As a person who does a lot of business travel, I decided I wanted to learn Hindi before my next trip to India. I had an excellent time on my first visit, seeing the Taj Mahal and meeting many friendly people. Even though many people in India speak good English, I felt it would have been better to be able to speak and understand at least a few commonly used phrases in Hindi, the official language.
In addition to traveling in India, learning Hindi will be useful even when I am back home. I live in Vancouver, Canada, where there are many Indo-Canadians living. Several of the people I work with are from India, and I enjoy dining in Indian restaurants.
This is a picture I took at a local Indian sweet shop during their annual Diwali celebration, and it would be a real bonus to know more about these holidays. Especially for a person who does business with people who speak Hindi, it will give you an enormous advantage over your English-speaking competition if you can demonstrate you appreciate the Indian language and culture. Imagine going to the movies to watch a Bollywood blockbuster and not having to read the subtitles!
But that very aspect of learning Hindi is one of the stumbling blocks I encountered during my search. There are some programs that teach a few Hindi words and phrases, but they do not give you much of a background about the history and traditions of such an ancient culture. My decision to learn Hindi was that if I was going to invest my time and effort, I was going to need lessons that included grammar and preferably audio lessons I could download and listen to at my convenience.
Sure, I suppose I could have picked up a cheap copy of some book like Hindi for dummies, but it’s my personal belief that if you want to get good results then you need not only to put your own maximum effort into it, but you also want to be working with people who care as much about the language as you do, and not having to suffer with an inferior set of teaching lessons hacked together quickly by someone who was only out to make a quick buck.
Given that there are some excellent companies who are teaching how to speak and learn French, German, Italian, Arabic, Japanese and other foreign languages to native English speakers, I am hoping they soon will realize there is a healthy market for people like me and you who want to learn Hindi.
