Customer Reviews

Colloquial Hindi, 2e: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have been learning hindi for the past two years, and I have been using many books in the process, including Snell and Weightman, an older book by Misra and Fairbanks, another book by Surendra Gambhir, and this one by Bhatia. For those starting from scratch, this book is the best option.

Snell and Weightman move way too fast and you quickly find yourself in way over your head (unless you already have a background in hindi). I found this Bhatia's romanization excellent because it emphasized the difference between english and hindi sounds, and most importantly, Bhatia was consistent throughout (though hopefully some of the typos towards the end will be fixed in a future edition). His pronounciation introduction is also the best I've seen as far as emphasizing and drilling Hindi vocal nuances. The pacing of the book is very comfortable for the complete beginner.

Bhatia also does not take anything for granted. A lot of important questions left unanswered by other books are treated thoroughly in this text (like the compound use of "lena", "jaana", and "dena"; the frequent ommision of the "a" sound in the middle of words; and the fact that words like "mahal" and "kahana" are pronounced "mehel" and "kehena"; just to name a few...) You are really able to digest everything as you go along. Bhatia's word list and grammatical summary in the back are god-sends, and his mnemonics like "nerd nouns" and "laal adjectives" are clever and effective. He also puts his lessons in a cultural perspective that is crucial for using your hindi socially.

One criticism I would make is the lack of emphasis on the devanagri script. If you use this book, you should really take the initiative and learn the script. It will help you as you progress to more advanced books.

It seems like the few who gave this book a bad wrap are educators who are used to hindi being taught in a certain way. I think the things that make this book different also make it the best.

My recommendation is start out with this book, then go through Snell and Weightman, using the early lessons as review, then go through Surendra Gambhir's pricey but excellent "Spoken Hindi" set. All these books have their lessons on cassette. I transferred all the lessons to CD, which made my studying much more efficient. Also get McGregor's beautiful Hindi-English Dictionary which will be a cozy campanion throughout. If you can even find the Misra and Fairbanks book, don't bother. It is quite antiquated and impractical, and the tapes are a nightmare. Happy studying!

This book is clear and comprehensive, yet simple enough for a complete beginner. The reader can choose to learn just spoken Hindi or to also learn to read and write since all of the dialogs are written in romanized Hindi as well as in the Devanagari syllabary. The cassettes are necessary, but poor compared to the cassettes from other courses. The dialogs are read only once, very quickly, with almost no opportunity to practice repeating what you hear. The leftover space on the tapes are filled with discussion in English of questionable utility.

I just received my book and CD set and am enjoying working through the lessons with ease. So far what I've noticed is that the author has created realistic verbal exchanges that represent the etiquette present in the culture. Also, he has given examples of greetings that can vary between regions and/or religion. Addtionally, the accent being taught is that of "educated" Hindi; the accent college professors and newscasters use. Maybe now my Indian friends will understand me.

I am no expert in the field of languages, but I've got to say that this course already has Pimsleur and Byki beat hands down and the CDs play just fine in my Macintosh! Love the light use of humor as well.

I actually looked forward to receiving this book. As English is my native tongue, and I had studied French/Japanese at school, I was looking for an easy book that would teach me the hindi alphabet and provide me with some easily referenceable vocabulary. Whilst this book provides some assistance on both, I didn't find the layout to be very useful. I would have also preferred more attention on how to write the characters.

I'd still recommend this book, but a little more visual assistance (the book is a bit dry, as it is predominantly textual) would have enhanced my learning speed, as well as more romanization of hindi words, especially for beginners such as myself.

While the Colloquial course enjoy a good reputation for its courses in European languages, the courses for Asian languages are almost all of far lower quality. The Arabic courses, Colloquial Persian, Colloquial Tamil, Colloquial Punjabi, Colloquial Vietnamese, Colloquial Urdu are all much shorter and more rudimentary than the average European language course. Unfortunately, Colloquial Hindi is no exception.

The main problem with this course is simple, far too little content. This leads to two consequences:

a. the grammar descriptions are too short. Colloquial courses for almost all European languages include a complete overview of the main grammatical points (of course not always in great detail, but still) but this course gives offers very little for those interested in Hindi.

b. the vocabulary is a joke. For most other Colloquial courses, the vocabulary you learn in the course is somewhere around 1400-1600 words. Many courses include over 2000 words (Colloquial Italian, Icelandic, Albanian, Czech, Russian, Spanish of Latin America and probably others as well). This course, in sharp contrast, doesn't even include 800 words, and that's far too little for a course calling itself a "complete" language course.

So only half of the vocabulary found in other Colloquial courses and hardly any help at all with the grammar. That's not good enough.

Hindi is a beautiful language to hear and quite a challenge to learn. Tej Bhatia organized the book in a easy to follow format. The book is divided into learning the language and reading/writing it. It allows the student to learn one or the other, or even both. My main purpose was to understand Hindi and speak in general terms.

The first few pages demonstrate the Devnagari script which appears to be overwhelming to a Westerner until one realizes that the alphabet is phonetic. Once the sounds are memorized, combination of characters can be learned and then you realize that you can read the language.

Each section begins with a simple dialogue followed by an English translation. Words are defined within the ensuing chapter with easy to follow grammatical rules, sentence structure and cultural insights. The end of the chapters reinforce lessons through tests.

The audio portion is complementary to the written instruction, and is essential to utilize.

This book is excellent. I highly recommend it for a student of the language.

Another method that I have been learning Hindi is through another medium:

Hindi Level 1 Win/Mac Personal Edition [Old Version]

This book is clear and comprehensive, yet simple enough for a complete beginner. The reader can choose to learn just spoken Hindi or to also learn to read and write since all of the dialogs are written in romanized Hindi as well as in the Devanagari syllabary. The cassettes are necessary, but poor compared to the cassettes from other courses. The dialogs are read only once, very quickly, with almost no opportunity to practice repeating what you hear. The leftover space on the tapes are filled with discussion in English of questionable utility.

If you have been learning Hindi by the Pimsleur language system, you may have wanted a book to answer your questions. This is the book. It is excellent. However, if you plan to use the book and tapes or CD's to learn to speak Hindi, it is lacking. The best of worlds would combine the two into a single system.

If you are looking into learning Hindi, this book is super duper detailed. I was looking for something that was more conversational Hindi, and what i got was something that was way more than i bargained for, in turn, turning me off to the entire thing. This book is for those who really want to learn hindi inside out upside down.

This book does offer some assets that are helpful, particularly for a student just starting out. Its section on pronunciation is quite comprehensive (do get the CD that goes with) and it also has an excellent section in back that teaches how to actually handwrite the Hindi alphabet, which I have not seen in any other book. It isn't particularly difficult to write Devanagari, but trying to copy from only printed works does not work very well. Strangely enough, however, the author does not use Devanagari in the body of the book itself- the dialogues that go with each lesson are reproduced in the back of the book, but the exercises and grammatical asides are given only in a complex and cumbersome phonetic system that a learner is unlikely to use again after finishing the book. Devanagari is one of the most precise systems of writing ever devised, and although there are in the spoken language a few deviations from strict phonetic accuracy ('raheta', to live, is usually heard now as 'rehta') it would not use a huge amount of space to simply point them out as they occur. The book doesn't offer a great amount of vocabulary, either; Snell and Weightman's superior work 'Teach Yourself Hindi' is both a richer source of vocabulary and a deeper treatment of grammar.