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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:
--------
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.
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.
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.