I’ve recently started learning Hindi. The biggest hurdle so far has been the Devanagari script, which is just now beginning not to look like random squiggles after hours of trying to read it.
I think that in order to learn it I’m going to have to actually write some of it - if nothing else than to properly do the exercises in the book (Snell). But the book doesn’t offer much guidance on this, other than to start on the left and follow through on the right.
I realize getting my writing to look better than a young child’s will take much practice, but is there anywhere I can just some basic guidance on how to form the shapes for the nagari syllables? If anyone can advise me here, wonderful; else I’d very much appreciate a referral to a website or free (or cheap) resource that would help me with this.
I can’t offer much help on forming the letters, but I can tell you what i’ve read about how it is written in general.
It shouldn’t be hard, but you’ve got to remember that the diacritic for /i/ is to the left, and you need to leave room for it. William Bright discusses Devanagari in the book “The Writing Systems of the World”. According to him, the symbols are hung from the lines on lined paper, and the top line is added later. With rapid writing, the headstrokes are often omitted, bringing it closer to Gujarati writing, which lacks head strokes, and descends from Devanagari. The fact that it was used mostly for correspondance and bookkeeping suggests that losing the headstroke is a common thing to do in written informal Devanagari.
That makes sense. Forming the headstroke with each character was a big part of the difficulty of getting it right. I think I’ll get some lined paper and just omit headstrokes for now.
Yep! The book introduces them almost immediately, and they’re introduced a few per chapter; I’m already familiar with a few of them.
If you can, try to pick up Urdu as well. It’s slightly different but still mutually intelligible, but will let you communicate with an additional several million people for not that much more effort (mainly learning a new alphabet and some different vocabulary), and of course has a prettier writing system as well.
Wow, finally something on the Dope that I’m qualified to answer.*
The biggest hurdle to learning Devanagari for the first time is the sheer number of letters and letter combinations that have to be learned, I think.
That is absolutely correct, when writing a word, you write all the characters without the top line, and then stroke through the whole word. Forming the symbols does take a while, but this website has a pretty good set of animated gifs for each letter: Faculty at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University
They all start with the top line, however. I would recommend doing the opposite; it’s a very hard habit to break once you start doing it, and it makes writing whole words very cumbersome.
That’s because I’m from India, and studied Hindi for several years at school as a second languauge, although because I haven’t used it much for a while, I’ve lost much of my fluency.
Whoops, just one more thing. The animations on that site tend to do the vertical line first, before anything else. For some letters, you’ll find it more convenient to do the vertical line last; once you’re fairly familiar with the forms, a little experimentation will allow you to see which is quicker.
Find yourself a good table of conjunct consonants (samyukta). Make very good friends with it. It’s going to be your constant companion from now on, unless you memorize them all.
Once you’ve learned the consonants and vowels, congratulations! You’re almost halfway there. Just kidding. But it’s the conjuncts that are the real hangup. There are several dozen of them.
Many are intuitive and are two easily recognizable consonants stacked one on top of another or squished together, like kk or pp.
Others use a recognizable piece of a consonant, like the n in nd.
Others have very distorted letter shapes that you can sort of make out if you squint, like in ddh.
And then others just have no resemblance to their original shapes, like ksh or the two forms of r when preceding or following another consonant.
If you stick with Hindi, this will allow you to read. But if you study Sanskrit, you still won’t be able to read it properly until you get a thorough grasp of sandhi. A good sandhi table will also be your constant companion throughout your early career as a Sanskrit scholar, but sandhi is something to be memorized. One of many reasons why study of Sanskrit is so challenging.
Not all books on Hindi will give a full account of conjunct consonants. But you won’t be able to read many words if you don’t learn the samyukta forms. So be careful to get a good book on Hindi, Lonely Planet won’t cut it. I strongly recommend Outline of Hindi Grammar by R.S. McGregor. There’s an even better samyukta table in Sanskrit: An Introduction to the Classical Language by Michael Coulson.
P.S. Both McGregor and Coulson include numbered stroke-by-stroke arrows showing how to write each character, as I think the Teach Yourself Hindi book also does. That’s all you’ll need for learning to write.
If you think conjunct consonants are bad in Devanagari, they are much, much worse in Malayalam and Sinhala. All Indic alphabets have them, with one exception: Tamil. In Tamil, every letter is written out distinct and separate in full, every time. It’s by far the simplest alphabet of India. If you take up Tamil after struggling with Devanagari, what a relief! Tamil consonants that are not followed by a vowel just have a dot on top. Makes you wonder why no one else in India thought of that.
The Urdu script is absolutely different from all the other alphabets of India. It’s a special adaptation of Arabic script, with 10 extra letters added for non-Arabic sounds. Urdu writing is complex and is the result of several layers of historical adaptations. If you have the leisure to study the history of writing, it would really help to learn to read and write Arabic first before tackling Urdu script. The underlying principle of how to put letters together to signify words is something that’s peculiar to Arabic.
Once Arabic is understood, plus the Persian adaptation of Arabic script which is the intermediate stage that Urdu is based on, then a lot of why Urdu is written with such strange rules will make better sense. Another reason to study Arabic writing first: Arabic textbooks are printed in naskh, the clearest style of letterforms. Urdu uses nasta‘liq, which is very pretty as yBeayf observed, but the shapes are not as easy to make out as in naskh. Well, this method of learning Urdu worked for me.
Sadly, Teach Yourself Hindi does not have stroke by stroke arrows; it’s the book I’m using. It does, however, have a table of 100 conjuncts, and introduces them chapter by chapter, so I don’t think I’ll be suffering there. (Of course, learning a new language is full of suffering - but it’s a fun kind.)
I don’t quite have the bucks for the McGregor book right now, but I’ll see if I can get it through my university’s interlibrary loan. Stroke-by-stroke diagrams would be very nice to have.
Thank you for the advice on Urdu, too, those who have given it. I’d planned to study Urdu eventually if I got anywhere with Hindi, but that’s a long way off yet, of course.
Hey, that’s pretty cool! Thank you. I’ll take your advice about starting from the top line, but that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for.
For each new writing system I’ve had to learn over the years, I’ve discovered that learning that reading “{character} = A” is fairly worthless for me. I’ve had to practice writing the new character while saying or listening to the sound it represents.
I haven’t actually looked at Teach Yourself Hindi, but I have Teach Yourself Gujarati from the same series, and it uses numbered arrows for stroke-by-stroke character formation. McGregor’s Outline of Hindi Grammar is the best for this: he shows several intermediate stages as you build up each character. Makes it all very transparent.
Wow, that’s really cool - all these people coming out of the woodwork learning to write Hindi. Anyway, I have no advice beyond what everyone else has said, but I suggest doing it just like when you were a kid - lines of each letter, and start out writing them big and clear. You can shrink them down later. I learned in my teens, and I still prefer lined paper and skipping a line between each line of script. And I can write pretty fast. My reading it back is still slower, though, as I have to comprehend each word before I can move on. My cousins send me books regularly, and from their books I’m about up to a sixth standard level on reading.
