BEFORE YOU BEGIN

Afroz Taj
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599
taj@unc.edu

Before proceeding, you will need to have:

A Hindi (Devanagari) font. 

MAC: If you are a Mac user, the OS-9 system program includes an optional Devanagari font installation. You can install the font easily from your OS-9 CD-ROM. Unfortunately they have not worked out all the bugs with the Devanagari fonts in OS-X. If you use OS-X, you may need to switch back to "Classic" to view this program correctly.

WINDOWS: If you are a Windows XP user, your browser already has Hindi installed. You may need to activate it by going to "Internet Options" under the MS Explorer "Tools" menu. If you are using an earlier version of Windows, you need to download a Unicode font that supports the Devanagari script. You can download a Unicode font called RaghuHindi. Once you have downloaded the font, you must install it in your "Fonts" folder under the "Control Panel." Restart Explorer once you have installed the font and then go to "Internet Options" under the MS Explorer "Tools" menu. Add "Hindi" under the languages menu, and then make sure the RaghuHindi font is displayed under the fonts menu.

After you have installed or activated the Hindi fonts, please open this page to check whether the operating system and browser combination on your computer is displaying the Hindi font properly.


नमस्ते !

My name is Afroz Taj.

Welcome to "A Door Into Hindi."

Note: This site is still under construction. Please feel free to explore it as it evolves, but not all links and features have been activated yet. 

This Website contains several learning modules:

1. The Writing System
2. Lesson Dialogues (24 lessons)
3. Glossaries and Vocabulary
4. Grammatical Explanations
5. Exercises and Tests
6. Additional Resources



1. The Writing System

Before you begin, you must become familiar with Devanagari, the Hindi writing system. 

Also, in each of the first five lessons, each new word is linked to an animated spelling movie. Click on the word 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.

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 modules.

3. Glossary and Vocabulary Module

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 !
 

 

 


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