I’ll check our Lipikaar; I’ve figured out how to change the language settings on my Mac, and using the little keyboard key, I can type pretty well. I’m much better at writing in pencil, though (I wonder if people would get mad if I just uploaded scans). I think I’m using the Snell grammar more than I realize. I spent a good three months with it, and have apparently internalized the grammar enough to have no problem. I like that Snell gives you conjugation and sentence structure early on. LiveMocha is too much about the things you’re saying, and not enough about why they’re that way.

However, to my credit, I watched a Bollywood dance scene this morning and understood roughly 15% of it, so I’m feeling pretty accomplished!

I don’t think LiveMocha does a good job in teaching grammar, really, but I’m okay with that. I’m using Snell to learn the formal aspects of the language (and getting help from Aditya), and using LiveMocha to keep me practicing new vocab & sentence structure. Plurals, I understand, are fairly regular – it all depends on the type of ending the word has.

I am pretty good with the script, but the transliteration bugs me. So far I’ve been corrected twice because I’m using Snell transliterations instead of LiveMocha transliterations (and honestly, this is the biggest frustration I have with Hindi, period – transliteration is such an imprecise method of communication, and I usually ask for words in Devanagari if I’ve never seen them before, because I get a better pronunciation that way). I’ve seen some people actually write their writing exercises in Devanagari, and I’ve seen some people request them, too, so I just may start doing that.

Have you had problems with plurals? I can’t seem to make sense of the way LiveMocha teaches them. I think more time with Snell will do me good.

(I think I may have an easy time with the numbers part – I learned 1-10 a while back, just so I could count in Hindi. I’m such a dork.)

I just completed lesson four – numbers. Now I’m going around naming things in the house – “This is a red door. These are not two black dogs, these are two brown dogs. ”

How are you doing on the transliteration/Hindi script part? I really dislike how you can’t do the review parts in the script…