If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.

The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:

The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]

They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.

If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.

The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:

The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.

Related Posts: Mass literacy can be fun

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Intellectual$ingh3141592: Good afternoon, Sudo-Ji.

SudoSecularSAsian: Greetings, my good fellow. How goes it? I trust all is well on your end?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: Today I am, I must confess, a tad jealous of our colleague over at MIT.

SudoSecularSAsian: Please elaborate, if you would be so kind. I am, as they say, all “ears” — though what precisely that means in the context of Internet Messaging is an open question.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: It appears that Professor Deb Roy, of MIT’s Cognitive Machines Group, is pursuing a gargantuan project oriented to the study of language acquisition in human infants. What is most impressive is, he is using his own son as the source of the data!

SudoSecularSAsian: His partner must be outraged — I know my own spouse places strict rules on the degree to which I can allow my academic projects to interfere with our personal lives. In my occasional forays into the world of “weblogs” — with which you are well-acquainted — I have been asked to delineate a fairly sharp line between matters of public discussion and our own private affairs.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I completely understand. However, in this case, the baby’s name is being shielded from participants in the study (he is merely referred to as “Dwayne,” after a character in a popular Ridley Scott film). Moreover, Roy’s partner, the eminent speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Northwestern), is apparently fully on board with the project.

SudoSecularSAsian: Singh-saab, I just checked the link you forwarded and I have to ask you… Do you really think this type of grandiose, pie-in-the-sky study is really a worthwhile usage of resources? Is it really likely that the scattered attempted phonemes of an infant in the earliest stages of language acquisition will offer significant new data? Isn’t it possible — or I daresay, probable, given Chomsky’s universal grammar — that the real root of language is to be found not in the “babble” of a child attempting to mimic adult sounds but in the neural-cognitive framework on which the linguistic capacity is built?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I must concede I am not qualified to respond to your conjectures, though I should perhaps remind you that Chomsky’s thesis has been widely discredited in the field of linguistics. However, one thing you say does ring true — the sheer expenditure of electricity required to support the massive arrays of hard disks (1.4 petabytes!) is deeply irresponsible in this era of imminent global warming. Did you have the chance to peruse the latest tidbit in the Times about the responsibility the wealthier countries have to the global south?

SudoSecularSAsian: Yes, and it’s quite distressing. I’m afraid our beloved South Asia may bear the brunt of the developed world’s resource profligacy. The Himalayan glaciers are in trouble, and a “brown cloud” of pollutants is steadily building up over the Indian Ocean, with results on the climate-scenario that are extremely difficult to foretell, though the consequences are unlikely to be pleasant.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: :-(. (Please forgive the emoticon — it’s a childish expedient, but sometimes an eloquent one.) Well, I must be off, I’m afraid.

SudoSecularSAsian: 😉 All is forgiven. This is the brave new world of lexico-typographical expressivity! Au revoir! Continue reading →