Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script

Sure. It was used. It was described as "good". It arrived. It is ratty. And the first twenty pages are missing. How can I rate the book when part of it is missing?

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.

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.

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.

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.