Colloquial Hindi

The Complete Course for Beginners

Tej K Bhatia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317306573
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Colloquial Hindi: The Complete Course for Beginners has been carefully developed by an experienced teacher to provide a step-by-step course to Hindi as it is written and spoken today.

Combining a clear, practical and accessible style with a methodical and thorough treatment of the language, it equips learners with the essential skills needed to communicate confidently and effectively in Hindi in a broad range of situations. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

Colloquial Hindi is exceptional; each unit presents a wealth of grammatical points that are reinforced with a wide range of exercises for regular practice. A full answer key, a grammar summary, bilingual glossaries and English translations of dialogues can be found at the back as well as useful vocabulary lists throughout.

Key features include:

A clear, user-friendly format designed to help learners progressively build up their speaking, listening, reading and writing skills

Jargon-free, succinct and clearly structured explanations of grammar

An extensive range of focused and dynamic supportive exercises

Realistic and entertaining dialogues covering a broad variety of narrative situations

Helpful cultural points

An overview of the sounds of Hindi

Balanced, comprehensive and rewarding, Colloquial Hindi is an indispensable resource both for independent learners and students taking courses in Hindi.

Audio material to accompany the course is available to download free in MP3 format from www.routledge.com/cw/colloquials. Recorded by native speakers, the audio material features the dialogues and texts from the book and will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

pāT^h

Units

1

namaste/namaskār

Greetings and Social Etiquette

By the end of this unit you should be able to:

• use simple greetings
• learn expressions of social etiquette
• use expressions for leave-taking
• ask simple questions
• make simple requests
• use personal pronouns (e.g., ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, etc.)
• use some nouns and adjectives

bātcīt Dialogue 1

(Audio 1:9)

Namaste Greetings

Hindu–Sikh Greetings and Other Social Etiquette

Hindi greetings vary according to the religion of the speaker, but not according to the time of the day. In some cases, the speaker may choose to greet according to the religion of his/her listener. Such a choice is socially more appealing to the listener and you can easily win the hearts of your listeners by being sensitive to their way of greeting.

Mohan goes to see Sarita in her office. They know each other but are not close friends.

MOHAN:	Greetings.
SARITA:	Greetings. How are you?
MOHAN:	Fine. And you?
SARITA:	I am fine too. What can I do for you? [lit. do order]
MOHAN:	(It is) not an order, (but) a request. (The conversation continues for some time.)
MOHAN:	Okay. Goodbye.
SARITA:	Goodbye.

shabdāvalī Vocabulary

(Audio 1:10)

(Note: It is standard convention to transliterate Hindi words in lower case and this convention is used here. Therefore, the first letter of the first word is not capitalized. The only exceptions are upper case T, D, N and R which represent the retroflex sounds.)

Pronunciation

In the eastern Hindi-speaking area (e.g. in the city of Banaras), the vowel ε in the words,

m

and

hε, is pronounced as a diphthong, a combination of two vowels, i.e. [ai = a + i]. However, in the western Hindi-speaking area (e.g. in Delhi), it is pronounced as a vowel ε, as in English words such as cat. Since this vowel pronunciation is considered to be the standard, this is given in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Hindi writing system and pronunciation
• Transcription table
• Script and handwriting
• Units
• Reference grammar
• Key to exercises
• Dictionary order
• English-Hindi glossary
• Hindi-English glossary
• Index