Introductory Hindi Course

This Hindi course has been prepared to provide beginners with a textbook for learning Hindi intensively in three months, Dialogues, vocabulary introduction passages, wordlists, oral exercise, reading passages and writing skills. As an introductory course in Hindi, this course teaches the Hindi spoken in homes and markets, town and villages of north India. The simplest vocabulary and structures of speech have been chosen. The Devanagari alphabet is introduced at the beginning and transliteration of letters is discontinued as soon as a letter is learned. This book has been produced by the Landour Language school. Established about. 1910 this school has trained over 14,000 students, mostly from foreign countries, to speak Hindi and other languages to high levels of mastery. Accompanying this textbook is accompanying audio CD, designed to reinforce the material presented in the textbook. The students can work through the audio clips chapter by chapter, or select the parts that are most helpful at the time. Each chapter starts with a dialogue, which has been recorded twice. The first audio clip presents the dialogue as a real- life scenario read by two or more native speakers. The second recording of the dialogue is read by one person with a pause between each sentence, and is designed to give the student a change to practice speaking the dialogue text. The first seven chapters contain phonetic drills, where the student has a chance to listen to and repeat the basic sounds of the Hindi alphabet. Listening and pronunciation skills are then further developed using the homophonic sentences and listening comprehension sections. Each chapter contains audio clips of relevant vocabulary, which corresponds to that introduced in the dialogues and the readings. From Chapter 8, recordings of full-length Hindi readinds are introduced. Each three-to four-paragraph monologue is recorded at regular conversation speed, allowing the students to hear Hindi as it is spoken outside of the classroom. We hope this technology will enhance the student’s learning experience, and, in particular, allow the spoken word to effectively accompany personal study with the textbook.