Introduction to Hindi Grammar

I taught myself Hindi from this book, so I have a special place in my heart for this particular book. However, bias aside, there are several reasons I feel this book is the best book to learn Hindi grammar. First, however , this book is not going to teach you how to read the Hindi script, and you MUST know the Hindi script to use this book. (You should learn the Hindi script anyway primarily because Hindi consonants are worlds away from the consonants of most other languages and you need a way to easily represent 6 different d sounds and four different t sounds without getting confused or mistakenly saying what the closest sound is in your mother tongue.) To learn the script , I recommend Snell's "Beginners Hindi Script, " which is what I used to sort through the madness . Secondly, this is not the world's complete grammar guide to Hindi. It is basic grammar. The advanced version covers most of the rest you need to know, but there is no book that teaches all aspects of Hindi grammar. Every book seems to have one or two aspects everyone else left out, which is why I have ten plus Hindi books in my library. That being said, the main positive of this book is simplicity and organization. It uses minimal jargon. The information is not crammed together like people on a packed train, as is often the case with many Hindi language books, and the Teach Yourself Hindi books in particular. The other shortfall in the Teach Yourself book is it is hard to use as a reference; everything is scattered throughout, as it seems to be primarily for class room use. Also, this book is written by a native speaker used to instructing foreigners. This is a plus, as I feel certain language insights come more easily to native speakers. Finally, from the beginning, Mrs. Jain focuses on colloquial pronunciation. This in particular is a terrible shortfall of Rupert Snell, who seems to be a promoter of book-Hindi, formal pronunciation. But, let's be real, if you are interested in Hindi, you are more than likely interested in colloquial speech ; you either know Indian people or you like Bollywood. In both situations saying, ve and vehe, yah and vah may get you laughed at behind your back, and/or not understand why the people on TV are not saying what you learned. This is a fabulous primer in basic grammar that does not try to drown you with information. It it's simple and user friendly, once you learn Hindi script.

This a great resource to use in conjunction with other sources. I am a linguist and so I like to use it in conjunction with an actual linguistic descriptive grammar - the info in here is not detailed enough for my purposes. For my Hindi teacher, however, who has no linguistic background, this book is absolutely perfect. Lots of great information, many good examples and practice exercises, and it gives her a good introduction to linguistic concepts without getting so complicated that it's over her head. Wonderful!

I received this book without an audio CD, so I can't comment on its effectiveness. I can say that if you don't have the CD, you had best be quite comfortable with reading Devanagari script in order to make best use of the book. You don't need to be anything like an expert or a fluent or fast reader, but you'll need to have a certain amount of confidence. That aside, the book has excellent content, presented in a lucid and serviceable manner (good enough for me to buy the other two books by this author). While it's not as beginner-friendly as my favorite "Complete Hindi" it's more conceptually advanced and more complete, so the two exist side-by-side quite nicely. The only real drawback is that the presentation of concepts could have been better organized. While the book progresses in a normal and reasonable manner, looking things up--- in other words using the book as a reference--- can be difficult, or at least something of a chore. So I'll give the book 4 stars. It's clear and lucid, quite complete for a beginning book, but lacks some structure.

I am studying Hindi at my university, taught by a visiting Fulbright scholar. She was expecting to teach 'heritage' students, and was therefore unprepaired for the 4 non-heritage students who registered for her class. No curriculum, no texts. She very successfully taught us to read and write Devanagari script, but we were all struggling with how to learn grammer and with beginning to speak with understanding. I was so relieved to find Usha Jain's book. It makes sense! And it is so well laid out for the beginning Hindi student. I recommend it highly, and I look forward to future texts from this very gifted teacher.

This is an excellent book for beginners like me. The exercises are easy to follow and learn from. It's giving me a much better understanding of the very basics of Hindi. Don't expect this to teach you everything about Hindi as it's only basic grammar.

This is a great book to start learning Hindi. But the Audio CD it comes with does not work. It has just one track and it does not play. I tried it on two different CD players and in both it comes out blank. I am not even sure they do any quality control on their Audio CD.

I'm using this book to supplement "Teach Yourself Hindi", and I love it. You must, however, contact the seller and order the audio CD, otherwise you're stuck without solutions. Use the audio while exercising, and respond to the drill question in the short pauses, and you will be pleased with how constructing grammatically correct sentences soon becomes second nature. In as far as the content is concerned, I can second the many explicit reviews already on file.

This is an incredible grammar manual which I used in grad school and now reordered several years later (regretting getting rid of so many of those grad school books). The Bible of navigating conversational Hindi if grammar is important to you.

This book is amazing