Product Description

Bestselling language courses now with audio CDs!

From Danish to Spanish, Swahili to Brazilian Portuguese, the languages of the world are brought within the reach of any beginning student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Language Courses at their own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. These complete courses are based on the very latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including:

• Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
• Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
• Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
• Practical vocabulary
• Regular and irregular verb tables
• Plenty of practice exercises and answers
• Bilingual glossary

The new editions also feature:

• Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
• Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
• Website suggestions to take language study further

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #96780 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD

About the Author

Rupert Snell

teaches Hindi at the School of Oreiental and African Studies, University of London.

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Customer Reviews

It's better than nothing, I guess
I find I can slog my way through this book using my training as a linguist and a student of several other languages, but I can't imagine a regular joe getting much out of it.

The Devanagari text is rendered in a tiny typeface, and no instruction is given on how to write the letters; after finding some web sites that show this, I discovered I was doing it all wrong. The writing system is also just dumped all at the beginning of the book, rather than being introduced gradually throughout the lessons (and a writing system this complex needs to be introduced gradually). Some glyhps that show up later aren't even in the beginning section on the writing system.

The material is poorly organized, in that school of thought that believes putting the vocabulary & grammatical notes AFTER the text that uses them is a good thing. In real life conersation you hear things you don't know, but you can ask the speaker as soon as they've said it; not so with a book, where it's merely annoying to come across words & constructions that you know could have been introduced beforehand. I quickly took to reading each section of the book backwards.

Vocabularies are not organized in any conceptual way that would aid learning (opposite or similar pairs or groups, sequences, and the like). Some people have the initiative to redo word lists in their own notebooks, but I don't see why a pedagogical book can't take a little trouble to be more functional as a reference as well.

The end glossaries are not symmetrical--although you can look up some (not all!) Hindi words for numbers and get their English translations, you can't find any number in the English-to-Hindi section, for example (they're hidden in an appendix elsewhere in the book).

The early recorded dialogues are TERRIBLE; stress and intonation are obviously wrong, the actors seemingly talking 'slow and loud' for the benefit of the beginning student. It doesn't help. I've taken to buying Bollywood DVDs for my dialogue needs and just trying to pick out words & phrases I've learned so I can be sure I'm hearing authentic pronunciation.

If you want to learn Hindi, there aren't a lot of books out there, especially packaged with audio material. You'll be able to work out the language using this book, but it's going to be a lot more work than it should have to be.

A Good SECOND Hindi Text
Before you read the bad reviews of this book, please be aware that it is recommended to follow Snell's brilliant Teach Yourself BEGINNER'S Hindi. This introductory book and audio set (978-0071424370) goes very slowly, and it has been quite useful to me in preparation for using Teach Yourself Hindi.

Very Disappointing
There are better Hindi Book / CD combos out there. I ordered this one because I was going to India and I am very disappointed. The course was not organized well and very boring.

Don't bother wasting your time and money on this. Find a different product.