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Rosetta Stone is addictive
Thank you, thank you everyone who gave me this marvelous birthday present. I need to write thank you notes, but I warn you all that I am crap at that. I'll aim for it. But if I fail, please know how grateful and overjoyed I am to have this piece of software!
I can now see why TM, my Hong Kong born student, so loved to celebrate himself when he got scores of 90% on lessons. He would make the championship gesture, clasping his hands over his head and shaking them, or lift his laptop to show everyone the screen. Everyone else who was working on some other lesson or (supposedly) paying attention to direct instruction, and not needing to remark on his Rosetta Stone scores. You have to get at least 85% (mastery) to be allowed to proceed further, to the next lesson. Me, having started the program... I am sad if I miss any answer at all. 100%, man, that's my goal. But I understand T. better, now.
Anyway, here's what I can write, now, having completed four lessons of Hindi from Rosetta Stone. Of course, the final sentence is really only possibly because of help from S., in Mumbai, via instant message tutoring. I couldn't possibly have either structured it or known the vocabulary, except from my various phrasebooks and dictionaries. Which are misleading. In the original thing I wrote, I asked rhetorically if what I'd written was "tasty", instead of "interesting".
मैं थोड़ा थोड़ा हिन्दी लिख सकती हूँ। मेरा सफ़ेद बिल्ली रिलक बुरी है। मेरा जवान बिल्ली मया काली है।
गज़ब, है ना?
भाषा शिक्षा में बिल्लिया कयूँ हमेशा आ जाते है?
Also, please remember that this little script thing cannot do conjuncts, damn it. So billee isn't spelled right, and I am sure other words suffer, too. Still, here is more or less what it is supposed to say:
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Mehn thoda thoda Hindi likh sakti hoon. Mere safed billee Rilke buri hai. Mere javan billee Maya kali hai.
Gazab, hai na? (not sure how to transliterate that)
Bhasa shiksha mein billiya kyun hamesha aa jate hai?
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Or:
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I can write a little little bit of Hindi. My white cat Rilke is old. My young cat Maya is black.
Interesting, huh?
Why do language lessons always involve cats? (Why do cats always come into language lessons?)
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See, the LAST time I tried to learn a language on my own -- Gaelic, which I think I wrote about a few weeks ago ... that is, I mentioned it a few weeks ago... I tried learning it from "Teach Yourself Irish", the book and CASSETTE TAPES, twenty YEARS ago. Anyway, the only sentence I remember from it was: An kaht ban an chairde something something. Which was more or less: the white cat sits by the fire. So what gives with the cats?
As of yesterday, I can now tell you about a boy running, falling, jumping, reading, swimming, walking (going), being on something, being under something, and being in something. Similarly, I can tell you about a girl doing those things, a man doing those things and a woman doing those things. I can also tell you that the old woman has white hair, while the girl has black hair. And the man has a buzz cut (admi ki baal chota chota hai). Ladki dhor rahi hai. (The girl is running). And so on. Aurat ki baal lambe hai. (The woman has long hair). I can identify cats, dogs, elephants, airplanes, fish, birds, cars, homes, (old and new), horses, and the colors yellow, white, black, red, blue, and pink, for some reason. Not green. Not purple. I would think that Hindi would be a language saturated with colors, but I am wondering whether people just use comparatives, instead -- like saying something is "eggplant colored" or "hibiscus colored" or "sunset colored".
Oh... by the way, Mac users -- I had to switch browsers to Safari, which is not as pretty or functional in my eyes as Firefox... but it can render Hindi, so what can I do? Sigh. I tried downloading unicode fonts for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but none of my ignorant efforts worked. If I had a computer guru locally, I would ask for help. But I don't think I do.
I can now see why TM, my Hong Kong born student, so loved to celebrate himself when he got scores of 90% on lessons. He would make the championship gesture, clasping his hands over his head and shaking them, or lift his laptop to show everyone the screen. Everyone else who was working on some other lesson or (supposedly) paying attention to direct instruction, and not needing to remark on his Rosetta Stone scores. You have to get at least 85% (mastery) to be allowed to proceed further, to the next lesson. Me, having started the program... I am sad if I miss any answer at all. 100%, man, that's my goal. But I understand T. better, now.
Anyway, here's what I can write, now, having completed four lessons of Hindi from Rosetta Stone. Of course, the final sentence is really only possibly because of help from S., in Mumbai, via instant message tutoring. I couldn't possibly have either structured it or known the vocabulary, except from my various phrasebooks and dictionaries. Which are misleading. In the original thing I wrote, I asked rhetorically if what I'd written was "tasty", instead of "interesting".
मैं थोड़ा थोड़ा हिन्दी लिख सकती हूँ। मेरा सफ़ेद बिल्ली रिलक बुरी है। मेरा जवान बिल्ली मया काली है।
गज़ब, है ना?
भाषा शिक्षा में बिल्लिया कयूँ हमेशा आ जाते है?
Also, please remember that this little script thing cannot do conjuncts, damn it. So billee isn't spelled right, and I am sure other words suffer, too. Still, here is more or less what it is supposed to say:
--------
Mehn thoda thoda Hindi likh sakti hoon. Mere safed billee Rilke buri hai. Mere javan billee Maya kali hai.
Gazab, hai na? (not sure how to transliterate that)
Bhasa shiksha mein billiya kyun hamesha aa jate hai?
--------
Or:
--------
I can write a little little bit of Hindi. My white cat Rilke is old. My young cat Maya is black.
Interesting, huh?
Why do language lessons always involve cats? (Why do cats always come into language lessons?)
-------
See, the LAST time I tried to learn a language on my own -- Gaelic, which I think I wrote about a few weeks ago ... that is, I mentioned it a few weeks ago... I tried learning it from "Teach Yourself Irish", the book and CASSETTE TAPES, twenty YEARS ago. Anyway, the only sentence I remember from it was: An kaht ban an chairde something something. Which was more or less: the white cat sits by the fire. So what gives with the cats?
As of yesterday, I can now tell you about a boy running, falling, jumping, reading, swimming, walking (going), being on something, being under something, and being in something. Similarly, I can tell you about a girl doing those things, a man doing those things and a woman doing those things. I can also tell you that the old woman has white hair, while the girl has black hair. And the man has a buzz cut (admi ki baal chota chota hai). Ladki dhor rahi hai. (The girl is running). And so on. Aurat ki baal lambe hai. (The woman has long hair). I can identify cats, dogs, elephants, airplanes, fish, birds, cars, homes, (old and new), horses, and the colors yellow, white, black, red, blue, and pink, for some reason. Not green. Not purple. I would think that Hindi would be a language saturated with colors, but I am wondering whether people just use comparatives, instead -- like saying something is "eggplant colored" or "hibiscus colored" or "sunset colored".
Oh... by the way, Mac users -- I had to switch browsers to Safari, which is not as pretty or functional in my eyes as Firefox... but it can render Hindi, so what can I do? Sigh. I tried downloading unicode fonts for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but none of my ignorant efforts worked. If I had a computer guru locally, I would ask for help. But I don't think I do.
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shabash!
some commentary for what it's worth:
i wonder about the cat sentence = it should be mera, not mere (mere is plural), and older/younger is usually understood as bara/chotta. javan is a bit too formal -- it's a derivative of jivan (literally life or youth, like zindage/i in persian/urdu)
i would probably write it as mera safed billee, rilke ka nam hai, bahur bura hai. mera chotta bille, maya ka nam, kala hai. (hindi sentences contain multiple clauses within them which i always find terribly confusing, and have painstakingly learned to produce on my own. but then again, i rarely write hindi -- i only read and speak!)
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बुद्धु
This is giving me a complex about my sight.
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Also, you could look and see if you can find a Hindi font. The one I have says you need to have Windows for it to work and you have a Mac so I don't think it would work, but IIRC there are fonts that work for Macs too and I think my friend with a Mac might have even gotten this one to work: http://www.abhivyakti-hindi.org/abhi/hindi_shusha_fonts_dl_help.htm
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p.s. your Devanagari for Hindi should have a conjunct character for nd and look like this - हिन्दी - or you could also drop the न out entirely and replace it with a nasalization dot over the ह to represent the n sound (हिंदी)- otherwise you've got hinadi. ;)
Oh and also, your Thoda thoda is actually thora thora; if there is a little dot underneath what is usually a retroflex Da sylable, it becomes a retroflex Ra sylable. 8D
Rosetta Stone questions
How long have you had Rosetta Stone? It looks so SHORT, like it won't last me long. What's your experience? As I say, my students use the English version, and that one takes them... well, forever, even if -- if the damn thing were well-networked, or our crappy laptops were better at picking up the signals from our weak-assed hub -- they used it for fifty minutes a day. And they don't even use all the different components. I didn't even really KNOW there were different versions of each lesson -- audio, text, and pictures; just audio and pictures; just text and pictures; picking out the correct text (="writing", ha); and a sort of rudimentary speaking portion with a vocal waveform, which makes me laugh. I assume the English version of Rosetta Stone is gigantic and has multiple levels, unlike the Hindi.
Have you completed the whole program? Also... do you have any experience with the online version? Has it got more material? What's the difference?
Transliteration
Transliteration does indeed vary widely. There's a de facto standard used rigorously in academic writing known as IAST (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration), but it's largely unknown to Hindi speakers unless they happen to have been exposed to it in academic works written in Western languages.
For informal use you'll indeed see e.g. थोड़ा written as thoda and thora, because that sound is somewhere between an r and a retroflex d (the technical term is retroflex flap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroflex_flap)). A fluent speaker will already know the word, so there's usually no ambiguity. Similarly a fluent speaker will not be confused when no distinction is made between dental and retroflex consonants, so for example both त and ट will be rendered as t. This makes things rather challenging for us non-native/non-fluent speakers, to say the least.
You might want to look into ITRANS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS), a scheme that uses regular Latin characters to represent all sounds accurately. It started to catch on for a while for online correspondence and for things like the the spectacular Hindi Songs Archive (http://smriti.com/hindi-songs/), but appears to be slipping into obsolescence now that it's much easier to type Devanagari directly as Unicode.Re: Rosetta Stone questions
I think my biggest problem with RS is that there is no glossary or any kind of transliterated reference to use, so if you have any doubts about the exact meaning of what you are learning to say, you can't look it up with the program and are basically on your own for finding that info out. I have ended up using 3 separate Hindi dictionaries and phrasebooks trying to look up and find the words and phrases being used in RS just to get a specific translation! And things like Raha hai/Rahe hai/Rahi hai aren't even in the dictionary so it took me about a week to find out (from lesson books) that this is the Hindi version of our "ing" and that the first part of the phrase is being cut back to the "stem" word! I've read that other RS language programs do have a glossary to help with that kind of stuff, so I don't know why they didn't include it with the Hindi program. I understand people who prefer the "immersion" method where you just learn without any kind of reference to translate things back into your own language but this doesn't really work well for me. I want to know what the heck I'm saying, exactly and why things are said in a certain order (no grammar points covered in RS)! Haha.
I haven't checked out the online version at all. How long have you been studying Hindi, and are you using some books also? I think the RS program could take awhile to get through because once you get past a few of the beginning lessons, they start throwing alot of more complex stuff at you, and very long sentences. I haven't gotten far enough in RS to figure out if you can really learn anything from it beyond repeating exact stuff you have heard there; I can't see how you can pick up specific grammar points important for forming your own sentences without any english reference material. What do you think? I only know a few other people who are trying to use RS Hindi so I'm excited to hear your opinion of it as you go through! 8D
Re: Rosetta Stone questions
I've been interested in learning Hindi and Urdu since I was... oh, nineteen or so? Maybe even earlier. But I have actually been working on systematically picking it up since... maybe January? February? I got a notebook at that point and started writing down what I thought I was hearing in movies, and sorting things into categories -- adjectives, verbs, nouns, numbers, frequent expressions, etc.
And then in the past month or so, I have bought the Snell "Teach Yourself" book and mini-dictionary; a phrasebook/mini dictionary; a used Hindi-English dictionary (not the McGregor; I want to get that, but who knows when...). I bought a silly sort of kids' workbook for learning the Devanagari script -- "Your First 100 Words in Hindi", but it was too silly to take seriously. I mean, I used it, but mostly just to make flash cards.
My other main resources (apart from reliably wonderful Bollywood movies and filmi music) are friends, like
Re: Rosetta Stone questions
I also have the "your first 100 words in Hindi" book and managed to mostly learn to read the script from that (my friend got it, hated and returned it though!) before I started to read Snell's book on the script (I wish I had started with that - but I do love my 100 words flashcards! 8D...)
Hurray for Bollywood movies and film music!
rahaa/rahii/rahe
I don't know if this will help, but I thought I'd point out that रहा/रही/रहे rahaa/rahii/rahe are forms of the verb रहना rehnaa "to remain".
Hindi (as well as some other Indic languages) have the somewhat unusual feature known as compound verbs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), which you've seen in other places such as बिल्लियां आ जाती हैं billiyaan aa jaatii hain "cats come". Here आ aa is the stem of आना aanaa and जाती हैं jaatii hain is the plural feminine present imperfective form of जानाा jaanaa "to go", so you get what at first blush appears to say "comes goes". It takes some effort to "forget" what जाती usually means because here it doesn't mean "goes" at all -- it adds "color" to the verb it's modifying, in this case adding a sense of definiteness (or completion, if this were past tense, i.e. आ गयी). In other cases it might change the meaning entirely; the Hindi section in the Wikipedia link above has a couple of examples of this.
Compound verbs are rather complicated to explain, and probably even harder to learn: Usha Jain of UC Berkeley, for example, doesn't even try to explain them in her widely used textbook for first year Hindi, covering them instead in her recent Advanced Hindi Grammar. But it's an absolutely central feature of the language, and one can barely get by in Hindi without compound verbs.
Hmm, there I go again. Perhaps I should start a Hindi-Urdu blog for such ramblings rather than burden you with them all the time. I've already registered hindi-urdu.org (www.hindi-urdu.org), so there's a good place for it. Now I just need to get the site up and running.
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By the way, the way you do conjuncts with the Devanagari-QWERTY input scheme is by typing an F (lower case; sorry, I told you the wrong thing earlier) after the first consonant, then the second consonant. So to do ल्ल you'd type l-f-l. (Capital F is how you get the dot under the preceding character.)
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क्षत्रिया Something like that? Also,
हिन्दी
बिल्ली
प्रीय That's "dear", yes? Oh, so exciting, and satisfying. Thanks, J!
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Horrible Halants in Hindi
I am an Australian living in India who only today has had the same grips with
Rosetta Stone. I found your blog trying to find how to correctly type the halant - shorter stem - form of the ky conjunt. Rosetta Stone keeps marking me wrong!
Have you travelled to India often? What inspired your interest in Hindi?
After two years on the subcontinent I am still tongue tied in hindi conversation. Forgive me for the bland question how do you type the halant form of conjuncts in Rosetta Stone?
Re: Horrible Halants in Hindi