Moderator:vijayjohn
Luís wrote:What would you guys recommend for learning the script?
There's a (relatively) large Bangladeshi community in the neighborhood where I'm currently working, so it would be nice to learn some stuff about it
Luís wrote:Which is strange, considering how many people actually speak Bengali!
Luís wrote:Well, there's a ton of resources for Hindi, at least when compared to other languages of India.
This website seems to have quite a few interesting books, from "Telugu in a Month" to "Basic Konkani" or "An Intensive Course in Kannada". But they all seem to be Indian editions and there's no preview, so I'm not sure how good they are.
This book seems interesting too.
vijayjohn wrote:The way I see it, on the one hand, it's rare to find non-South Asians who are willing to try learning Hindi and even more so for any other South Asian language. On the other hand, there's lots and lots of pressure on a lot of us South Asians to learn English. As a result, when a foreigner does express interest in any of our languages, we're not just surprised; we often fail to understand what the motivation for such an endeavor could be, however obvious it may seem (or be!) in reality. That's also why we're very unlikely to create resources for learning our languages: because who is going to buy them and what's the point when plenty of foreigners have managed to get by and even live in South Asia speaking only English anyway? I have tried at least three times to make useful resources of some sort for learning Malayalam, and my dad in particular loves his language and reads lots of novels in it, talks to me in it, and so on, yet even he is highly skeptical of the idea that a foreigner would be able to share an interest in it and never saw how me trying to make resources for learning it was anything more than a waste of time.
OK, rant over. I wouldn't go so far as to say there's nothing out there for learning the scripts of these languages online, though. For Bengali, at least there's Omniglot and Wikipedia.
Luís wrote:So, after three weeks I finally received "Learn Bengali in 30 Days" in the mail (I ordered it from India). And yeah, I get what you guys were saying... this feels more like a phrasebook and not a good one at times. But it does explain the alphabet and considering how cheap it was, it'll be a nice addition to my collection.
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