These past two weeks I have experienced a lot of progress in Hindi. I was having a frustrating time because I felt like, even though I have studied Hindi for several months now, I couldn't communicate anything. Then, this week it seemed that suddenly all the little things I had been learning started to click together into meaningful language. I had several moments of creative communication in Hindi this week.
I had three main topics of study these two weeks:
1) Food/cooking: I was able to discuss liked/disliked foods, as well as explain in very simple Hindi how to cook my breakfast (grits).
2) Shopping: I have been using Mango lessons to learn how to ask for and purchase items at a local shop in India. This includes some colors and items (neeli kitaab for blue book) and verb phrases (Yeh kitne ka hai? for How much is this?). I know numbers 1-10, but I haven't been brave enough to tackle the rest of the number system yet.
3) Grammar: I have introduced myself to grammatical cases in Hindi. So far, I have learn about the direct case and the oblique case of nouns and adjectives. The oblique case is used when the noun or adjective is governed by a postposition.
The resources I used included the Elementary Hindi textbook, the Basic Hindi textbook, Duolingo, Mango, and a Youtube channel called Hindi University.
As I mentioned before, I was experiencing frustration with myself at the beginning of the semester. However, I am striving to be kinder to myself in all areas of life, and I think this has positively influenced my Hindi learning. I am looking forward to learning more in the coming months.
My goals for this coming week are as follows:
- Basic Hindi: Lessons 10, 12, & 13
- Find children's book to practice reading
- Role-play shopping experience.
- Start translating a song either into or from Hindi.
- Study Hindi at least one hour per day.
Comments
Hi Mae! Thanks for the comment. For conversations with my language partner, I like to set up a role-play situation (like shopper/shopkeeper) and then act it out in Hindi. I think this is a good approach for beginners because it it very high-context and focuses on highly useful skills.
If you aren't working on specific interpersonal skills like that, I imagine you could do something similar with topics. You could share the topic with your partner ahead of time, and then both of you prepare vocabulary/grammar structures that may be useful. I think one of the most important things is that you have something that you want to say. Pick topics that you care about and have something to communicate about, and then use the conversations as practice for communication using new (or review) material you have learned.
Hey! You talked about being able to communicate in a meaningful way this past week. I was wondering if you could tell me how you simulate these conversations with your language partner. Is there a prepared topic or script? I've carved out time to converse with my language partner each time we meet and it's helpful, but I'm worried that since there's usually no structure that I am using the same vocabulary over and over. How do you usually structure these practice conversations?