Hi Nat,
I am not studying or do I know Hindi, but I am working on Japanese at the moment. I bought the Practice Makes Perfect Kana book and it helped tremendously to get the script and phonetics of Hiragana and Katakana down. The Practice Makes Perfect series also has a book for the Hindi script. If you currently know the script then you can ignore this first paragraph.
I know it can be hard to find good materials, because their are a lot of bad materials out there. Too many people give language books 5 stars simply because they are excited to have the book and haven't even finished the book yet. I have been using Duolingo and Mangolanguages to help with Japanese. Hindi is on both apps/websites. It helps with essential grammar and basic phrases. I also feel using both resources has made it easier for me to decide on what Japanese textbooks I want to use and what books to ignore. For Mangolanguages you can log on if you have a library cared for free.
It is also possible to find some googledocs files that contain some of the more common language textbooks in PDF form. I've found entire books for Japanese, Mongolian, and Danish through googledocs.
Hope this helps and that you can make a trip to India in the future!
Joshua
Let's learn Hindi (you can get it on Amazon)
I also liked
Teach yourself Hindi
Because of its many helpful exercises and it is written as a interesting story
And my third suggestion for after you've gotten a bit advanced ( for me after I read those two books and was comfortable in hindi )
Hindi for non Hindi Speakers
Which is basically wriTten like a textbook
Hindi pod 101 is a good web resource as well
The main thing is focus on pronunciation there is a specific way to most sounds in the Hindi alphabet , mostly involving tounge position and most books/websites/even teachers do not stress this near enough
It is important to learn how to pronunce Hindi correctly as a beginner because after you get more advanced it will be much harder to do
I speak Urdu as my second strongest language. Urdu is close to hindi, and I can tell you that without sound knowledge of the alphabet system (how to read it, how to write in it, how to pronounce it), it will be very tough indeed to learn a language far divorced from English, especially if you didn't get exposure at a younger age.
For this reason, I definitely agree with Joshua's comment and can see that he knows from experience what the first step to learning a REALLY foreign language is...
We know that if you speak English well, you have the capacity to learn Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, and other romance languages.
Some say 30% of words are in common between English and Spanish.
I have also heard that 40% of words are in common between Arabic and Urdu, and there are many examples I know of where it's true
But between Japanese and English, or Between Spanish and Farsi, the languages are worlds away.
If, say, you were a native speaker of Korean or mandarin, perhaps you could at least conceptualize the language at some level to facilitate learning it...
in lieu of that, I definitely recommend getting comfortable with the alphabet and phonetics and so forth as Joshua said.
Namaste Natalie ji,
Italki itself is a good web site to learn Hindi. It's good for beginners.
By watching Hindi videos and movies, you may have some idea about learning Hindi. It's not a good idea though.
Can i suggest you something, if you are really serious in learning Hindi you may buy some Hindi books. If you wish, i can recommend them.
Furthermore, why don't you take a trial Hindi lesson ? It will be self explanatory and would help you a lot in understanding basic grammar, sentence pattern, use of all tenses etc.
Would you like to give a try ? You are welcome. For yr information, i have already taught Hindi to foreigners, tourists and few Americans, Britishers etc.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Have a nice time,
Happy learning.
Dhanaywaad / thanks,
fir milenge / will meet again,
Mukund Chaskar (Skykpe id)
