Please have a look at http://www.ispeakhindi.com.

I am an online tutor from Chennai, spent 30 years in Bihar. MY mother tongue is Tamil. I served a US NGO in India and abroad for 29 years.

Regards

suresh
91 09840643690

If you talk to people who are polyglots, most of them will tell you that the key to learning a language isn’t a program like Rosette Stone or hours of studying. Rather, it’s mostly about simply speaking the language–even if you know very little–and getting used to the feel of the language on your tongue. You can spend your entire life ‘studying’ a language, but never be able to use it well if you simply don’t start speaking it, as awkward and silly as you might sometimes feel. And trust me, I have felt truly silly many times, but if you look over the grammar rules and start verbally applying them in simple sentences, your skill level will increase really fast. I talk to myself a lot, which works really well, and of course, an understanding husband can be really gentle but helpful if offering corrections.

So my general advice is to add a few new words a day (As a linguist enthusiast, I’ve read that trying to do more than 20 a day is generally counter-productive), and also learn a new grammar structure/rule a day. Then talk to yourself, and try a few sentences with your husband in the new grammar structure, so that you become familiar with it. Spend a few minutes reviewing the next day, and then start the next chunk. It doesn’t even require an hour a day to this, and I think that this approach might work for you. If you learn a single grammar rule and some new words almost every day, that’s a lot of progress in a year!

I wish you the best of luck with everything.
(Oh, and as far as learning Devangari goes, I’ve successfully used an approach that I learned from my Japanese classes. Namely, when you learn new words, write them out several times (maybe on an index card), and see if you can read it tomorrow. If you force yourself to write in the new alphabet, even when it’s only copying things, the repetition of constantly seeing the letters, and then pronouncing them over the next few days until you can rapid read the word, will drill itself into your head. Plus, you’ll be learning the script as you add words to your vocab.)

1) Along with language also learn how to converse…
e.g. Indian people tend to get close while speaking ( by now u may have known). Same gender people may even touch ur hand or back while talking not the opposite gender ones.
-they listen rather than looking at ur face.
-they are loud and fast sometimes or many times or most times..
– tell them to slow down if u want to understand.

2)Watch hindi movies. play– pause…may sound stupid but will be helpfull.

3) And practice with coworkers..speak only in hindi with ur husband..

(btw I am at the receving end of all this at my place)

In my case, my husband’s family speaks a mishmash of Tamil and Telugu, so I’ve put off learning either on the grounds that I’d have to learn both to be conversant with them. And since their English is fantastic, I don’t really have to — but I’ll probably take a stab at Tamil at some point since that’s the predominant language where my in-laws live.

Can’t wait to read about your progress!

As far as the choosing of incentives goes – well, I think that the specific track I have chosen is the best for me, but we’ll see as time goes on. Figuring out the perfect incentive – not too strong, not too weak is something of an art. Consider this article, for instance, where a daycare imposed a fine on parents who were late to pick up their kids – and the number of late parents doubled! By making the whole process a simple monetary transaction the daycare removed the social “shame” factor of being one of those parents. A higher fine would have made lateness more costly – but it’s questionable whether a high enough monetary fine could have been implemented without creating a backlash. Tough to balance, like I said.
Regarding the rest of your comment… *rolls eyes*

I stumbled across your blog through a tweet you made about one of my blog posts (“If America is a melting-pot, then to me India is a thali…”) and am SO glad I did. You have so many great posts and resources on here, relevant to both my own family’s experience and my thirst for all things intercultural, that I’ve only had time to glimpse at it for the moment, but I’ll be back!

I used to teach ELD (aka ESL) and one of the things we would have the students do was keep one binder with all of their work, doing things like drawing pictures and labeling them. I started one for myself, and go figure, the words I remember, are ones I did some kind of drawing for as opposed to making vocab lists.

I actually found a bunch of little kid song videos on youtube that have the Tamil lyrics printed on the bottom. My goal is to retype them and translate them slowly over time.

There is a cool free program called Azhagi that lets me type in Tamil. It includes a lot of other languages in the unicode editor that are in “beta.” Hindi/Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi, Oriya, Nepali. Retyping things has helped me learn the written language pretty well.