Teach Yourself Beginner’s Hindi Script

Here’s some good news about the Hindi writing system: no capital letters, and no separate cursive forms to learn!

Teach Yourself Beginner’s Hindi Script by Rupert Snell was one of my favorite products for Hindi. It begins with an interesting history of the Devanagari script used in Hindi, and the chapters have cute titles such as “Consonants” and “Vowels,” which I get a kick out of. Explanations are followed by enjoyable exercises.

I very much liked that Snell cautions you to copy the handwritten examples and not the printed forms (“printed” meaning as would be printed in a book). This may sound like a trivial point, but it is not.

In language-learning books I used for Japanese, Arabic, and maybe other languages I can’t think of right now, the difference between print and handwritten examples was not always properly considered or explained, which led to confusion (mine) in writing exercises.

Addendum: This edition is now out of print, but the book has been reissued under the name Read and Write Hindi Script: A Teach Yourself Guide. I haven’t tried it out, but I can see online that the table of contents is virtually identical.