finals week

This week has been the week of finals.

I finally finished my Hindi class after almost two years of studying and attending weekly classes with a co-worker who taught the class using Rupert Snell's book called "Teach Yourself Hindi". Now I can read and write the Devanagari script used for Hindi. This next year I want to practice my talking skills, which means I need to start working on extending my vocabulary also.

I finally completed the season in the competitive volleyball league at work during lunch time. We lost the very last game in the finals to come in second place. It was fun playing with such great volleyball players and I learned a lot and am now a better player because of it. That is true in most sports, in that if you play with people better than you then you will improve over time. Every time I enjoyed watching my teammates set the ball perfectly and then watch as one of the other players would spike it with so much power. It is just fun to watch good people play.

This is my final week of work for 2008. The company I work for closes their office the last week of December, which really means every one gets an extra week of vacation every year, which is very nice! I plan on finishing the first section of my new book and hopefully finish all of the sections up until I went to India. I need to find the journals that I kept during that time and review them to figure out what I need to say. That was the most important time of my life so it may be hard to condense it down to something reasonable - it may be a book in itself!

Names in Hindi

Rick : िरक
Sarah : सारा
Nathan : नाथन
Daniel : ढानेले
Andrew : एनडरू
Jake : जेक
Jessica : जेिसका
Evans : इळनस

Hindi Unicode Editor

Learning Hindi हिंदी

My current long term goal is to learn Hindi हिंदी. A group at work is learning Hindi during lunch breaks on Mondays. I am not a huge fan of the book we are using as the font is so small. It is the classic book for learning Hindi called Teach Yourself Hindi.

I really like the Hindi Script Tutor web site as I can see how the letters are drawn and can hear them spoken so I don't have to guess on either.

As soon as I can get a grip on the Devanagari script I am going to go thru the NC State Hindi site by Afroz Taj. He is also on local TV in Raleigh on Time Warner channel 18 from 9-10pm on Monday and Wednesdays.

These are my other 3 attempts at learning non-English languages:

1. 1980 to 1982 - while in India I was mostly in in West Bengal and Bangladesh so I learned Bengali using the LAMP method. The beauty of this method is immersion in the local culture. I lived with people who did not know English so I learned the language by listening and knowing what was the correct thing to say in the appropriate situation. This is so much better than learning by translating from English to Bengali. I taught myself to write and read the script only when I returned to USA when being around Bengali friends.



2. 1983 - to graduate at VaTech I was required to take a foreign language, so I chose Spanish and took a compressed full year of Spanish in 9 weeks in summer school. The class was 3 hours a day 3 times a week and we had to speak 1 hour of each class to our Cuban speaker in Spanish only.



3. 1987 to 1989 - while living in Saudi Arabia I taught myself how to write Arabic since I love the calligraphy of the language. I enjoyed the artist value of the language as they use it as an art form as well as a language. An example of this is Hassan Massoudy's art

So far I have learned how to write the vowels and my name is pretty easy to write: िरक, using this on-line Hindi unicode editor.