Learning Hindi Day 1 - A Quick Experiment

So last night I was at a friend's place, enjoying festivities for the New Year and playing Settlers of Catan. Yeah, we know how to party.  Seriously though, it was fun.  I like strategy games.  Putting your settlement on a spot that maximizes brick and wood...

...I digress...

Today was also the first day of Project Hindi, and I decided to perform a quick experiment.  Before I get into that, let me explain something about Hindi to those of you who don't know anything about the language.  Of course, I just started learning it a scant seven hours ago, so I am in no way an expert or anything.myself.

Hindi has an alphabet where you read it just as it's written.  It's a WYRIWYG language (What You Read Is What You Get), unlike English or German.  Russian and Korean are spoken as they are written.  That's good because it just plain makes sense.  However, unlike Korean and Russian, there are a LOT of symbols in the alphabet, 52 to be exact.  The vowels are written differently at the beginning of the word rather than inside the word itself (a little bit like Korean), and there are a LOT of sounds that are different from English.  The script is also...well...take a look:

This might get complicated

So, some of you may be asking "Why is he learning to write the language on the first day?  Why not just learn to speak it and move onto writing later?  Wouldn't that be easier?"  Truth be told, that might be one way of going about it, and I'm sure some people do that method, but I don't.  I always start with learning the writing system, for a couple reasons:

1. Writing helps you get the sound system down.  You need to know what sounds there are in the language so you can pinpoint which ones you're going to have to practice, i.e. which sounds don't exist in the English language.  
2. Writing helps you learn new words and practice them.  I know about five words of Hindi so far: spoon, door, day, January, and tomato.  I know, that's random, but practicing words helped me learn them.
3. When speaking, it's helpful to be able to visualize the sentence as you're saying it.  When I speak German for instance, I see the sentence in my head (not super clear but basically) and it helps me remembering which word goes where so that I, you know, make sense.

Okay, so my first experiment was a little writing quiz.  Last night at about 4 a.m. or so, I started practicing 10 Devanagari letters.  I wanted to see how much of it I'd remember by morning and how much of the sound I would remember.  I found this website earlier, Hindi Script Tutor, which is a pretty decent resource.  It shows you stroke order, gives you example words and pronunciation, and gives quick tutorials on letter placement.  When I woke up this morning, I wrote down all the letters I could remember without any aids:

I got 8/10.  Not bad.  Here's what it looked like:

 If you speak Hindi and can read and write, would love some comments on my handwriting.

Actually I'm finding that writing Hindi is a lot of fun.  There are a lot of squiggles and lines in the middle, and then you write this big long bar atop of the squiggles to make letters and words.  One of my old students told me that it's such a curly language because Indian people used to write on leaves, and straight lines make it easier to rip the leaf rather than curves.  I have no idea if that's true or not, but it would be a cool fact if it were true. 

Today I'm focusing on learning to write, and we'll see how long it takes me to get the alphabet down.  Wish me luck!