for semi-fluent speaker? (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Hindi materials for semi-fluent speaker?
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cntrational
Triglot
Groupie
India
Joined 4928 days ago
49 posts - 66 votes

Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English*
Studies: French

Message 1 of 6

23 December 2014 at 2:57am | IP Logged

I grew up around Hindi, but I've lost the ability over the last few years, due to personal issues. I can follow casual Hindi speech like that in a movie, but I can't produce much Hindi output. My vocabulary is also lacking.

What materials would you guys recommend for me to get my Hindi back? Textbooks, reading material, websites, anything goes.
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Luso
Hexaglot
Senior Member
Portugal
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Speaks: Portuguese*, French, English^C2, German^B1, Italian, Spanish
Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical)

Message 2 of 6

23 December 2014 at 11:49am | IP Logged

नमस्ते.

Before someone else drowns you under a pile of courses (pun not intended, or maybe it was), I'd like to refer you to this Hindi comics online page.

I hope it will amuse you and provide clues to how much you've lost and need to get back.
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day1
Groupie
Latvia
Joined 3693 days ago
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Speaks: English

Message 3 of 6

23 December 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged

Audio books

In terms of textbooks, I don't think there's anything great for your level.

Edit:
except maybe
Hindi Newspaper Reader, after which you can move into reading newspapers in Hindi.

Edited by day1 on 23 December 2014 at 2:37pm
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Gemuse
Senior Member
Germany
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Studies: German

Message 4 of 6

25 December 2014 at 10:57am | IP Logged

Novels. Being in India, you have loads of books that are available, eg.
http://www.amazon.in/Meluha-Ke-Mritunjay-Immortals-Hindi/dp/ 9380658826
The series is also available in English.
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Jeffers
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United Kingdom
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

Message 5 of 6

29 December 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged

If you are interested in a free online course, New Directions New People from the University of Pennsylvania is very good. The videos were made sometime in the 1980s, so it looks a bit dated, but it should serve your purpose very well.

Besides working on courses, I would suggest doing a load of reading. The Hindi Newspaper Reader mentioned above looks like a good idea, but I've not used it. I can definitely vouch for The Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader and Usha Jain's Intermediate Hindi Reader. Both have audio; the audio for the Routledge reader is downloadable, the Usha Jain reader comes with an mp3 CD. The Usha Jain book has about 3 times as much text, which is a clear advantage. The Routledge reader is good, but only has about 50 pages of text due to being filled with exercises and notes. However, one advantage of the Routledge reader is that you can also download translations of the chapters.

These are pretty expensive, but there are also a lot of free readers for Hindi. I made a post on my log which I will quote here rather than typing again:

Jeffers wrote:

I just found an index to some fantastic Hindi reading material availible for free (and legally!) Most of the material are collections made for intermediate students in the 80s, and so the typography is pretty awful for some of them. Others (like the Sholay script) are more recent.

The Great Glossary Fair
This is a set of links to a lot of good Hindi and Urdu materials (including all the ones listed separately below). I was already aware of several of these items, but a few of them I thought were unobtainable. It was really good to find them all together in one list.

Three Hindi Film Scripts Published by UC Berkeley in 1980, this is the script three films, plus glossaries for each of them. The films are Sara Akash (The Whole Sky- 1969), Tisri Qasam (or Teesri Kasam) (The Third Vow- 1967) and Garam Hawa (Scorching Wind- not on IMDB). I read about this book years ago, and have searched for it many times. The typography is awful, but I have ordered a used copy of Sara Akash cheap, and I'll see how it goes.

Richard Delacey has put together a lot of materials in Hindi and Urdu. Most important for my purposes are the text and glossary of Umrao Jaan (1981) and Sholay (1976). Both are computer typeset, and so quite readable. Unfortunately, the Sholay script hasn't been finished.

Virtual Hindi is a collection of online Hindi stories with audio, arranged into beginning, intermediate and advanced pages. The audio can be downloaded, but the text is only set up to be read online (booo!) There is also a page of videos with ordinary people, and a page about some festivals.

Hindi Readers by John Roberts The typography is a bit blurry on these three readers, but the contents look really good. Each page is about half a page of Hindi text, with a running glossary below. Words which appear again are not glossed again. The first one is a Panchatantra reader, the second is a history reader, and the third is a collection of readings on "Peoples and Institutions of India", which were simply extracted from a book by sociologist Prakashchandra Diksit. They use a more "Sanskritised" Hindi, and cover topics about aspects of Hindu culture. The six chapters are: Cultural Patterns of Marriage, The Rituals of the Hindu Life Path, Hindu Marriage, The Hindu Ashram System, Dharma, and The Hindu Caste System. For someone interested in Hind, Indian culture and Hinduism, this is an awesome find.

Hindi-Urdu Since 1800: a Common Reader This was not linked directly from the Glossary page mentioned above. The book is a well-known reader co-written by Rupert Snell (of Teach Yourself Hindi fame). There are about 80 pages of introduction (in English) about the evolution of the languages, etc. Then there are 24 readings, about half of which are in Devanagari script and about half in Urdu. Each reading has an introduction and notes (all in English). You can download the whole book as a single pdf, or if you click on each chapter on the website, you can download individual chapters.

EDIT: I missed this one:
Glossaries of Hindi Texts Collection of Hindi prose and poetry readings for advanced students. Unfortunatly, the glossaries are on the webpage, and not included in the PDF files.

If you use Teach Yourself Hindi (or even if you don't), Rupert Snells podcasts are excellent: Glossaries Alive has one podcast per chapter of TY Hindi, and Spoken Thesaurus has podcasts 90% in Hindi about vocabulary for different topics and subjects.
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Tyrion101
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United States
Joined 3714 days ago
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Speaks: French

Message 6 of 6

30 December 2014 at 6:26pm | IP Logged

BBC offers several different news sites for various languages, including I might add Hindi. If you are into news that is.

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