I have links to all my Hindi resources at my blog at http://whitehindu.blogspot.com/2010/02/hindi.html

Also, if you are still in the D.C. area, there is a fantastic Meetup.com group particularly for practicing speaking Hindi. I go every month. Their website is: http://www.meetup.com/hindigroup/

We don’t know any “older aunties” in the area – I can’t even think of anyone two or three connections away who would fit that description. :-/ DC is a very odd area, and all of our friends are young, and transplants to the area. However, it’ll be great to read articles that will give me good ideas for practicing with Aditya and my MIL (who is somewhat uncomfortable in English).

I hope you keep popping in to share tidbits – I’m sure a lot of people here besides myself would be interested to hear more about how the language learning went, and how it is raising three boys (I’d start with… tough! ).

Just a few quick thoughts after reading about your Hindi project…
I was where you are before I got married, and I wanted to learn Urdu
(my dh is from Pakistan and we’ve been married 8 years) ASAP for the
shaadi (I had the big shindig in Pakistan).

I had a lot of the same books you do…there were fewer teach yourself Urdu books back then, so I had to use lots of the Hindi ones. The spoken languages are pretty darn close and when I’m speaking Urdu with my Indian neighbors, they say I’m speaking Hindi I just leave out certain religion specific words that are Urdu-only and it works for all.

I wanted to recommend some language learning articles that can be found here: http://languageimpact.com/articles/learners_start.htm

To keep myself motivated I found that it sometimes helped me to read “meta articles” about actually learning other languages to give myself a motivational boost and to hear about others who had achieved it. The Thomson articles are chock full of neat ideas for ways that you can utilize native speakers that you have access to for boosting your language learning.

Urdu was the first time I was learning a language without a class/specific book/support system to keep me on track/etc. I had previously learned Spanish and German (studied in Hamburg for a semester in college, miss my Franzbroetchen and Bakerei!), but never
gone out on my own and really I found that staying motivated is more than half the battle!

Finally, I would recommend that you find some older aunties to practice Hindi with if at all possible. The relatives that I had to mostly impress/talk with during my wedding were the slightly older aunties who had no English, so while still in the US I found older ladies at the mosque (where I went hunting for native Urdu speakers and practiced my Urdu with them. They were often monolingual Urdu speakers, or multilingual in other languages but often not English, so it was often not possible for me to get shy or be lazy and lapse into English. I also got to practice the aap forms that I would need to talk to older relatives, and got to hear women’s speech, which is often quite different from men’s, grammar-wise and in other ways.

The shaadi went well and I became quite fluent in Urdu and spoke with my first-born son in it exclusively for his early years of life. (Now I’ve got three boys and it gets tricky to keep up the minority language once the English from the environment starts overtaking the Urdu)… So I’ve been there and done it and you can too!!!!!!! Best of luck!

I used to practice my reading in the cab on the way home from work – reading all the Hindi on the signs of the Mahihalpur main road.

I wish that Livemocha had actual Bengali courses !!! I am doing the intermediate Hindi courses and trying to correspond via mail with a girl who knows Bengali. I think I am going to ask for some of those Baby Hindustani books for Christmas… am learning my Bengali from Sahaj Path and Borno Paricay, which are obviously not very modern :\

I get what you mean about the rules. Now I’m learning things like, “The form you use when it’s possible something will become something else.” OK…I don’t have to use that all that much. I can just slap a “maybe” word in front of the verb I use the “change” form with to make myself understood. So it’s hard to see the use. Reading a lot helps, because it comes up and I sit there thinking, “I know this form. What the hell…” until it comes to me or I break down and look it up in a book.

Mother speaks English limited to “good morning” and the like. She’s memorized a few phrases and it always throws me when she uses them. Sister understands more than she can speak and Good Man says her English and my Korean are “same same.” But we almost always communicate in Korean–or at least I try to communicate in Korean first, and then repeat what I said in English if I feel like I’m really being unclear. She’s shy (says Good Man).

Even if she weren’t, I feel like it’s MY responsibility to learn Korean to communicate with his family, so that’s where we turn to first. Father speaks English fluently, but not being able to speak to Mother and Sister as fluently as I’d like, relying on Good Man or Father to interpret adds a layer of distance between us. I don’t like it. Sister’s started blogging, which is fun. I WANT to read her entries, so it’s good Korean practice for me.

Finally, Lang-8. I’d say whenever you’re writing stuff that isn’t just purely memorized is the time to start using it. But I LOVE Lang-8, so I’m biased. I write something in Korean and within a half an hour it’s corrected. It’s wonderful.

There’s no way I can take a strict vow of Hindi – while I have plenty of Indian coworkers, I don’t think they know much Hindi vocabulary for energy & power-related things – and I KNOW I don’t!

You are definitely putting my Nepali language learning to shame, but its a great inspiration to know you are out there working on this as well… I’ll try to pick up the pace, and perhaps make my own detailed learning plan as well. Its good to have some competition For now I’m posting updates on the “Nepali” section of my blog, but I haven’t even really updated that. I’ll get on top of it soon, I promise

One thing that is really helping me is the fact that I have weekly “meetings” set up with my friend AS. I might not necessarily study much before the meeting, but she puts me on the spot and makes me “perform” and speak even if I hum and haa about it. I’m actually surprised at home much I am saying these days, and I’m happy that she is strict. I actually translated (spoke out loud) a pumpkin bread recipe into Nepali on Monday. How cool is that?

For me, right now the focus is speaking. I studied devanagri when I studied Hindi in India, so I feel relatively comfortable with most of the script, but for some reason, when I write out the words in devanagri I find it really hard to memorize them and their conjugations. When I took a language class in Nepal over the summer I requested that we write everything in English transliteration so that I could move faster with grammar and vocabulary. I’m still using this tactic for now, so I can learn to speak more quickly and once I have a solid knowledge of words and sentence structure I can back tract for script.

I understand that devanagri makes a lot of sense because it is so phonetic, but at the same time I remember how I learned French. I started out with a horrible French accent (I wince when I think back at how I used to sound), but once I had it down, it was easier to transition over. So right now I don’t mind if I’m not sounding perfect.

Likewise, when studying Swahili and Hindi I took a strict “vow of ___” this is easier done when living in the country where it is spoken, and not having an obligation to speak at work, but it helped me immensely. Basically I took two weeks, and said I wasn’t allowed to speak anything but Swahili or Hindi (depending on the country I was in) except for one English usage per day. If I needed to use it in a class, or if I wanted to save it to tell a long, involved story over dinner, so be it, but the rest of the day was strictly that other language or silence. It was a huge struggle, especially in India, since my Hindi was so poor, but I’m kind of stubborn. I’d string together whole paragraphs of half broken Hindi and unconjugated verbs to get my point across, and I learned so much… dictionary at my side. I’ve been too chicken to make a “vow of Nepali” but maybe sometime… I’ll get there.

Another thing I used to do to practice familiarizing myself with devanagri is I used to write long letters in English using devanagri script. It was like a secret code, and helped me practice using it for sounds and writing it out. I think P found it a bit weird, but I enjoyed it.

Anyway… keep up the good work!! I’m rooting for you!

I remember being in that irritating middle stage that you describe when learning German as well. In German, the grammar starts hard & gets easier as time goes by, but there’s a lot of little quirks that you need to learn. I remember reading the last third of my grammar book and being really frustrated because it felt like I was just slopping on a rule here & there to my mental structure of the language. The earlier rules had been more key in learning the structure (and more difficult), but I felt like I was getting somewhere at the time, and it was easier to keep the rules in mind. You know you’re almost there, though, when you start thinking in the target language.

I remember you mentioning that your husband’s mother doesn’t speak English at all; does his sister speak any English? Or is it going to be all Korean, all day?

Also, I remember you mentioning Lang-8 before. When do you think it would be useful to incorporate it into the set of language learning tools? (I’ll see about using WordChamp once I’m comfortable writing out the script – at the moment, it’s good for me to practice my handwriting, since handwritten characters don’t look identical to printed ones.)