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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.
no subject
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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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
no subject
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
Transliteration
Re: Rosetta Stone questions
Re: Rosetta Stone questions
Re: Rosetta Stone questions
rahaa/rahii/rahe
no subject
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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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