If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.
The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:
The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]
They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.
If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.
The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:
The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.
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