Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book offers a clear and complete introduction to the Devanagari script with numerous reading and writing exercises. After some brief remarks on the Devanagari syllabary's history and significance the author starts off explaining every letter and signs of the script. He does it indicating the stroke sequence and giving handwritten examples of every character. A very brief chapter teaches the reader some basic sentences and commands. The book is rounded off by six specimens of native speakers' handwriting and a short glossary at the end.

I bought this together with the Teach Yourself Hindi book/CD set, also from Rupert Snell, and they make a great combo. Learning devanagari was always the part of learning Hindi I was least looking forward to, but the book is so well put together that it makes the challenge very interesting. Right from its fascinating introduction, dealing with the hisory, structure and philosophy of the script, it helps build an eagerness to master devanagari, essential to really mastering the language. I can't think of a reason not to buyn this book, especially in tandem with the Teach Yourself CD set.

I have tried to teach myself Hindi, and there is no denying that the key to learning the language and its pronunciation is learning the script. This book is methodical, thorough, and very effective. I used it at the beginning while working with more comprehensive books, and I learned the writing system very fast with its help. This in turn made studying with the other books that much more valuable.

However, once done with the book I actually didn't have to go back to it., which is a good thing, because the physical quality of this book is appalling. It is so poorly bound that during my very first attempt to open and copy from it, it came apart immediately, and only lots of scotch tape kept it from disintegrating entirely before I was done with it. This is unacceptable for the price!

Learning a whole new script can be a dauntling task; a good resource, however, can help one achieve one's goal. I found this book to be very helpful in learning to read and write the Devanagari script. Of all the scripts I have learnt, eg, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, this one has been the most difficult. This book goes into detail on pronunciation, history, and shows one how to write the script. I loved the introductory history to Hindi.

I am thoroughly enjoying going through this book. I purchased it along with the 'Oxford HINDI-ENGLISH Dictionary' and 'Say it in Hindi', a tiny little traveler's phrase book that I like to take in my purse and learn an easy phrase or two in the car (not while driving, I hasten to add!). I like the pictures of actual road signs in India, and I like the actual samples of writing by real people. In real life no one writes like the text books, and if we are learning the language I feel we need to know all its variants. I also like the way Rupert Snell introduces the consonants based on the position of the tongue in the mouth, and how he introduces 3 sets of consonants and then gives you practice on those before introducing the next few sets. Along with the Hindi course on the UPenn web site, which shows excellent audio-video clips of Indian people pronouncing the actual syllables, it makes writing and remembering really fun and easy. I think this book is a must buy.

This book is an excellent into the language of Hindi, I picked this book mainly in the interest of looking at it, and found the writting system was fascinating enough to buy the book. Once you get past the background chapters about the language the book gets you directly into writting characters, and doing excersises. In about a week I was able to write all the consants and vowels, and understand basic 'conjuncts', which are probubly the hardest thing about the writting. Conjuncts are basically two consanants put together. The next chapters skim the surface of grammer and basic sentences. The end has 5 appendices giving you writting examples that would make you scratch your head in confusion for awhile, Numbers, Answers and even additional practice.

The book is also full of numerous signs that have things written in Hindi in them, these make learning the different fonts much easier and get you out of looking for the English letters in some of them.

My one complaint is the way this book doesn't explain the sounds to well, and the writting examples in the end are horrible! I write bad in english but it seems these people had burned their palms before trying to write.

I first made my acquaintance with this book at my local library a year ago. I was originally planning to learn Urdu and its Perso-Arabic script, but the beauty (and comparable simplicity) of Devanagari made me change my mind. I eventually bought this book (just last month) and am very happy to say that with just 5 hours of combined practice (over a 2 week interval) I can easily write in Devanagari! For a grapho-maniac like me, realizing that I can write in a completely alien script is more than enough encouragement to stick with actually learning the spoken language. Do yourself a favor: if you want to learn Hindi (and I recommend Snell's Teach Yourself Hindi course for that) you really NEED this book. Except no substitutes.

Definitely the book to buy if you wish to learn Devanagari Script. The book includes a thorough introduction to the alphabet. Each character shows you how to write it in steps. There are also lots of words and exercises WITH KEYS AT THE END to help you to know you are doing things correctly. These exercises include Devanagari to roman letters and vice-versa. I would HIGHLY recommend this book. Another plus is it includes an authentic writing sample from 6 different people. True handwriting to let you see what the language genuinely looks like written in the script. Also lots of other explanations and fun things like a chapter on writing English words in Devanagari. :)

I bought this book simply because Amazon said that many people who bought Teach Yourself Hindi bought this book. I think this recommendation was quite reasonable. When I opend the Lesson 1 of Teach Yourself Hindi, the skit was written in Devanagari. Teach Yourself Hindi also has some pages about the Devanagari Script, but I don't think that's enough. So, I opened this Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script and studied the script first. The book explains strokes and shows plenty of examples of hand written scripts. Those were quite useful. Now I am comfortablly studying the skits in Teach Yourself Hindi. I recommend studyging Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script first.

I recommend this book because the Hindi Script gets pretty intricate. It is quite interesting to go through the rules governing these intricacies, particularly in conjuncts. You even, in some instances, get to see different forms of conjucts for print, and alternatives to overly complex, and convoluted conjuncts. And there are exercises for you to do so you can practice.

It deals with the vowels, and consonants in their own chapter. It also has a section on puncuation (which i don't immediately think of when I think of scripts). Even shows you how to express things like "Yooooooo!!!!!", and abbreviations.

Some of the reading is a little tiresome. But you'll learn the script.