THE
TRIANGLE SOUTH ASIA CONSORTIUM
Before proceeding, you will need to have:
1. the free QuickTime movie player on your computer. If you do not have the QuickTime movie player, you can download it from the QuickTime site . Make sure to scroll down to the bottom of the page and fill in the required information. Now that you have QuickTime, watch these short introductory videos. Would you like to hear the introduction in Hindi or English? After watching the video, press the "Back" button to return to this page of instructions.
2. A Hindi (Devanagari) font.
A. If you are a Mac user, your OS-9 and above system program includes an optional Devanagari font installation. You can install the font easily from your OS-9 (or above) CD-ROM.
B. If you are a Windows user, you need to download a Unicode font that supports the Devanagari script. Microsoft offers a free download of its "Arial Unicode" font from this website.
Welcome to "A Door Into Hindi."
Note: This site will be under construction for the next two years. Please feel free to explore it as it evolves, but not all links and features will be activated until Spring 2002. Click here to view the overall plan of the course.
This Website contains four learning modules:
1. The Writing System
2. Lesson Dialogues
3. Glossaries and Vocabulary
4. Grammatical Explanations
Before you begin, you must become familiar with Devanagari, the Hindi writing system. Click here to read a description of Devanagari.
Also, in each of the first five lessons, each new word is linked to an animated spelling movie. When you click on a word to see its meaning, the glossary window will contain a pink spelling icon. Click on the spelling icon to see how the word is spelled.
2. Lesson Dialogues
Each Lesson contains a dialogue movie. All of the Lessons are listed by number in the navigation bar. When you click on a lesson, the movie associated with that lesson will download to your computer.
Begin each lesson by watching the movie. Click on the play button on the QuickTime player.
First, watch the movie without activating the script. Just listen to the dialogue. Then, if you so choose, you can activate the scriptwindow so that as you watch the movie, the script will appear in the frame below the movie.
At any point, you can pause the movie by clicking
on the pause button on the QuickTime player.
You can replay individual sentences by clicking on
the replay button in the script.
Or you can scan back or forward by using the sliding
bar on the QuickTime player.
Now let's look at the script. The script contains links to the remaining two modules.
3. Glossary and Vocabulary Module
New vocabulary words will be highlighted
in red.
Click on a word to see its meaning in English.
4. Grammatical Explanations
Whenever a new grammatical construction is introduced, you will see a green grammar button in the script. Click on the grammar button to see an explanation of the new construction.
The grammar explanations also contain cross references to more detailed explanations as contained in Rupert Snell's textbook " Teach Yourself Hindi."
This site also contains several Additional Learning Tools:
1. Glossary
2. Exercises
3. Quiz
1. You can view a list of all of the new vocabulary words for each lesson by clicking on the Glossary button.
From within the glossary window, you can click on the flashcards button to test yourself in your memorization of the vocabulary. The flashcards can be used in oral and/or written mode.
You can also click to access the entire glossary for all 24 lessons.
2. When you click on the Exercises button, you will get a set of exercises testing the grammar and vocabulary contained in the lesson. These may be either oral or written exercises. At this stage, Hindi text entry and voice recognition are not activated on this website. Thus if you want to submit your completed exercises to your teacher, you will need to write down your answers to the exercises by hand, or record your oral answers in a cassette or digital file.
Many questions have no "right" answer, but you can click the sample answer button to obtain a possible answer, according to which you can check if your answer was in the correct grammatical form.
Eventually, this site will generate a random set of exercises for you. This set will be different each time. You can keep on requesting exercise sets until you have mastered the material.
3. When you are ready, you can click the Quiz button to take a quiz based on the things you have learned in the lesson. The quiz may be either oral or written.
Now, let's proceed to the main page where you can
begin to learn Hindi
!