During this past week, I focused on strengthening my grasp of the Hindi (Devanagari) alphabet, including the consonants, vowels, and matras. As I mentioned before, it has been somewhat tricky for me since some of the Devanagari letters look similar to Punjabi letters but have completely different sounds. The way I've been overcoming that obstacle is using the book "Teach Yourself Hindi," which is used in many college courses about Hindi. In the book, Snell has a list of words that use certain sounds.
What I did during this past week was to rewrite the alphabet several times, focusing on understanding the distinct sounds of each letter, carefully write out some of the words while pronouncing the sounds, learn the conjugations of the verb "to be," and study the beginnings of some Hindi greetings. I am using the Five Colleges Mentored Hindi website, which has great culture videos in Hindi (LangTalk) that are about the different greetings. I will upload the artifact I created. Meeting with my language partner was great -- I was actually able to hear a native speaker sound out the sounds I had been confused about, and he helped check my understanding of the alphabet/sounds by doing dictation exercises, where he would say a word slowly once or twice, and I would then write it according to the sounds I heard. For Hindi, dictation and learning by sound is really important, even if (like me) one is not an aural learner. This is because in Hindi, the difference in two letters might just be aspirated vs. unaspirated, like a hard "K" sound vs. "khh." Or, in Hindi, there are the sounds: d, dh, dt, dhh, t, th. Thus, meeting with my Language Partner was great because he could check the progress I have been making, and it gave me a chance to hear spoken Hindi from a native speaker. During this past week, I also watched segments of the Hindi film "Once Upon a Time in Mumbai." It was partially as a way to learn more about Bollywood culture and as a way to check how much Hindi I could recognize. Although I can recognize the conjugations of "I am, she is, etc..." and recognize some words from my Punjabi knowledge, the actors spoke so fast. However, I could often use context clues to figure out what was going on.
-सिमरन :) (Simrun)
Comments