I am Suresh from Chennai,

Irene and others, , if you are keen on online Hindi classes, I am willing to take. I was brought up in Ranchi for 30 years. I served a US NGO for 29 years in India,Russia and South Africa. I also do Hindi to English and vice versa translation job. I am a B.Com. graduate.

I have google talk facility/internet at home

Regards,

Suresh sskay56@gmail.com 9840643690

does anyone know about an international hindi school in Mussoree, Uttaranchal? i went there once and heard some people speaking about this school afterwards, but at that time i was happy with the hindi basics i knew. but now i want to express myself better in hindi, also i need to read and write properly. i need a good school, with an intensive one month course would be great.. thank you so much for any advice!

irena.

Well a few years ago, I was preparing for a trip to Japan and ran across a daily learn Japanese podcast at http://www.JapanesePod101.com. I looked around and did not find anything for Hindi. Since my in laws live with me and they both know Hindi. And my mother-in-law even taught Hindi for 33 years at the Indian High School in Bahrain. Also my wife knows Hindi. I thought this would be something good to do. So we started recording http://www.ISpeakHindi.com about 2 years ago. And it has helped me practice everyday. I still can not carry out a really useful conversation, but it has helped learn the grammar, some words, and I think if I keep going I will learn.

Anyway, if you are looking for a way to learn Hindi you might check it out at http://www.ISpeakHindi.com but if you are really interested in learning Hindi, maybe you would be interested in making some shows with us?

As it is commonly known, not only pakistan but bangladesh was also involved in the partition from india. But unlike pakistanis, we bangladeshis do not claim to be speaking an entirely different language from our indian bengali counterparts. In fact, some of us even encourage ourselves to try to speak the form of bengali that is spoken in indian bengal, regardless of who is hindu or who is muslim. This is because the bengali that is spoken in Kolkata is the standard form of bengali, and there is a certain beauty to every standardized language that cannot be replaced by any other means.

Pakistanis on the other hand, as well as many muslims from india, are so occupied with their religion that they began to de-sanskritize their language (the hindustani language) and began to arabize/persianize it to form urdu. To me this makes no sense, why would you want to arabize your language to the extent that it becomes incomprehensible to its hindu speakers just because of your religion?? Urdu is a sanskrit derived language, therefore it should be borrowing from sanskrit like every other indo-aryan language and not from arabic or persian. This situation is comparable to english speaking hindus creating their own version of english by replacing all of the latin and greek terms with sanskrit terms instead.

The point I’m trying to make here is that everyone should be proud of the language that they speak, and should make every effort to speak its standardized form correctly. There is definitely beauty in standardized hindi and hindi speakers should work hard to speak it correctly.

The reason i brought pakistan and urdu up is because i cant help comparing them to us bangladeshis. Although we are muslim, we would never imagine de-sanskritizing our language and using arabic and persian words instead. As muslims we could easily use the word “kitab” for book when we speak, but we will always prefer the standard bengali word “boi” every time. This is because we are proud of our language and culture, we fought the pakistanis once to save it and if we have to we’ll fight again and again and again.

To us bengalis, being able to speak the pure form of the language is a sign of prestige and high education. My parents always try speaking to me in pure bengali, so i naturally know words like shombhob (possibility) and kothin (difficult), as well as more complex ones such as prathomik (primary), beejgonit (algebra), and obhishshap (curse). I’m from Canada by the way so i never went to school in bangladesh.

This has always happened, which is why English has both houses (Germanic root) and mansions (French root) and thousands of other such pairs. But I think it happens much, much faster these days because, for example, you can get 70 channels of English language satellite TV in Pune. The kids grow up watching Marathi soap operas, Hindi films and American cartoons. Which language do they understand/speak? All of them!