Hindi Made Easy

View other editions of Hindi Made Easy.
View books by J.S. Nagra, S.K. Nagra.
View books in the GCSE Series.

Appears well written - Rated
I found it very difficult to grasp Hindi. But this book is great: it really shows you how to do those fancy shapes.

simple but solid introduction - Rated
This is an incredibly slim and quite basic introduction to the study in Hindi. It doesn't cover a lot of ground, but it is very inexpensive and I think potentially very useful for younger learners (such as teenagers, for whom the book is written), and even adults who are not experienced in studying other languages.

The book includes a section on vowels, telling you how to pronounce them and showing you the full character in the Hindi script. These are not too difficult so the section is quite short. It then includes a section on consonants and on consonant pronunciation. Hindi consonants are much more difficult for native English speakers, since there are many sounds that we don't have in English. Fortunately this section includes diagrams of the vocal tract (i.e. the mouth and tongue) to show you exactly what to do with your tongue so you can make these crazy sounds! This quite good. Then it jumps right into vocabulary: there are several words per page, each introducing a letter of the alphabet and including a picture, the English meaning, the word in the Hindi script, and the Hindi pronunciation in the (modified) Roman script (i.e. with the same letters as English). This is the first third of the book.

Then the book gets a bit more difficult, as it gets into detail about how to write Hindi. Many more words are introduced, and then some short reading passages are included. This part of the book is organised by sound. Most of these are vowel sounds, because vowels are written differently when they are at the start of the words than when they are elsewhere, so they can be difficult to learn to write and read. At the end of the book are a few more short reading passages and finally a glossary containing the words used in the book.

In short, this is a good introduction to Hindi, but it probably would be too simple for experienced language learners. But if you are not ready for something serious like the Teach Yourself Hindi book, or if you aren't sure if you want to invest that kind of money yet, this is a great way to get a feel for learning Hindi.