Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Snell has put together a dictionary that English speakers can easily use and contains a lot of language that is spoken by most people who speak Hindi or Urdu in India. It does not lean to much to either Persian/Arabic or Sanskrit, but is nicely in the middle. So, for example if you enjoy Bollywood Hindi movies, this dictionary will be very useful for you when you want to find the meaning of certain words you hear in the films.

Hindi can be a fun language to learn because you can pick up a lot just by watching some really fun movies and I think it is the only other lanaguage besides English that gives you an opportunity to learn it through movie watching. What a deal. India is great that way. More movies are made in Bollywood each year than Hollywood, so between this dictionary and Bollywood and either of Snell's other Teach Yourself books, you will be understanding Hindi in no time and then you can impress your friends and family by speaking such a distant langugae like a native. Go for it.

I am a third year Hindi Student at UW-Madison and I must say I was skeptical of such a small dictionary, but the one is pretty good. It has sentence examples for most of the verbs and it points out when the structure in Hindi is different from the structure in English so you learn a good bit about usage while using the dictionary as well. It is a small dictionary, but the selection of words is very good.

My only complaint about this dictionary is that it's not more extensive. My Oxford English-to-Hindi dictionary was clearly designed for Hindi speakers learning English, not the other way around. Not so the Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary. Where multiple translations apply, this dictionary gives not only the translations, but a plentiful supply of usage examples. In the front there is a clear, comprehensive section of the Devanagari script -- including an exhaustive list of consonant conjuncts and a concise grammar reference. The ambitious student could gain an elementary understanding of the language using this book alone -- though I don't recommend it.

If I ran the world and could improve this book in any way I wanted, I would only expand it to include more words. The material that IS there is excellent, I just wish there were more of it. That's the only reason I hold back from giving 5 stars.

Whether you're teaching yourself or getting formal instruction, this is one reference you should NOT be without. And the price should be within any budget.

I began learning Hindi a semester and a half ago, this is a good dictionary for me at my stage right now. it offers a single word translations as well as phrase translations. I recommend it to people learning Hindi.

good points: VERY easy to navigate. easy to read print. it's light and easy to travel with. it has pronoun, verb, adjective (etc) guides that are superb.

bad points: it has very few words. most of the words i've needed to look up so far, have not been in there. or they had a word for it, just not the one i was looking for. 14,000 definitions (NOT words) sounds like a lot, it's not.

perfect! except for the fact that it needs MORE WORDS!!! :-(

very good indeed but a pity it does not exist with more entries specially in english. Romanized characters for beginners and well choosen words.

The "Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary" is an excellent supplementary text to have when studying the Hindi language. It contains over 14,000 entries of very common words. Most of these entries give the form of the word coming from Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic, and then the word you would hear in colloquial (every day speech). It also tells you the gender of the nouns (m or f),the part of speech it is, gives the transliteration for each, and shows many entries with usage examples so you can see how it functions in a sentence. It also includes entries from English-Hindi AND Hindi-English. True it is not an exhaustive dictionary by any means, but for a language with relatively limited good materials out there, this would be a great aid for anyone and get you well on your way to knowing over 14,000 common words. (Remember even the average college graduate only knows 30-40K words in his native language.) So this dictionary is a good amount and for the price and userfriendly layout you can't complain!

I am Christopher Stanton's wife, Laura. I didn't want to create a new account to write this - my first ever review for Amazon, but I was so grateful for the Teach Yourself Hindi Dictionary that I wanted to comment on it. I have been studying Hindi on and off since the '70s, when I lived in India for 6 months. Since then I have been back three times. Each time I find a different new grammar book, study frantically for a month, and then forget Hindi again for another 6 years or so! We were just in India in December 2009 for a wedding, and while preparing for the trip, I discovered this dictionary. It is the perfect book for someone who knows a certain amount of basic Hindi vocabulary and grammar and wants to review. I love the full sentence examples for every word. They were great for getting my mental Hindi switches turned on after so many years.

Once I was in India, It was easy to use the dictionary to find the words I needed, and to figure out how to use them in my own sentences. I managed to have several long conversations beyond the usual, "How much does it cost? Where is the bathroom?" This communication was a first for me, and I was very excited about it. I felt that that Rupert Snell was a reliable helper and companion. Of course, only the most common words are in the dictionary, but that is only to be expected for a "learners' dictionary". More words would just be a distraction. If you know a bit of Hindi and want some added confidence, this is the book for you.

Very useful for its size. The best feature is the bomb symbol that alerts the user to special grammatic circumstances when using the word. The hindi-english section also has the transliteration right next to the word so that the user can find it quickly even without knowing the script very well.

I'm often mystified by the selection of vocabulary. Why on earth are words like visa, Urdu, and sari as well as numbers (all listed on another indexed page anyway) included? It seems to me these are a waste of precious space for a compact dictionary of this kind.

I spent about three hours placing tabs in the Hindi-English section so that I could look up a Hindi word I see somewhere. This section is given in Devanagari script, but fortunately phonetically. It was a matter of my converting the "alphabet" of this section to some useful and logical sequence. I do wish the publisher would consider providing a dictionary for the beginner who has no intention of learning Devanagari script.

After these adjustments, I've been able to make use of the dictionary. It's flawed, but possibly the best of its size.