My next door neighbors have recently moved here from India. As such, they speak very little broken English. I speak zero Hindi. We communicate with smiles and nodding, hand gestures, and me pronouncing words slower and louder like an idiot.
I need to write them a quick note to ask for a favor. Since they would be helping me out, I would like to write it in their native language.
Any suggestions on how I could create a note that would make sense to them? Online translators are limited to words only, and I really want to be grammatically correct. I don’t want it to look like I put an English note through Babelfish.
I should have added: Feel free to e-mail me if it is private. And if you can wait, and they can read Hindi, I write Hindi quite well & would love to write a little note and mail it to you!
Fantastic. I sincerely appreciate your offer and will take you up on it.
Now, do I know for a fact they speak Hindi? No. From what I read, it looks like there are 18 different dialects of the language. Are these completely different from another, making communication impossible, or is it more of a “New England vs. Texas” regional type of difference?
I have never run across anyone who claims to speak Hindi whom I cannot understand.
However, I meant: are they S. Indian? Do they speak Tamil, Malyali, or something else? If you get a chance, ask them what state they are from. And I’ll be awaiting your e-mail.
I don’t know how to say “hovercraft” in Hindi though.
On a similar note, I’m trying to learn how to order a beer in about 12 languages. I’m up to six. Can you please translate, “one beer, please” into Hindi for me? And then you might want to add pronunciation hints.
Tragically Dip, Hindi is the language for much of North Central India, and IIRC the most widely spoken language there. But there are literally dozens of major languages spoken in India, from four different language families: Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bengali, Newari, Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gondi, Assamese… It would help immensely if we knew where in India the lady came from – she’s actually more apt to understand English than Hindi if she’s from another area than where it’s spoken; it remains something of a lingua franca for the subcontinent, though that usage seems to be declining.
Anaamika was kind enough to translate for me, and I dropped the note in their mailbox this morning. We will see.
Now, let’s assume they do speak a different language than Hindi. Would this be the equivilant of someone writing me a letter in German (I speak none), or will many words and phrases “carry-over”? I guess I’m asking how different the languages are?
None of the words will carry over unless they speak one of a limited number of languages. Gujrat, which is not far from Punjab, speaks a completely different language than Hindi. Perhaps close to Spanish & Italian, where you think you can understand the words but you actually don’t, they just sound similar.
