Talk:Hindi

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Can someone guide me on how to enter letters in the Devanagari script? I can probably cover some of the basic grammar, having studied Hindi for 10 years now! Gokul madhavan 13:45, 14 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Well, I'm going to bed now. :) I just wanted to say that I know the book looks like a mess but I know what I'm doing and it's gonna be great. :) --Addicted2Sanity 08:18, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Writing lessons

I would really like to see lessons teaching how to read and write Hindi step-by-step. It's hard to learn from an overview of letters. 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 Hindi than in English), common personal names, Hindi words that have entered English, English words that are used in Hindi, words that both Hindi 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 how to write Hindi, I'd be glad to help you, even though I don't know it yet (I'd learn it though and I have learned a variety of foreign alphabets already). 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 16:37, 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] Transliteration scheme

This book uses a ton of different transliteration schemes. It's confusing and it looks like a total mess. I suggest that ISO 15919 be used throughout the page. I'll look into doing some machine transliteration myself if I can find the proper software. Tasnu Arakun (talk) 18:24, 12 November 2008 (UTC)