Customer Reviews

Hindi: Start Speaking Today!: Two Audio Cassettes and Phrase Book (Language/30)

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The "course" is essentially just a pair of people saying words and sentences. There is no explanation of sentence structure, words, or anything. The language used is also very rigid and formal, which is of dubious usefulness. The whole thing feels like it was made from a template: take a number of English sentences, have someone read them in another language, and sell the tapes.

One highlight: it's pretty comical to hear people reading the Hindi words for "beef," "pork," "bacon," "steak," and "raspberry."

American Narrator: "Beef."

Hindi Narrator: "Beef."

American Narrator: "Pork."

Hindi Narrator: "Pork."

And so on.

Considering that the only place you likely could order pork is in an Amercian hotel, it hardly seems worth the trouble to tell me how to say it in Hindi. However, I now know how to say, "Can I use the photocopier?" I really don't know what else I would need.

This course is a brief introduction to conversational Hindi. Thus, it would be good for someone trying to get by in Hindi, like a phrasebook. You will not learn enough to have a very good conversation or master the language. The course has two audio cassettes and a booklet that cover the most important words and phrases.

To add to what a previous reviewer said about the courses in the Language 30 series being cut to a single mold, one of the phrases given in the course is "How do you like your steak?", which made me wonder whether the Hebrew and Arabic courses in the series include the question "How do you like your pork chops cooked?".

Of course, the Language 30 packages are basically tourist phrase books (roughly the same content as "Say It In Hindi" or the excellent Lonely Planet "Hindi-Urdu Phrasebook", but briefer) plus recordings--which is not to say that they're useless. If you're just curious about a language and like to compare vocabulary for numbers and phrases like "What's your name?" and hear how they're pronounced, or if you're studying with a more serious course but you'd like more exposure to the language while you're driving, the tapes or CDs and slim, shirt-pocket-sized booklets can be very convenient.

If you buy a used copy, though, make sure it's the recent version with printed devanagari (Hindi) text. (The older version had handwritten Hindi and more high-faluttin expressions.)

I'm not really sure of the point of this course. It's supposedly more than phrasebook, but all it seems to do is throw phrases at you, let you repeat them, and hope that that approach will somehow teach you Hindi. It will make you a very good parrot, but it does nothing for understanding.