About Darvazah [Video Intro]

Darvazah: A Door Into Urdu is an interactive, multimedia Elementary Urdu learning website. It is designed to provide the equivalent of one full year of university-level language instruction. We encourage you to explore the site and try out the various lessons and learning resources. We sincerely hope that you will be able to learn basic spoken and written Urdu by working through the learning materials provided here. Darvazah also incorporates oral proficiency guidelines developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL).

If you are a teacher of Urdu, you are permitted to use the materials in this site in your Urdu classes with proper attribution. Darvazah is copyright by Afroz Taj and the United States Department of Education. We will also be glad to share with you the source code and page templates if you wish to develop similar materials of your own.

This project was funded by a major grant from the United States Department of Education under the International Research and Studies (IRS) grant program. The IRS program is administered by the International Education Programs Service division.

According to the terms of this grant, the entire Darvazah site is available to anyone in the world at no charge. There is neither password nor registration required for this site. We do ask that you send us your comments and suggestions. From the beginning, Darvazah has been a collaborative project and your feedback is welcome.

Darvazah consists of twenty-four video-based lessons with accompanying scrolling texts, grammar notes, communication and culture notes, vocabularies, "video-professors", an Urdu alphabet module, exercises and quizzes, and other learning resources. The lesson movies were filmed in India, Pakistan, and the United States over the past ten years. Each film is a self-contained story introducing various situations, cultural concepts, modes of communication, grammatical structures, and vocabulary words.

To some extent Darvazah is still a work in progress. We will continue to add new features and make corrections in response to suggestions and comments from learners and teachers of Urdu.

In order to use all of the features of Darvazah, you will need to configure your computer properly. The Before You Begin section contains detailed instructions on how to do this.

Darvazah has a sister site: A Door Into Hindi for those wishing to learn Hindi. Unlike many currently available textbooks, we have not attempted to differentiate between "Hindi" and "Urdu" linguistic contexts. Hindi and Urdu are the same language in their day-to-day spoken forms (although they use different alphabets). Occasional vocabulary words may appear strange when used in the "wrong" context (e.g. "namaste" in Pakistan), but we believe that the alternative, an attempted segregation of Hindi and Urdu, would be misleading and detrimental to our learners’ objectives.

We would like to thank the following individuals and institutions for their suggestions, advice, guidance, hard work, and/or moral support throughout this project: Tej Bhatia, Frances Pritchett, Daisy Rockwell, Rupert Snell, Shamsur Rahman Farooqi, Sean Pue, Arfaeen Iqbal, Abdul Hameed, Khawar, Grace Clark and the USEFP staff, Stephen Pouos and the South Asia Language Resource Center, Nilakshi Phukan, Claire Lampe, Chandra Mohan, Sandeep Hattangady, Qaiser Abbas, Amy Wilson, Samuel Eisen, Edward McDermott, Christine Corey, Gang Yue, Ruth Gross, Jan Bardsley, Lori Harris, Linda Zhang, Amanda Tueting, Paula Cherry, Missy Seaton, Tony Burgin, Tony Stewart, Hal Levin, Pamela Lothspeich, Shaheen Parveen, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University, the U.S. Department of Education, Marriala Consultants, the Center for Research on Urdu Language Processing, and the NC Center for South Asia Studies.

For more information about this site, feel free to contact us at:

Afroz Taj
taj@unc.edu

John Caldwell
caldwell@unity.ncsu.edu