Customer Reviews

Hindi, Urdu & Bengali: Lonely Planet Phrasebook

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I saw the previous version in a library and wanted my own copy. I bought the latest version - big mistake. So I went off and bought a second copy of the previous version. The publishers broke a very good product - a pity.
Why? The old version was Hindi and Urdu - the new version has Bengali also. Although the newer version is thicker, a lot of useful information
was either removed or condensed in such a manner that is very hard to assimilate. Also the number of entries in the dictionary was reduced. I only wanted Hindi. The only good point about the book that there is an enhanced culninary reader (i.e. menu decrypter!).
Buy the old one and please (publisher) - 'if it aint broke - don't fix it'

I've been using the computer program Rosetta Stone to learn Hindi, and it's extremely helpful in getting a person started with learning the grammar, some basic words, and the script. But Rosetta Stone doesn't teach you the really crucial basic phrases, like "Hello, how are you?", "My name is Bob," or "Where is the bathroom?"

That's the specialty of this phrasebook--teaching you the basic phrases you'll need to get by. It also shows the basics of how to read the Urdu and Hindi scripts, but it's not necessary to learn them to use it, since the phrases all have phonetic renderings. One of the other reviewers complained that this phrasebook won't teach you the language. But it's not meant to; it's just supposed to help you get started, or to help you get by when you're not planning to actually learn the language.

The organization of the book is very useful, since it's grouped into sections for different kinds of phrases, making it easy to find the stuff you're most interested in.

The dictionary in the back, when you're going from Hindi or Urdu to English, is arranged in the order of the Hindi or Urdu alphabets. Maybe this doesn't make the most sense for English speakers, who if they're just starting aren't going to memorize the order of all the letters in the Hindi and Urdu alphabets. The other reviewer complained about this, but since the dictionaries aren't very long, I don't think it's a big deal. The dictionaries also have the phonetic spellings, so you can flip through pretty quickly to find the letter you're looking for.

My main complaint is that the Urdu font in this book is kind of hard to read. It might just be because I first learned the script from another book that used a different font, and that's what I'm used to now. But I think that with the font used in this book, it's inherently harder to tell which letter is which, making it harder on a beginner.

This book is good for basic phrases to get by. It's better to get a book specific to the language you will be using, or use the internet for a better view of the specific language. However, for the casual tourist who wants to know a few phrases, it can be helpful.

Although this combined edition is more accurate than the previous separate phrasebooks for Hindi/Urdu and Bengali, do not expect to use it to actually learn the languages or even get beyond a couple of dozen phrases.

Perhaps in conjunction with a formal language guide to Bengali, this phrasebook would be more helpful, but at the time of my recent travels, there was no English language language study guide available for Bengali/Bangla (I think the Teach Yourself series has one, but that series is currently going through a one-by-one reissue as the cover format and typeface have changed).

The main problem is the Bengali to English dictionary, which is listed from the point of view of the written form vs. how things sound or how they transluterate to Latin characters. This requires first learning Bengali script, which is quite difficult due to the bizarre rules in all South Indian derived scripts (including Thai and Khmer/Cambodian as well as Hindi) vs. Cyryllic, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. And besides which, literacy is not and should not be a requirement for developing the more important day-to-day fluency of speaking and listening skills in a new language while traveling.

The publisher would also be advised to make clear that there are significant regional variants within Bengali (if not also Hindi/Urdu), and thus one is not always understood even with basic everyday phrases as they are published here. They might also be advised to include the related Punjabi language/dialect in the next edition, to be more complete.

This is a compact, easy to use, and helpful little book for basic phrases you will use in India and other South Asia countries.