1 week is complete!

So this is episode 1 of my weekly video blog where I'll recap what I've done the previous week and just share whatever insights I've had with language learning.  I'll have a lot to talk about and 52 episodes to do it in!  What kinds of things do you guys want to see in these videos?  Would you like to learn Hindi along with me?  Talk about the culture?  Just leave some comments and some love!

Project Hindi - Day 3

My enthusiasm is still going strong, thankfully, and I'm making real progress with the language overall.  What I've found is that my knowledge of other languages is seriously helping me with learning Hindi.  No really.  I thought it would be an island onto itself.  Skeptical?  Here, I'll prove it to you.  

Believe it or not, Hindi grammar is a LOT like Japanese.  From what I've been able to learn, in Hindi, verbs come at the end of the sentence and they have post-positions!

Postpo-huh?

In English we have prepositions, right?  The book is IN the room.  The kids are climbing UP the wall.  You spin me RIGHT ROUND baby RIGHT ROUND.  We also have conjunctions, like and, but, or, etc.  When we put them in the sentence, we put them before the thing they're modifying, hence the word PRE-position. 

In Hindi and Japanese (and Korean, but don't tell them I said that) the preposition comes after the word it modifies.  Compare the three languages:

English : The book is on the table.

Hindi: Book table on there is.

Japanese: As for book, table on there is.

You'll also notice "is" goes all the way to the end of the sentence.  I had no problem getting these grammar points, which was kind of cool!

Ah the Taegukki, the flag of South Korea!  Aside from the whole grammar spiel, Hindi and Korean have some common themes when it comes to pronunciation!  Again, who'd huv thunk it?  Korean and Hindi both have a whole slew of "Aspirated Consonants."  Hindi has more, but the Koreans are no slouches.

Not again, Jonathan.  What's with all the grammar junk?

Well, you're not going to get very far in a language if you can't put a sentence together and don't know how to pronounce things so other people understand you. 

Aspirated means that it's got some air to it.  Confused?  Okay, try something out for me.  Say this out loud to yourself:

Tap testers say wet water is better.

Say it a couple more times.  All of those "t"s in English are the same.  In Hindi and Korean, they're not.  The "T"s in "Tap Testers" is an aspirated T.  Hold your hand up to your mouth when you say "Tap Testers" and you'll notice a burst of air.  Now say "wet water."  Nothing.  The "tt"s in better?  Kind of sounds like a "d" doesn't it?  

Now try to say the whole sentence with aspirated "t"s.  It'll sound funny, but the meaning is still the same.  English speakers don't care about aspirated consonants vs. not.  In Hindi and Korean, the meaning would change entirely if you use an aspirated "t" vs. a non-aspirated "t."  

This is NO SMALL THING.  When I was teaching in Korea, I tried saying I had 18 students.  The word in Korean for eighteen is sheep-pal.  Sheep means "10" and bal means "8."  I mispronounced it badly and I used an aspirated "p" instead of a hard p. 

Instead of saying "I have eighteen students" I ended up saying "I have @#$@#$ing students."

Yeah, that raised some eyebrows.

I did some reading and found out that Hindi is an "Indo-European Language."  Linguists basically think that Europeans, Persians, and people living in the northern part of India all spoke one language, and  then the language split off as people migrated.  I looked up the language family Hindi was in because when I started learning words, I saw WAY too many similarities with Spanish, German, Greek, English, etc.  Apparently, other linguists way back when agreed with me and they did the whole research thing to figure out that most of the worlds major languages are related to each other.  For example, when I was counting in Hindi I was like.

"Ok.  Ek, do, teen, chaar, paanc, chah, saat, aat, nau, das.  Wait a sec, "teen" sounds just like "three" in English, "Aat" sounds like "Acht" in German, Nau sounds like the Greek prefix as in "Nonagon," "Saat" sounds like "Sept" in French, and "das" sounds like "Diez" in Spanish. 

Way too much deja vu in just ten words.

So far, the project is going as well as it can.  My books have yet to come in (thanks Amazon!) so I'll just have to wait to really get into it and still continue my self study. 

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!

T-Minus Two Days!

Hi all and welcome to the 1 Year Language Challenge: Project Hindi!

Wheel of Dharma turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn.

I know, initially it was going to be Arabic.  I changed my mind afterwards because I've always wanted to learn Hindi.  I walked into an Indian restaurant, starting watching some Indian television, and something about the culture said I'd like it.  In general I like Indian culture and Hindi was always going to be my first choice, so I switched.  After this year, I'll be able to order at any Indian restaurant and watch Bollywood to my heart's content, YEEHA!.

For those of you who do no know, the "1 Year Language Challenge" is where I spend 365 days learning a new language from scratch.  I start on January 1st, 2014 and end on December 31st at midnight.  After a year, I'll see how far I've come.  The rules were like this:

1. The new language could not be too similar to a language I've already studied.  Therefore, no Polish, Dutch, Cantonese, Italian, etc.

2. It had to be a living language that a large amount of speakers spoke natively.  So no dead languages like Latin or Sanskrit or languages that only two people in the world speak, but won't, because they've been feuding (true story!)

3.It had to be fairly usable after I learned it, so that I could possibly use it.  So far, my language skills have kind of/sort of netted me jobs I may not have otherwise got. 

I'm a bit of a polyglot.  With various levels of fluency, I speak Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, French, Russian, and German.  My native language is English.  Hindi will be my 9th language.   I have a natural talent for language learning, so I've been wanting to do this for quite some time.

Soon the secrets of Hindi will be all mine! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

This project is part silliness and part science.  A lot of what I do to learn languages is weird and I'm a little bit on pins and needles at the thought of sharing it with others.  Oh well, I've done embarrassing things before.  I want to figure out what my brain does to learn languages.  What strategies do I use to pick up new words?  What methods work best to assimilate grammar?  Testing myself should prove enlightening, and I'll start to understand what my brain does as instinct.  Also I'll be closer to my lifelong goal of the ten language mark. 

All of my Hindi books are coming in from Amazon hopefully by the first, and one of my former students sent me a Youtube channel with non-stop Hindi music.  I've got some websites that teach basic Hindi, so I'm

I've been thinking about the format for the blog.  What kinds of things do you guys want to see?  Cultural things?  Do you actually want to know the exact process I use to pick up words?  Do you want me to upload examples of my progress?  Video?  I'll check in at least weekly.  I still have a full time job and I'm starting a new business, so this will probably take all of my spare time outside of those two things.  Let me hear your thoughts!