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Begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including: Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues; Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises; Step-by-step guide to pronunciation; Practical vocabulary; Regular and irregular verb tables; Plenty of practice exercises and answers; Self-assessment quizzes to test progress; Bilingual glossary.
For beginners and those who want to brush up their Hindi, this is a complete course in understanding, speaking and writing Hindi, a language spoken by over 275 million people around the world.
The course can be used as teaching material for both class tuition and individual study, presenting Hindi which is primarily colloquial and practical. It gives greater access to Urdu, Hindi's sister language, which shares a virtually identical grammar and much of the Hindi vocabulary.
The course is divided into 18 units, each of which is based on dialogues which exemplify and bring to life the new grammar introduced in that particular unit. Transliteration in the roman script is provided for the first five units and for all words in the Hindi-English glossary. The dialogues form a kind of soap opera based on the life of a Delhi family; the English translations are deliberately close and literal, so as to form a key to the Hindi.
The grammatical explanations are intended to be as accessible and non-technical as possible. The main grammatical structures of Hindi are all presented. There are plenty of exercises for readers to practice each new point and a key at the back for checking answers.
An audio CD is also included, containing approximately two hours of listening.
About the Authors:
Rupert Snell teaches Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Simon Weightman is a Research Assoicate.
Review:
This book is an excellent introduction to Hindi. Using dialogues and exercises it gives the learner a clear guide to Hindi grammar and vocabulary and the Devnaagari script. It is probably not suitable for anyone looking to acquire tourist Hindi in a short period of time, but there are many good guides available for this (even on-line). For anyone looking for a thorough guide to teach themselves (conversational as well as argumentative and occasionally cantankerous) Hindi, this book is highly recommended. It also has an entertaining, if bizarre, Bollywood ending.
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