[Course Forum] Introductory-Hindi-Course

Community-Created Courses Indian Languages
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Course Forum for:
https://www.memrise.com/course/1865998/introductory-hindi-course-landour-language-school/edit/details/
The course is now Lesson 01 to 20, and includes audio for (nearly) all items.
The work is in progress and I intend to do also lesson 21 to 30.

I’d really make this course as good as possible, so any feedback and requests for correction of errors or improvements most welcome.

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Could you add English letters to each word, besides the Indian writing? It would help me understand how to pronounce what I’m hearing.

Thanks for creating the course.

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I understand your request. In fact you’d like to have the English transcription along with the Hindi. Giving the transcription would in part undermine the training recognize the words written in Devanagari.

But perhaps you feel you’re not reading Devanagari well enough, and it’s blocking you from learning your vocabulary. Perhaps we have two or three options:

  • I have the word list in Excel and could give it to you. You can then add the transcription, create your own course, and bulk-upload the vocab. That’s a little technical how to do it well and easy, but it is an option, or
  • You choose to do first a course to learn the script. There is one: https://www.memrise.com/course/98853/hindi-devanagari-via-ipa/. There is also a course that also teachers the typing. I used just some levels of it to learn the script: https://www.memrise.com/course/405581/hindi-typing-inscript-and-vocabulary/
  • You wrote you have difficulty hearing/recognizing the right sound, I’d suggest it’s actually better to study more with audio only, so that your ear will get trained in recognizing them, since that seems to be your bottleneck. Use the listening option for learning (the speaker icon in the main screen on the web, or the purple one in the Android App). I know this is the more difficult path, but I believe it to be more fruitful in the long run. Just my personal educational opinion.

It’s not completely what you are looking for, but I hope the suggestion help you learning. Happy studying and ask anything you want.

Note: in real-life conversations you can’t (usually) rely on the written text either. I have a positive experience with that especially in the lower levels. So recognizing individual words isn’t difficult for me anymore. Unfortunately, I don’t have so many sentences, so recognizing words in a sentence or conjugation, when they sound so different from the individual words, is still a weak point of me.

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Thank you for your very informative reply.

To be sure you understand me correctly, when I said English letters, I did not mean English words. Here is an example from a song from the movie PK:
Bin pooche mera naam aur pata
Rasmon ko rakh ke pare
Seeing that helps me to understand how to pronounce what I’m reading in the other alphabet.

Your advice to study more with sound only is good. I think I will go that route first.

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That is indeed how I understood it. Bin pooche mera naam aur pata is probably orignally बिन पुछे मेरा नाम और पता. I call this ‘the Hindi (in the Devanagari script) is transcribed using the latin script’.

And even a lot of Hindi speakers use this transcription, especially on YouTube and things, I think because many computers don’t have Devanagari keyboards, and easier to type with the latin script, then to type blind in Devanagari.

Enojoy studying and watching Hindi dance!

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