This week I had an introductory meeting with my language partner Atul. I have known Atul since last year and we have briefly spoken about my expectations for learning Hindi last semester, but during this session we focused in on what exactly I want to learn. I want to develop my speaking skills by learning basic greetings, being able to talk about movies and music, and tell the time. I also want to learn grammar rules as well as be able to read and write Hindi in Latin script. We went through my drafted learning plan and I told him what I believe my level of competency is in regards to Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking. We also finalized what days of the week we would like to meet and how often.
The rest of the session was focused on going through the Hindi alphabet. We found a character chart online and worked on the pronunciation of each character. I learned that I have difficulty pronouncing some words because of my accent but by listening to Atul say each character multiple times, I slowly learned the proper pronunciation. He would also give me examples of words that I already knew that used those characters. We will definitely come back to that character chart to fine tune my pronunciation.
Overall, we accomplished my goal of deciding what exactly I wanted to learn this semester and finalized times to meet each week. I am excited to delve into the language even though I know it is going to be difficult. I have not learned a language from scratch in a long time so I will need to be patient and motivated while learning.
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Character Chart we used