Monday, May 21, 2007

Did you forget to feed the cat again?

So the book's been teaching me about invariable adjectives and adjectives with masculine/feminine endings, and ... Well, check out this sentence demonstrating an invariable adjective:

क्या बिल्ली जिन्दा है?

Yes, that means "Is the cat alive?" I'm not sure whether I should be amused or worried ... In any case, it's brought back memories of my high school German teacher, who taught us prepositions by using examples like, "The fork is on the roof. Is your sister under the chair? Who put the dog in the attic? My shoes are not in the bathtub."

Also, I can now count up to 20! I learnt to count up to 5 from the movies, then up to 13 from KBC, so I'm good with those, but I do need to practice 14 to 20 some more.
Next up: tu vs. tum vs. aap, and then Unit 3!

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Eat my dust, Unit 1!

Yesss! I just finished the last exercise in Unit 1 - answering questions like वह हिन्दुस्तानी है? वह शादी-शुदा है? वह सुखी है? वह अमरीकन है? * about the three people introduced at the beginning of the exercise. Nothing particularly fascinating to report there, except that two of the people were called Suresh Khanna and Vinod Kumar, which I kept unintentionally combining into Vinod Khanna ...
There were so many new words in Unit 1 that I decided to keep my own glossary (but really I just wanted an excuse to use my glitter pens).





Next up: Unit 2 with numbers, genders and levels of formality! Then I might finally be able to come up with my own sentences, rather than just translating the ones in the book. I see some exciting times ahead!


* Is (s)he Indian? Is (s)he married? Is (s)he happy? Is (s)he American?

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

वह खूबसूरत आदमी कौन था?*

This is not only a very good question to know (very practical when you are out stalking Bollywood's खूबसूरत आदमी ** in the dark) but also the title of chapter 4, which is the last chapter I remember from the Hindi class I took a while ago. For a while now I haven't been a good girl and wasn't studying Hindi very diligently but now seems like a good time to start again.

So, in the time honoured tradition, I present my high-tech equipment:

A few books ...




A stack of index cards with lots of grammar most of which I don't actually remember ...




And a fabulous pad with coloured paper, some of my writing - and lots of grammar that I actually sort of remember ...



And of course I need my trusty iPod to listen to the Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies Podcast which has taught me lots of useful phrases to use when the खूबसूरत आदमी I'm stalking turns out to be Johnny Lever ...

By the way -the
़खूबसूरत आदमी in chapter 4 is called Suhas and Sangeeta would like you to know one thing: vah sirf mera dost hai!

*Vah khubsurat aadmi kaun tha? - Who is this handsome man?

**Is that the proper plural? खूबसूरत is an invariable adjective, isn't it?

A big thank you to Carla for the spelling advice!

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

sign, sign everywhere a sign

IMG_1443.JPG
I've started going through some of my photos from my trip to India last summer, trying to work through the Devanagari, and Trivial Matters helped me with this one. That was a real labor of love on his part, too; it took me at least half an hour, with TM saying "Now what do you think could come after LA?". It's amazing to me how thrown I am by fonts that are different from those in my book. If you want to reenact the painful process, click on the photo to go to the flickr page, where I put the answers and some notes on the bits I found hardest.