So I am back to learning Hindi again, a little more so this time. I had given it up for a while, as I got almost to learning new verbs and the couldn’t memorize them or remember postpositions or remember plurals, so I put the books on the shelf and watched a lot of Bollywood, and am a little better at listening comprehension but have atrophied with respect to reading and speaking. Which is to say I’m almost back at square one.
However, I’ve been following Gori Girl’s RSS feed and she posted a beautiful gem of a website, LiveMocha. I spend a couple of hours on it, doing the Hindi 101 course, and I’m feeling a little more confident, in that I learned a few new vocabulary words and have apparently retained some of my basic grammar. I even got some feedback on one of my exercises! I am planning on picking it up at least three times a week, so that maybe I’ll learn it sooner than 2012 (because as we all know, the world ends then, or something; it’s a good goal). I figure that when I was in school and learning French, I had three classes a week for four years, plus conversations and reading books, so even if I can’t get to a fluent point in three years, I can at least be competent enough to eventually do that whole volunteering in India thing I’ve been thinking about. Well, provided that I go someplace where they speak Hindi.
So if you want to learn a language but are cheap (like me) and don’t want to buy Rosetta Stone, go visit:
My username is legosnell. Friend me, please. I’m lonely.
(The only downside is the usual problem with non-Roman-character-based languages; the transliterations do not match what I’m familiar with from the Rupert Snell books, so I’m doing some double translation sometimes.)
I think there are some problems with the search function at LiveMocha; I can’t even find myself on there. Also, I (or, really, my husband) have noticed a few errors in the lessons – minor ones, but pay attention to the tips on the side which offer corrections.n
Oh, good. I felt really computer-illiterate there for a while. I finally sent an email to a friend and that seemed to bypass whatever the problem was.
Thanks for the heads-up on the corrections! I noticed one in my Snell book a while back and felt smart (it was written मैं in Devanagari, instead of मे – totally different).
Yeah, I tried to friend you, but I can’t find you. I’m chickengoddess (big surprise there), so friend me.
Friended! Whew. I can’t wait to practice together!