Customer Reviews

Hugo Language Course: Hindi In Three Months

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This book would be useful only for someone who just wants to be able to exchange a few phrases with Hindi speakers during a trip to India. Only tourist-oriented situations are presented in the dialogs, and even then the vocabulary and the total amount of material presented is extremely small. The tapes are relatively good because the native speakers read each dialog once at a normal pace, then they read the dialog slowly, line by line, so that the learner can repeat and learn pronounciation. Unfortunately, the tapes also contain a lot of filler in English that becomes annoying after repeated listening, and worse yet, in an effort to "simplify" the grammar, the tapes (and the book) will teach you some sentences that are not entirely grammatically correct.

This book isn't for people wanting to learn advanced Hindi and complex Hindi grammar rules. This book is for people who want to learn some quick basic communication skills in Hindi. I found that I could communicate with people in Hindi, at an elmentary level, after studying with this book. This book helps one learn the basic aspects of Hindi.

This book seems to be meant primarily for travelers who need some basic street Hindi to be able to communicate with native speakers easily. The Devanagari alphabet is ignored entirely, and grammar is not emphasised any more than is necessary. What the book does give you is a very solid and basic grounding at basic communication skills. The conversations on the tape are very useful in practical situations such as at the airport, marketplace or so on. But the book doesn't get very in depth, so if you want anything more than a casual introduction to spoken Hindi, you will need additionall resources. but as a starter course, this book can't be beat!

In the effort to simplify the learning of a language, some books go too far. This is one of them. Things like noun gender and case suffixes are all but completely discarded, making one's Hindi sound childish at best, incoherent at worst. In addition, it uses an inconsistent romanization scheme. Americans should also be aware that the pronunciation guide is done according to British English.

Apart from a TWO PAGE section headed "Reading Hindi Script" in which the Hindi alphabet is presented, this book does not teach you how to read or write Hindi! This little book of 143 pages of big type teaches conversational Hindi with transliterations (into the English alphabet) only. After completing this course you will not be able to read any Hindi signs, menus or periodicals, and you will have no clue as to how to write Hindi.