Read That Sign! round 3

The more Hindi I learn, the more I see in my photos from India (summer 2006). Here's a detail from a picture of a street in Agra. I'm proud to say I got this one right away. If you click on the photo, you'll be taken to the original, full photo, where I put the transliteration and some notes. You'll also see what was really the subject of the photo....

Pratap isn't the only one who writes postcards.

I got a postcard from my friend Aditya in Mumbai!


After 40 minutes, I had written out and looked up every word I could - and then had to turn to a friend for help reading and/or getting the meaning of the others. I need more patience - I get so frustrated when I can't read. But on the other hand, probably getting a taste of what iliteracy is like is a very useful thing.

The really cool part of this - other than getting a postcard from a foreign country, yay! - was that once someone told me what the words were, I could see how they knew. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see it. Maybe that's dumb, but it feels like an improvement over _not_ being able to see it, at least. I did know quite a few words and was able to look up several more - v satisfying as well.

The transliteration is on the photo's Flickr page (with line breaks as they appear on the postcard), with much help from the glossary at the back of Snell and from Filmi Geek.

Oh! And the picture!

lyrics in Devanagari

I've run across Navin Kabra's Archive of Hindi Movie Songs site many times and never explored it. But today I finally poked around and discovered that the site has a ton of songs written out in Devanagari - and indexed in seven ways (including type of song - qawwalis, birthday, rain, etc.), which makes my inner library really happy. In honor of my recently watching Teesri Manzil, maybe I'll try to read O Haseenaa Zulfonwaalee during my lunch hour.