हम क्या करेंगे/ham kyaa karenge?

[muckefuck]

So I'm working my way through McGregor again and I'm up to Chapter 5 (a.k.a. "Now Memorise Every Bloody Conjugation"). I think I'm chugging along okay, but I'm stuck on how to make this more interactive online. Suggestions? One idea I had was breathing a bit of life into learn_hindi. Perhaps we could take turns posting a "Word of the Day" similar to what I've tried to do here (simpler vocab, of course) and then each create sentences with it. Or post lines from our favourite songs and then pick them apart. Or both? Another possibility is Quizlet. I've been on the outs with them ever since they introduced advertising, but before then I learned a fair piece of Irish vocabulary with their resources. Also, there's a very active user who's already made several lists of useful Hindi words and phrases! Unfortunately, the glosses are in German, which is fine for me but probably not anyone else and it would be a fair bit of work to create English versions.

जो कुछ सोच रहे हो वह मुझसे बताइएगा/jo kuch soc rahe ho, vah mujhse bataaiegaa!

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I'd love to join in -- I'm quite fond of your suggestions -- the word of the day and the song lyrics in particular!!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You don't happen to know a good source for so-called "affective" word order in Hindi, do you? All the materials I've seen teach a fairly strict S-O-V word order, but ordinary song lyrics seem to follow anything but! I'm really curious what the difference is between cases like मेरा जूता है जापानी (song) and मेरा जूता जापानी है (default), for instance. Most basic works seem to think it's just too subtle to explain.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Sooo ... you're looking for something like this PDF?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Not really--this is a formal syntactic account (notice how it devolves into predicate logic before the end!) that is concerned only with permissible orderings, not the meaning of those various orderings. It tells me nothing concerning in what contexts I can expect, say, the subject to appear at the end or the object to intervene between the verb and auxiliary, only that such orderings are attested possibilities.

Still an interesting article, however!

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I'll let you know about my findings then -- sadly my books also assume S-O-V order as the norm ...

[wiped.livejournal.com]

i'd like doing a word of the day and lyric translations as well!

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Okay, I joined the learn_hindi community. I guess we can just start posting stuff when we feel like it?

I like the idea of translating song lyrics, though I'm nowhere near being able to really do it yet (maybe I'm misinterpreting, but my "Teach Yourself Hindi" book seems to be implying that I should pretty much learn the devenagari syllables before proceeding to anything else, so this is going to take a while ...) I could maybe just take one song and try to puzzle out (and post) a couple of lines a week, using a dictionary and winging it for now?

How do you type in devenagari in lj?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Normally, I would say watch a community's posts for a few weeks before posting yourself, but there hasn't been anything new in learn_hindi for months, so I figure whatever we decide to do with it is de facto what the group is about.

The intelligent way to type Devanagari here or anywhere would be to install an IME and learn to type it like I do English or German. This is what I do with Chinese or Korean, for instance. But because I'm lazy, my method for Indic has been hunt-and-peck with the Character Map followed by cutting-and-pasting. (None of the keyboard layouts make any kind of intuitive sense to me whereas the Character Map has the symbols in dictionary order.)