Teach Yourself Hindi Complete Course Package (Book + 2CDs) (Teach Yourself Language Complete Courses)

Very difficult. Good only for someone wanting to learn how to spell words.

Sandra

First of all let me say to those wanting to learn Hindi:
IT IS NOT HARD TO LEARN. Rest assured.

Snell has a few books out. Beginner's Hindi Script, Beginners Hindi, and Teach Yourself Hindi. There is a method to the madness. For those learning Hindi its a great idea to start out with Hindi script. Its rewarding and very easy to learn. When I first opened the Script book it looked overwhelming (like any new system of writing can seem)but I (and you will) learned fast. Don't waste your time with Beginner's Hindi, its slow and boring and the progress in Teach Yourself Hindi is much more rewarding. Teach Yourself Hindi gives you a solid basis in the first couple lessons and makes you feel comfortable (if not GREAT about yourself) and at how easy it is to learn Hindi (in fact, Snell mentions this in his intro). You progress very fast from lesson 1. He uses vocab from previous lessons, the examples he uses are great and memorization and study of these will motivate you to build your own sentences. I'm a ways along in the book and I can honestly say I could go back to India right now and talk to the friends I've made and we could have a decent conversation. That being said, there are 14 more chapters to go that are jam packed with important lessons. So now for my advice:

Like I said, it isn't hard to learn but I cannot stress the importance of practice. Practice, practice, practice! Learning the vocab in each chapter allows you to draw from vast new pools and gives you the ability to make more and more sentences (and trust me, its a great feeling!)

Despite the fact that there are 18 chapters, fight the feeling to fly through a chapter and think that you've learned everything in that chapter only to move on to the next one. Make sure that you really understand the subjects your're working with, otherwise you're only hurting yourself in the long run.

DO THE REVIEWS! I cannot tell you how helpful they are. You think you understand the subjects in the chapter until you are actually challenged to put that knowledge into play. After doing a few of the problems and refining your knowledge, its then that you say to yourself "aha..I'm getting this".

Don't give up on the first speed bump you come across. I've come across a few, but really you just need to go slow and think it through. You CAN learn it.

While you are studying Teach Yourself Hindi, there are other methods to compliment your study. Get his Hindi Conversation package. Its easy to put on your ipod and take with you and listen to. Repetitive listening will allow you to memorize sentence structure.
Watch Bollywood movies! Alot of them are hilarious and give you a great chance to put your knowledge to use. Also a great chance to pick up on some of the rich, Indian culture.

Anyway, I hope this was helpful. I would recommend Teach Yourself Hindi without fail. Five Stars all the way, baby. Remember the advice I gave you and you can't fail. Theres a world of Hindi speakers out there eagerly waiting to talk to us westerners, so get out there and start talking to them.

This book is definitely one of the best book for SERIOUS beginners to learn Hindi and certainly one of the best among TY language books. In fact it is used in a number of universities as a 1st year textbook among others. It covers a broad scope of topics, if you can manage to go through the entire book, you will get a solid foundation for further study. If you are a complete beginner without background of any Indic languages and do not want to learn the script, this book is not for you. If you are serious about Hindi, you can use this book with M. Shapiro's Primer of Modern Hindi, which covers more in-depth and technical grammatical explanations, after finishing both Snell and Shapiro, you can then embark on Usha Jain's Intermediate Hindi reader.

In fact, many Universities use this book as their textbook. I personally like to supplement it with something more systematic, but if you want something to really frame your Hindi learning, this is the way to go.

There is some serious slogging here. You can start right into the conversational, but each chapter is *so* dense that you don't feel like you are touching bottom! The beginners hindi version of this book is a *much* better version...