Hindi is the language, Hindus are the people. I am interested in learning Hindi, because I have a pupil who wants me to teach him English, and he persuaded me to go to a 'Hindi family' Toastmasters International speakers' club. I also see a lot of poems and messages written in Indian languages on my whatsapp groups for Global toastmasters (mostly in India) and poetry groups such as Fertile Brains.
I had been hearing in Singapore on the MRT trains, recorded announcements in Singapore's four main recognized languages, English, Malay, Chinese (Mandarin) and an Indian language. When I happily announced that I knew just one word, mandri, for thank you, my Singaporean Indian Hindu speaking friend pointed out that this was not Hindi but Tamil. Hindi is spoken in Northern India. Tamil is spoken in the south, from where Indians migrated across the sea to Malaysia and down to Singapore or directly to Singapore.
Hindi is not easy for English speakers. I tried starting in Duolingo and could not understand the sounds nor remember the symbols.
Somehow I started the course, missing the page with all the letters.
https://www.duolingo.com/characters
After researching on the internet, I found a system which shows first how you draw each symbol, comparing two similar shapes. Then relating the sounds to equivalent English words.
The speaker makes it easy to follow, showing how you draw each letter, using terms like, a semi circle, a vertical line, a balloon on top. a horizontal, a U.
I then went back to Wikipedia. I have extracted and simplified what I thought was most relevant and important, deleted long words, technical terms and references to elsewhere.
Comparison with Modern Standard Urdu
Linguistically, Hindi and Urdu are two registers of the same language and are mutually intelligible.However, Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and contains more Sanskrit-derived words than Urdu, whereas Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script and uses more Arabic and Persian loanwords. The two registers share an identical grammar, Hindi is the most commonly used official language in India. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan (and is one of 22 official languages of India, also having official status in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Delhi, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.)
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Script
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is written from left to right.
Romanization
The Government of India uses Hunterian transliteration as its official system of writing Hindi in the Latin script. Various other systems also exist,.
Romanized Hindi, also called Hinglish, is the dominant form of Hindi online.
At my Toastmasters meeting I was told that the standard greeting is namaste. (That's easy. Most people know that. bow slightly. The meaning is I bow to you, actually I bow to your soul.)
Useful Websites
https://www.duolingo.com/enroll/hi/en/Learn-Hindi
https://www.duolingo.com/characters
https://www.amazon.sg/Essential-Hindi-Words-Phrases-Travelers/dp/
https://wikitravel.org/en/Hindi_phrasebook Many useful words, to print out when travelling. Several words are the same as English, pencil, police, tampon, taxi.
https://wikitravel.org/en/Devanagari_phrasebook (Showing charts of vowels and consonants written in the pretty, squiggly Devenagari chracters)
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