Customer Reviews
not an easy guide - By: Fintan15, 30 Aug 2008 
If you just want to learn Hindi letters & pronunciation then this book is OK. If you really want to learn Hindi this is not a good buy. The organisation is terrible with poorly marked sections, no translations to see if you are correct & the vocabulary lists are all over the place. It took me ages to see how the lists at the back are sorted & it is pointless having half the vocab on a page of text & half at the backin a mixed up index. It is not clear whether you are translating a paragraph or single sentences either. I found this book totally confusing. Even the Hindi script on the cover is unlike the standard Hindi letters shown inside! There are far better books on the market than this one.
Appears well written - By: Kate Adie, 25 Apr 2008 
I found it very difficult to grasp Hindi. But this book is great: it really shows you how to do those fancy shapes.
simple but solid introduction - By: , 19 Jan 2003 
This is an incredibly slim & quite basic introduction to the studyin Hindi. It doesn't cover a lot of ground, but it is very inexpensive & I think potentially very useful for younger learners (such as teenagers, for whom the book is written), & even adults who are not experiencedin studying other languages.
The book includes a section on vowels, telling you how to pronounce them & showing you the full characterin the Hindi script. These are not too difficult so the section is quite short. It then includes a section on consonants & on consonant pronunciation. Hindi consonants are much more difficult for native English speakers, since there are many sounds that we don't havein English. Fortunately this section includes diagrams of the vocal tract (i.e. the mouth & tongue) to show you exactly what to do with your tongue so you can make these crazy sounds! This quite good. Then it jumps right into vocabulary: there are several words per page, each introducing a letter of the alphabet & including a picture, the English meaning, the wordin the Hindi script, & the Hindi pronunciationin the (modified) Roman script (i.e. with the same letters as English). This is the first third of the book.
Then the book gets a bit more difficult, as it gets into detail about how to write Hindi. Many more words are introduced, & then some short reading passages are included. This part of the book is organised by sound. Most of these are vowel sounds, because vowels are written differently when they are at the start of the words than when they are elsewhere, so they can be difficult to learn to write & read. At the end of the book are a few more short reading passages & finally a glossary containing the words usedin the book.
In short, this is a good introduction to Hindi, but it probably would be too simple for experienced language learners. But if you are not ready for something serious like the Teach Yourself Hindi book, or if you aren't sure if you want to invest that kind of money yet, this is a great way to get a feel for learning Hindi.
