Talk:Gujarati
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[edit] Writing lessons
I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Gujarati step-by-step, rather than just an overview of all letters. It's hard to learn from it. The lack of examples is another problem, but even if there were examples afterwards the learning situation would be far from perfect because the student would still have to memorise all letters at once in order to be able to begin practising.
What I have found really useful when learning non-Latin alphabets is a "divide and conquer" method that introduces few letters at a time and offers example words for practise immediately after each letter / each set of letters. What's even better is if those example words are understandable without prior knowledge of the language, that is, international words. For example: names of countries, cities or famous people (if their name isn't significantly different in Gujarati than in English), common personal names, Gujarati words that have entered English, English words that are used in Gujarati, words that both Gujarati and English have derived from Greek or Latin... The advantage of using these words is that students will be able to quickly see their own progress and the whole learning process becomes as fascinating as solving a puzzle. See the "Read Write and Pronounce Greek" lessons in the Modern Greek Wikibook for an example, or this external page on Cyrillic.
If you'd like to try this approach for teaching the Gujarati script, I'd be glad to help you, even though I don't know how to read it yet (I have learned a variety of other alphabets though and I'd like to learn how to write Gujarati too). Just create a big list of suitable words on a planning page like Modern Greek/Writing lessons plan, answer me here and I'll try to find an optimal order for letters.
Thanks for your efforts to teach a language that is hard to find in European schools!
Junesun 16:34, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
P.S.: If there's somebody generally unsure about how to create good language lessons, I really recommend reading the following two pages about it: Help: How To Build An Excellent Wikibook Teaching Any Language and Bite-sized language lessons.
[edit] A few considerations
We need a convention for romanizing that we can stick to for this book, since there are so many different varieties in use for gujarati. One that we use here would preferably be easily enterable in standard English characters -- that puts accent marks out.
Since there's not too much activity or content on here yet, i'm going to go ahead and start using as follows. If you have better suggestions, please speak up, because this system looks really weird and bad; but I think the accuracy is needed:
- Retroflex consonants are represented by placing a ' AFTER the consonant. Ex: taarũ (your), mot'ũ (big)
- Long vowels are written by repeating the vowel. Ex: maarii maa (my mother), mane/tane (to me/to you)
Nasalized vowels are represented by placing a ' AFTER the vowel. Ex: taarũ (your), kasu (something)- Nasalized vowels are represented by placing a ~ above the vowel. Ex: taarũ (your), kashũ (something)
- Aspiration is represented by an h after the consonant. NOTE: Do not use h's when not necessary! DO NOT WRITE thame or thũ or thamaarũ, INSTEAD WRITE tame, tũ, tamaarũ.
- Exception: ch is written ch ચ (unaspirated) and chh છ (aspirated). Ex: e maarũ chhe.
Also, I'm not a native Gujarati, so please correct me all the time. I might transgress these rules here simply because I don't actually know which way a word is supposed to be pronounced.
