Hindi 101

Yesterday we began studying Hindi in our schoolhouse here in Jaipur, the American Institute for Indian Studies. We had been assigned learning the alphabet (a series of 49 characters derived from Sanskrit) over the summer, and some of us did some of it...

Our first class was very overwhelming with lots of grammar drills from professors suited to intermediate Hindi students. After repeating "da, dha, pa, pha, na, nha, nya, nah) for two hours, I was ready to quit the language altogether. Luckily, we have a 3-day weekend to recuperate before our next class on Monday. I'm going to try and learn all of the letters and correlating sounds by next week so I can start building words. Yesterday I learned "mango."

For reference, here is the printed Hindi alphabet, including all 11 vowels, their matra marks, and consonants. Photo courtesy of Projectsource at Wikispace.