Hindi Stories

            Learning to speak Hindi is one thing, but learning to read and write it is an additional task. It’s not as difficult as Chinese or Japanese, because it is still a letter/phonetics system, rather than symbols. But there are many characters, and many of them combine to form entirely new characters when placed together.

            Luckily, in the Hindi class I took at BYU before leaving for India, we were taught the basics of reading and writing, so I was able to slowly sound out words when reading, and be able to spell words (or at least guess at their spelling) when writing.

            While in India, people were always super impressed when I was able to read even the simplest signs in Hindi, even if it took me a whole minute to sound out the words, but I wanted to get better and faster at reading. I also needed to expand my vocabulary since I didn’t know enough to communicate very well. So I came up with a plan.

            I went to an Internet café and looked up some simple, one page or less, stories written in Hindi (or I guess I should say written in Devnagari, since that’ the name of the script). The ones I found were mostly fable type stories, including the Lion and the Mouse, the Thirsty Crow, and some others.

            I printed them out and took them home with me, then in the evenings I would take some time to read over the stories. Sometimes I would just practice reading and sounding out the words, trying to read as fast as I could, while still saying the words right, but not necessarily worrying about understanding everything I was reading.

            Other times I would do a much slower read, going through word by word and sentence by sentence, with a dictionary by my side, looking up any words I didn’t know and then writing them down with their English translation in the margins. Once I knew all the words in the sentence then I’d reread it and sort out the words until I understood the meaning of the sentence. You’d think if you knew what all the words meant in a sentence than the meaning of the sentence would be clear. But because the sentence structures and ordering of words is so much different than English, sometimes it’s still hard to tell.

            After I had a good list of words in the margins, I’d practice them like flash cards, covering up the English and going down the Hindi, trying to remember what they meant, and then the reverse, covering the Hindi and trying to say the Hindi word for each English word.

            Then I’d go back to the story and try to read through the whole thing and understand as much of it as I possibly could.

            It was a long and slow process and I didn’t get to work on it as much as I would have liked to, but I felt that it was a very effective way to learn the language. I would certainly recommend it to anyone trying to learn another language, especially a language using different characters.

            Another effective way may be to read it side by side with an English translation, which may feel quicker, but may prevent or allow you not to go into such a detailed search of the language (though it would definitely save you some time looking up everything in the dictionary).